hi @WhiteBlackGoose ,
Thanks for starting the conversation. The community uses the Plotly Forum to communicate about Plotly questions/suggestions/show-and-tell (and a few others use Stackoverflow).
Is there a particular reason you would like to open a new communications platform like Discord?

Yeah, there definitely is!

I've been a member of a whole bunch of community discord servers, such as that of C#, F#, Java, as well as a couple of particular projects. So I'm willing to tell more about it (and if needed, administrate).

Discord is a chat

Not a forum. It means, the threshold for questions is much lower. You can come, quickly ask how to pass a parameter somewhere, and get an answer.

Of course, the maintainers of plotly.js don't have to answer - the whole point of community server is that anyone can help.

It's universal

One problem with forums - you have to register there all the time. It's not hard of course, but it's yet another time you leave your "digital trace" somewhere.

Discord, of course, is not as popular as telegram or whatsapp or facebook. But it's still very popular among developers (again, mentioning those servers, hugest and most active communities of their kinds. C# server is 30k+, the Python one is over 200k).

Not just chat

You can add a lot of channels, manage roles, add some automatic management and moderation (e. g. banning scammers, or remove messages containing executables).

Screenshot from the C# server

Oh, and it's also free, as a bonus.

Hi @WhiteBlackGoose
Thank you for the detailed response. I can see the advantages of Discord.

At this point, we would rather focus our resource on the Plotly Forum and encourage the community to use the Forum because questions and answers on the Forum are more discoverable. One typically goes to google (or other browsing engines) to search for an answer to their question. And Google will often show them the answer, or similar questions, with a link to the Forum because the Forum posts are searchable. That is why we prefer to use the Forum: we want the answers to be available to everybody. From what I understand, Discord questions and answers are not discoverable.

That said, I would love to talk to you. There are some ideas I would like to share with you about how we might be able to combine Discord to support Plotly and the community. I just emailed you.

@Coding-with-Adam in case you didn't receive it, I responded to your email the same day.
If someone else wants to discuss details about moving plotly to discord with me, I'm Oryp4ik#0120 on discord and the @WhiteBlackGoose on telegram.

Thank you for alerting me @WhiteBlackGoose . I just checked my Spam and saw your two emails there. I'm answering you right now.

Conversation notes

I suggested using Discord as a medium of talking about plotly and asking/answering users' questions about it.

Why

In my opinion, there are many people who would prefer Discord over forums. Chats in general are more beginner-friendly, when properly moderated. Plus, we can always keep channels for beginners and "advanced" channels separated, if we want.

So, with a beginner-friendly support, we may get more people getting started with plotly. Especially those, who already use Discord and do not want to use other online platforms.

Let's go over why I think discord could be a good change:

• Live chatting. When a community is active, you get responses for easy questions within a minute.
• Relaxed requirements for people who're trying to help. You don't have to spend a while writing a whole post like you'd have to on StackOverflow or other forums. If the user has a question regarding your solution, they ask and get help live.
• Relaxed community. E.g. we can have an #off-topic channels and things. It never hurts. Plus we can have a "gallery" where we'd have people posting their projects - you could even use it for readme or showcase.
• No need to create an account if you already have a Discord account (unlike Slack and forums). I personally am part of a whole bunch of both community and official discord servers. Joining one as simple as clicking the invitation link.

Things to think about

Adam said that he likes the idea of offering discord-only community users a place to learn Plotly; however, Forum questions and answers are searchable by Google, which means people that need help could easily find the answers on Google because it leads them to the question on the Plotly Forum. Questions and answers are not discoverable on Discord. In addition, Adam's time and resources are focused on making the Forum an even better place for users to find answers and share their Plotly success stories. Therefore, creating a new Discord Plotly server, maintained by Adam, is not an option right now.

If the community decided to create a Plotly server on Discord, they should ask themselves: How do we ensure to overcome the threshold, where people within the Discord community-driven server start helping each other out?

I recommended having maintainers and active contributors on the server so that people who come would get help. Theoretically, we eventually get to the point where active members start helping newcomers. But will it actually happen? I also said that maintaining this server would mean a lot of initial effort from community maintainers/contributors/moderators. That's why we have to understand if it's gonna be worth it.

Suggestion

I'll keep this issue open for a while.

• Please, vote with 👍 if you'd like to have a Discord server to ask questions there.
• Please, vote with 🚀 if you'd like to help others with plotly on this server.

Also feel free to add other suggestions, pros, cons, or other things to think about.

You have my vote. If you need an Moderator/Admin, let me know. I am experienced with bigger Discord Communities :)