ESOUI Discord
 

Can we please have an Official ESOUI Discord server?

I'm currently expanding my programmers skill set learning Lua, having done Python for almost 2 years it's time for me to branch out. I really want to make an addon for ESO.

I would love a discord where we can communicate and discuss in real-time about addons, addon ideas, the development/coding/programming of addons, the API, and patch notes/changes to the api and game itself.

We already have a gitter channel, which is better suited for developer chat. If you are just getting started, you should also read this guide and do some of the tutorials on the wiki. It will answer a lot of your questions.

Thank you!

Hey,
I created discord server for addons related discussions. The reason I did that is not everyone likes github (yes! that's true, I don't like github nor git itself nor anything related to git :P), not every player/addon author is willing to create github accout and many people already have discord account. I think discord is more players friendly than gitter and since we create our addons for players, discord seems to be good place to have some players - authors conversations. So please come in and tell your friends!


There is a role for addon authors (no special privileges, just to know who is an author) so let me know if are (link your esoui author page).

The other way round works, too. I do have a github account (not just for Addon coding), no Discord account and little incentive to create one. Not for just one "realm" I'm working in.

As far as I see there is an IRC channel on Freenode (though with no activity, as far as I've seen) and a gitter channel (quite frequented).

That's right iwontsay, but like sirinsidiator said, gitter is better suited for developer chat. Didn't know IRC channel is still alive, it was very active at beginning.

even if I use discord for gaming purposes, I do think it's not really needed for our usage.. :/

this forum and gitter seems be the most adequate solution for now.

what does gitter users think about it?

The point is I believe more people use discord than gitter and I'm not forcing anyone to leave gitter. Gitter is good for developers and code related chat since it's integrated with github. Discord on the other hand is a good place to communicate with players because many players use it anyway. They will not bother to create github account just to ask something and then never use it again.

gitter is good to post codes and this stuff... personally i like discord more. i can stay connected with my phone/pad/computer as well

Sorry, but gitter is not for users.
it's for devs or willing people wanting to start coding.

It's a quiet place where we can talk about coding with a certain level of comprehension, our life and dozen of others things without being disturbed by random user remarks. (like "REQUEST FEATURE", "NEWB DEV", "ADDON NOT UPDATED", "GO WORK SLAVE".)

If a user wanna talk to me, he leave a comment on the addon comment page, he don't come disturb me while i'm on gitter.

ps: I'm also receiving some love messages in my esoui/official forums/ingame mailboxes and even sometimes friendship requests or direct pm's while ingame you know. and sometimes love is not "in the air".

I'm not against moving on discord, but I just don't want "users" in there just for earring what I already know.

Ayantir, the french grouchy

^this. Gitter is and should stay devs only (although i am a noob coder lol).
Discord is fine for communicating with the player base, don't think they will interfere with each other, so why not :)

I have Gitter on my phone too. It's an android so maybe it's not on iphone, but you might want to check.

We can certainly make an official ESOUI Discord channel. I just was hesitant because I don't want to split up the author community.

Maybe the Discord could/should be more user focused and keep the gitter dev focused like it is now.

BTW gitter does have a nice iphone app too. notifications work, etc.

Splitting up the community even further was sort of my fear, too. But I do see the point to have a (the?) Discord channel more focused to developer/user interaction rather than developer talk.

and what this forum is intended for?.. and addon comments?..

There are already some people in the "unofficial" discord server so I don't see a reason to create "official" one. Besides I'm offended to "official" things... anyone remembers official esoui in-game guild for addon authors? It's called Arcane Scripters Guild. Not sure about NA but EU one is abandoned by it's creators and no one else have privileges to maintain it. I will also leave it soon as it's currently only wasting one guild slot. I know you guys (MMOUI staff) have lots of things to take care of so it would be better for us (addon authors especially) if you leave some things to the community. In the discord server there is already a separate channel for automatic messages about new/updated addons (fetched by RSS bot) and patch notes from official eso forums.

Ayantir, there are some people (like me :P) who don't check forum/addons comments very ofter. But I'm almost allways available on Discord. Also as I said I'm not forcing anyone to "move" anywhere. You can be here and there, or only here, or only there ;) That's your decision. Since you don't like to be disturbed by players you can stay on gitter and maybe visit discord from time to time to say hi ;)

There was an NA one?

You know I'm on discord almost 24/7. so I'll add it.. ^^

And it's more for users than for me, legends says that I'm scaring people when it comes to dev :D

I'd be more in favor of an official ESOUI Discord server rather than one run by the authors (or single author) if the purpose is to be more user focused. I'm not crazy about one or a handful of authors moderating a general user forum. Author moderation has been okay for Gitter because there aren't any users and we don't do anything crazy.

In my opinion it is much more likely that a community owned Discord server becomes abandoned than one owned by Dolby or Cairenn or some other MMOUI staff. Just look at one of the 618 addons in Discontinued and Outdated.

As for use, an official one can be advertised on the website. Anyone who chooses to join would certainly be more connected. There are benefits for authors and users to be in a more instantly connected environment. For authors, Reddit and these forums generally move too slowly to whip up an impromptu beta test or to gather a sample of saved variables. For users, it is sometimes easier to provide specific support through voice chat.

If you build another treehouse, there is going to be some fraction of the user base that splinters off from the established channels. If this is going to happen, I think it should be in an official capacity so it has maximum exposure and an air of legitimacy.

That's fine, it's a good filter to test their devotion :D

I don't mind either way. I guess even an unofficial server could get poromoted at the website, right?

I agree and would say that it could also host our friends of other games. wow, lotro, etc.

Hey Randactyl,
Community owned Discord server can't be abandoned because it's owned by community and not single person or group of persons related to one company. I will gladly grant admin roles to known to me, trustworthy authors and they can pass it on. I already gave an example of abanoned in-game guild officially created by mmoui staff. On the opposite site there is the gitter which is community owned and is doing very well :)

Can't see a reason why unofficial, community owned one can't be advertised that way. Besides as you probably know there is an official esoui IRC channel, can't see it being advertised on the website ;) Actually it requires some effort to find any info about it. We as a community can advertise it in our own channels. Can post info about it in official eso forums, advertise it in our guilds and so on.

I believe we are grown community, we don't need a kindergarten, we can handle moderation and we can shape that discord server to best fit our needs.

The IRC channel isn't pushed because many of the authors here decided on gitter instead. We also don't advertise gitter too much so that its kept developer only.

If we were to run an official ESOUI discord it would be supported and not abandoned but if this isnt wanted we dont have to.

Yeah, that's an idea too. A more general MMOUI Discord Server with one or
two channels for each site could see even more adoption. Larger projects need more sign off though.

The design of Discord's permissions system limits the validity of the first statement.

Discord servers allow only one owner. The owner is the person who created the server or the person the previous owner promoted into the role.

In an official case, the server owner would be @MMOUI#2137 or @ESOUI#4356 and some number of staff would have access to the account. In the community case, the server owner would be @SomeAuthor#2348. What happens if a single individual with access to one of these accounts becomes incapacitated in some way?

The Administrator role permission somewhat mitigates the community owned scenario, but it introduces its own issues.

Someone of role A cannot promote another person to role A. They can only create/modify roles below role A. If role A is granted the Administrator position by the server owner, users of role A can create role B below them and grant it the Administrator permission.

Play that situation out for a number of years. Is it not unsustainable at worst and highly messy at best?

Also, no offense, but who the heck are you? Why do you get to judge who gets power and who doesn't? We as authors have next to no accountability in this environment. MMOUI/ESOUI staff have some incentive to do right by users so that they do not lose ad revenue due to some moderation scandal.

I gave 618 examples of abandoned projects created by authors, which you quoted but might have missed?

I explained how the Gitter situation is different, but you conveniently did not quote my entire response. I said "author moderation has been okay for Gitter because there aren't any users and we don't do anything crazy." In addition to that, none of us really have any administrative powers nor are there any administrative duties to take care of. There are no roles to assign, there are no users harassing us, and we don't harass each other.

It could be. But I would think there are business concerns with endorsing and providing prominent links to a forum that you have no moderation stake in. In one case, a community server can pose a security issue for users. Discord is something that generally stays open all the time. It is not unthinkable to mistakenly post a password and then scramble to delete it (I've seen it happen and have done it once myself). Community Discord servers tend to have bots that assist in moderation. These bots have the ability to show the text of deleted messages to admins and to users with the needed permissions.

Like Dolby said, the IRC channel and Gitter chat are not advertised because they are not for wide use. They are focused for developer use, and we have all found our way to both of them either through forum search or being told when asking a question. Gitter is even linked on the front page of the wiki.

That's all very true, but bumps up against my points about maximizing exposure and providing a semblance of legitimacy (which you again left out when quoting me).

And I believe a large number of us (authors, since that is the concerned party) take extended breaks from this volunteer environment. That doesn't bode well for stability.

Look, this started as asking whether a Discord server existed. OP was pointed toward Gitter instead and was satisfied with the answer. Others have since joined the conversation and attempt to define a use for an ESOUI Discord server with the reality that we already have an established and still active dev-focused area. That niche is a user-focused environment.

I hope you can join in the constructive conversation rather than just defend the server you jumped to make.

Alright, you don't like me quoting only parts of your posts (which I did to make my post a bit clear, only wanted to point to which paragraph I'm reffering to) and you sounds like being offended by that, then I will not quote at all. You can guess which part I'm refering to.

I will create an account to which I will transfer the ownership of that server. I will then give access to that account to trustworthy authors I know. I can see your biggest concern here is who has the power and why he and not somebody else? So as you can see I would like the authors to have that power. Also don't expect me not being offended by that question. There are numerous ways you could get to that point without offending me. So answering your question I'm an addon author and I'm no one's property here. I don't get to judge who gets power, I have power and all other authors have it. I don't want to be restricted by others. I want to be creative and having power helps it a lot. In the discord server I created authors have full accountability and MMOUI staff will not lose anything in case of some hypothetical moderation scandal, because it isn't theirs official server. Do you want to limit my freedom so I can't create discord servers because "who the heck" am I?

I didn't miss your 618 abandoned projects, that's just silly example. How does that compare to single discord server owned by the community? Those addons were owned by individual authors. Also some of them are abandoned by active authors becase there is no reason for them after some game changes.

Here I will leave some part of your post unanserwer because I don't have a will and time to answer and will get to the last point.

I know OP question was answered but I wouldn't assume he was satisfied with the answer. I had same question in my mind and I wasn't satisfied. I suppose the topic would end there if not my post. There wouldn't be any discord server. The rest of the discussion was triggered because I dared to create one. I'm not going to defend it, it's there and you can join if you like. As I said I will create the separate owner account and will share it with trustworthy authors I know.

I disagree, when I noticed the post from OP I responded saying yes we could make one. I would have then expected more replies in support or not in support of the idea and then based on feedback acted upon it. In Fact we already have a discord channel, just havent made it public until there were people asking for it.

I do not wish to step on any ones toes or split the community so if the community wants to do it on their own that is fine.

In middle of that strange open *discussion* --its in chitchat-- as user mainly and dev from time to time on some others games, i feel all this as :

1- a very good idea in its own that is transformed into words battle between persons who until there were appreciating and respecting each other

2 - there is no freedom when there is only 1 leader with prefered minions (seeing the battle on here just for the idea of this new server, i can only imagine all the filtering and moderating that will happens because one is offended or one is not welcome or one think he is right.)

3 - i see this as forcing users to migrate to discord as they want to follow Author's addon, and it will simply create a schism even larger than now

4 - slap in the face of ESOUI as crude at it seems for a power battle and false freedom

The need or wish to have a special server is totally justified, but all this could have been handled differently and in a friendly manner.


Anyway, personally i am grateful for having ESOUI. Thank you Cairenn and Dolby

Looks like the community is also split if it comes to the decision. I created that server because I really like discord and spend much time on it. I explained why I would rather like it to by community owned. You (Dolby) answered to some of my agruments (though you said nothing about Arcane Scripters Guild! :P) but that didn't convince me. I thought people would be rather possitive about it but I already got offended... do something nice and turn the other cheek is seems. Not sure if I want to stay in such community. I'm also active in other modding communities so one less is not a big pain. Don't take as a blackmail, those are just my feelings about the situations after this short discussion.

Anceane,
Don't know if that was your intention (probably quite opposite) but point 2 sounds to me like a situation on official discord server if it ever gets created. I said I would share the ownership with other authors. The one leader thing is the case in official IRC channel and arcane scripters guild (there is one leader, and that's mmoui). There are some positive sides of it, I'm not saying mmoui staff is bad or anything like it (Dolby is kind enough that he's not going to open official discord server until we are unanimous). It's just that in such environments I feel like in kindergarden.
3. check my addons comments - you can clearly see I'm not reading them too ofter. But I'm almost allways available on discord. Is this forcing anyone to do anything? In my opition it's rather helping people reach some authors.

I'm also grateful of having ESOUI. Thanks to them I can share my addons with players. I just don't want them to be everywhere, controlling everything :P But what I want is not what commmunity wants, so read the first paragraph of the comment :)

Partial quotes were only a problem when you left out points that addressed your responses, as I pointed out. I'm not offended, just seeking clarity.

Harven, I'm not against you. I'm not against any individual here. "No offense" truly meant no offense, as in "Do not take this personally." You were left as the subject of that sentence not as an attack, but with the hope that it would spark introspection. In fact, the subject of the larger point (authors have no accountability to the users in this environment) was all authors. Who am I? Who's Sirinsidiator, or Ayantir, etc.?

Unfortunately, it's that exact point which you've still not addressed. You've now introduced this insecure owner account that one person gets to hand out the credentials for based on their personal judgement of trustworthiness. There is now a three class system of authors with anonymous power (!), authors, and users. The accountability problem has just been turned up to 11. The official case has non-biased oversight for moderation and mediation as well as two groups of users on equal footing.

Needing power to be creative does not follow. There are no restrictions in Gitter. There are no restrictions on ESOUI. You don't have administrative power on ESOUI, have you not been creative here? Your list of 30+ projects suggests you have been.

Ah, the classic "muh freedoms" red herring. Nowhere in any my responses did I say you are not free to do as you please.

The point of the Discontinued and Outdated example was that there are far more cases of authors up and leaving compared to the one case of ESOUI staff neglecting a guild that requires near daily sign in to a game that at the time was gated by a subscription. A guild that never really saw a ton of use (from my experience on NA). So is the number exactly 618? No. But it still speaks to the relevant volume of cases.

Projecting your dissatisfaction doesn't work out so well when the response to Gitter was "Thank you!" with no cause to suspect sarcasm or that OP was flat out lying. The discussion about a Discord server has been mostly good. You could have sparked the conversation by saying:

"Why not also have a Discord server? That would be more player accessible than Gitter."

Instead, you described a personal distaste for Git then jumped to create a server and assumed control of it. You then went on to demonstrate a misunderstanding of the purpose of Gitter (that it was inconvenient for users to access) and that you also have a personal distrust of official things. This all works together to create the image of a power grab rather than an attempt to better our communication tooling. To your credit, you've attempted to incorporate some of my feedback, but there were some execution problems. That's the sort of discussion that should be had.

Again, I'm really not against you or anyone else. All of my responses have been in the interest of constructing a useful purpose for a sustainable ESOUI Discord server.

Since I drafted this message, more responses have come in.

@Dolby, that's good news! I certainly vote for making that one public.

@Harven, I think your decision to withdraw is unfortunate. It certainly wasn't the intended outcome. I'll stress again that none of this was to attack you.

@everyone, in light of what has already been raised, does anyone have anything else to add to the discussion of official vs. community for a user focused server? Should we get a poll going?

Touting the Arcane Scripters guild is likely not a good example. Guilds can 'die' based not only on leadership but also the members. So you can't only blame the ESOUI admins for it.

Since there's no poll yet, I'd say that I think that an official Discord would be better. Giving the login info for one account to multiple addon authors is a situation ripe for abuse. If I get the info, what's stopping it from sharing it with all of my friends? What's stopping someone else with the info from doing that? And if the community uses it, it's doubtful that an official Discord would die down. If it does because of the admins, then this site will probably be useless anyway, with no one approving updates. If it dies down because of lack of activity... well, then that's not the admin's fault.

This is may be the difference.

I will speak for myself : i am a writer. Not a known writer. But i write. I am french and write in both langages. I love to create, and put images and painting with my words. I do not have time to moderate, or deal with anything beside what i love : writing and painting.

I see you as a creator, an author of addons. you have a lot of those too. Some you gave up on for different reasons, and some you still deliver and update.
You do not have the time to answer to all comments. You have to deal and choose the good comments : those who give information on bugs, those who push you to perfect the addon and ignore for the right cause the ones ony asking and asking and asking for nothing. (yes i am probably a bit rude)

I do not see you as an Admin/Moderator, but as a creator with all the freedom it needs.

Your idea is good, you need a place to regroup and i understand it. But i do not think that you should take the leader role that will eat your time and energy.

My two cents :))

PS : All of you Author's, are creator for me. I try as much as i can to respect your time and needs. I may have sometimes forget that when i am in love with one of your creations. Thank you for the big part of fun you added to this game.

Randactyl, looks like it was taken as an offence (or at least as a rude sentence) not only by me. You can't say "don't die" to a person, then shoot them and expect them not to die ;) But let's leave that behind.

Which point I have not addressed? Sorry english is not my primary language so maybe I don't understand something.
About the account with ownership (this is also in response to Dolgubon): I believe I know which authors I can trust so they will not hand that ownership to a random people.
Then you're talking about 3 classes of people in unofficial server and 2 classes with unbiased moderation on official server. But that moderation is a third class. And that third class is very small. Those are peoples that don't do addons, they know about our needs/problems only if we tell them. And even if we tell them to change something they don't have to do it. They can be lazy or they can see the point differently than we, addon authors, so they don't have to fully understand us. Let me jump to another point as my limited english vocabulary isn't enough to fully defend my point here.

You say I don't have administrative power on ESOUI. That's not true. I have my own author site here, where I have a sort of bug tracker, I can create/edit/delete pages on that site. I can upload/delete my addons, manage comments on my addons. I have numerous control panels. Aren't that administrative powers? Isn't that power helping me with being creative? I would like to have similar administrative powers on discord, so I can post files in the chat, post link, post screenshots, add new channels if I need them, manage bots so they can for instance post info about updated addons, post info about commits from my (and other authors) repositories, post news from eso site/forums (like patch notes). Maybe I will come up with something else in the future that will help me/other users of that server. Or maybe other author addon will need something? You may say mmoui staff will do that for me. Then let me tell you about IRC channel. Long time ago I came up with an idea to write an IRC bot that will post info about updates addons in the chat. I spent few hours writing it in lua and testing. I was happy that I wrote something useful and I thought people will like it. Then I invited it to the channel and was instantly told by mmoui staff that I should remove it because that's not the channel for it. Can you feel the pain? ;) If not, do something creative and useful and be told to throw it to the trash.

I created that discord server because I feel I need it and I don't want it to be controlled by third party company. I want it to be controled by the community, by people who know what they need and can execute theirs creativity while not being limited by some silly rules. I don't want to be only one with control of that server - I stated it many times. I knew that if I let mmoui staff create it first, it would share the fate of that IRC channel. And I'm not talking about it being abandoned, I'm talking about what I wrote in previous parahraph.

Dolgubon, sorry but in case of EU Arcane Scripters Guild I can only blame ESOUI admins. The person that had full control over it logged into the game only few times at the beginning, because the company is NA based.

Anceane, I think you can also find some answers to your comment in above paragraphs :) Thank you for your understanding.


@everyone: as I said before english is not my primary language and that's the reason it takes a lot of effort and time for me to write my comments. As I don't have unlimited time, my future responses will be short and will address only parts of your comments that I feel I can explain with my limited vocabulary without wasting half of a day. Sorry in advance :) Also I have my opinion in this case and I don't believe there are arguments that could possibly change it. If you decide to open official discord server that's fine but I will probably not use it. I will keep the server I created open, everyone is welcome.

I've been a long time user of ESOUI/WOWI. While I absolutely respect addon authors, I would 100% prefer an officially ran discord server over one ran by an author. Authors come and go all the time, ESOUI/WOWI had been here through thick and thin. So yeah, I'd vote for official.

I think it doesn't matter who runs it. For all I care you could make an official and an unofficial one and see which one gets adopted by the users.

The gitter channel was also created without thinking about stuff like that and it seems people like it. Btw it does have an admin who is currently missing and it doesn't hurt it one bit. ;)

I say, just use the one we have now thanks to Harven and if it gets used it gets used. Harven should also just lock the password for the owner account away and leave everyone as simple users. Flat structures work best in my opinion.

Also don't make more than one channel in the beginning it just fractures the communication. If there is a need for another one we will see it with time.

What the hell is Discord? :D
I personally haven't spend time there and probably won't in the future.

If it's connected to addons I'd say make it officialy connected with ESOUI. But I don't really care who runs it.

As long as no one expects me to join it and the authors won't leave gitter and the forum, I'm fine.

Anyone else see the irony in the furor over abandonment raised by someone who apparently has abandoned their own addons? :banana:

Jeff Goldblum to the rescue! Is the discord channel still active guys? How do I get an invite?