Better Community Support & More Fun
The Particl community has been spread across many different platforms ever since we abandoned Slack more than a year ago. This exile away from Slack was due to the overwhelming amount of spam we used to receive on the platform, and since that time, the community has been split in between using Telegram, Discord, and Riot — with our trusty bot “Rutherford” connecting all of the conversations together in real time.
While it is accommodating, this setup isn’t ideal and it also carries its load of pickles. For one, it makes spam more time-consuming to deal with, each spam post is required to be deleted on all three platforms. It also makes interactions and communications less interesting due to how posts from other platforms are displayed and formatted. Then there’s the issue of always being required to maintain the Rutherford bot which tends to break from time to time.
On top of this, and perhaps more importantly, there’s the inconvenience where we can’t really make the chatrooms as awesome as they could be by using bots since everyone’s on different platforms; bots sometimes don’t communicate or simply cannot interact, by nature, with users on different platforms.
For these and other reasons, we’ve made the decision to officially move over to Discord and methodically reduce resources on Riot and Telegram slowly over time. In 7 days, starting from today, the Telegram channels will be put in read-only mode. This should incentivize the remaining Telegram users to move over while still allowing new Telegram users to discover the project and read the conversations.
Particl - Discord Me
Official server for the Particl project. Particl is a blockchain project building a new independent and decentralized…discord.me
What Will Improve?
The time is right to move exclusively to Discord. With the release of the Open Marketplace being imminent, we anticipate an uptick in new users joining our awesome community. Serving new users on one platform instead of many will make everyone’s user experience much better and will allow us to do much more. Here’s a quick list of what the move to Discord will look like and — more importantly — what opportunities it opens up. Note that this list is obviously not complete, and new stuff will be added as we march forward.
Better User Experience
This is probably the most obvious benefit we’ll get from moving exclusively to one platform. Interacting on many different platforms at the same time definitely reduces the user experience by making much less appealing and, frankly, more confusing — especially to newcomers coming into our community and not being used to see bots responding instead of real people.
Let’s face it, linking platforms has many downsides. Bot conversations are confusing chains of replies to users on different platforms, images struggle uploading properly everywhere at the same time. The various different Particl channels, each with their unique URL and mixed between other crypto channels on Telegram is also pretty chaotic.
Discord will fix all of the above by providing a clean and structured interface that will go a long way in enhancing the quality of interactions and make everything more fun and intuitive.
Fight Off Spammers
Spam on Telegram is off the rails!
Every day, we see fake accounts joining the many channels and spamming them with seriously questionable content or “business proposals”. And it’s not like we don’t fight back. Even though our Telegram channels have three different bots specifically dedicated to filtering these kinds of unwanted posts, spam still happens at a pretty regular rate.
Discord simply offers more tools and ways to fight off spam and oddly seems to have fewer spammers going around from server to server with the hopes of deceiving users or just ruin their experience. We’ve also heard very positive and unanimous feedback from the people from other communities we’ve talked to that have made “the move” from Telegram to Discord as well: moving over to Discord has significantly reduced spam and increased community engagement and participation rates.
Better Ways to Keep Up-To-Date
Another neat benefit the community will gain from being united under the same platform is the ability to quickly stay up-to-date with the project and get additional information and content. Because it is very easy to add and find (as a user) new channels, we’ll be capitalizing on that to keep you all in the loop.
Don’t have Twitter? Can’t be bothered looking around for updates? Forgot to put Particl’s next event in your calendar? Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, because we’ve got your back!
In fact, we’ve already created a few channels specifically dedicated to making your life easier. To be more precise, we’ve created a whole section dedicated to making project information and updates as accessible as it’s ever been! This section contains these sub-channels:
- #announcements: Get all the latest news about Particl. This is usually what goes on particl.news.
- #progress-updates: This sub-channel contains all the development updates and general information about the progress being made on the project. This is where you’ll find Status Reports, notable Github updates, development updates, and etc.
- #tweets: This section automatically shows all the tweets made from the official @ParticlProject Twitter account. It doesn’t matter if you have a Twitter account or not, you should still be able to easily get access to our tweets if you so desire!
- #team: Here you will get the chance to learn a bit more about the Particl team members by reading various bios and information tidbits about them.
- #graphics: There’s a lot of Particl-related graphics, but somehow they’ve always been hard to get a hold of. Not anymore! This sub-channel contains all the latest important graphics. If you are looking for a specific graphic in particular, well then you now know where to-3.24% go look for it!
- #events: This is like your very own Particl calendar. This sub-channel will remind you of any Particl-related event 30, 7, and 1 day before they happen. This includes conferences, community gatherings, hardforks, release dates, and etc. Never miss an event anymore!
- #youtube: This one is self-explanatory. Just like #tweets, this sub-channel will automatically post the latest videos published on Particl’s Youtube account.
As time goes by, and as we receive feedback and suggestions, new sub-channels will be added to make the Particl Discord server the ultimate platform to be on to not miss anything.
Got Some Spare Change?
We will shortly introduce on Discord an open-source tipping bot that will allow you to securely send PART tips to other people directly from Discord. This should make newcomers warmer and more engaged to our community and encourage people who receive tips to pay it forward, strengthening the bond between us all!
Automation Make Everything Easier and More Fun
Automation and bots on Discord are the bomb! They are much more flexible than on Telegram, opening up more opportunities. They allow polls, custom commands, auto-moderation, music streaming, tags, auto-responders, and much more. This will allow for many more interactions and much more fun and will help make Particl’s Discord our very own world.
While we had bots on Telegram and Discord before, we couldn’t really use them to their full extent as they lose their effectiveness when users are spread across various different platforms. They obviously cannot interact with users on other platforms, so we couldn’t make use of their more exciting, fun, and engaging capabilities. This is poised to change now!
A Better Structure for Community Involvement
We’re also currently working on setting up a better structure for the onboarding of community members who want to take a more active role in contributing to the project. As can be easily observed, staying organized when only using a chat platform can be quite difficult if you do not use any sort of task management platform.
Using automation, we are in the process of linking a Trello board to a contributor’s channel to make it easy and accessible to manage tasks. Once ready, contributors will be able to interact with the Trello board directly from the channel and collaborate with fellow community members up for the task. This contributor channel should be ready in a couple of days and will be an invite-only channel, so don’t hesitate to contact @CryptoGuard#3505 on Discord so that he can add you to the channel!
What Will Become of Rutherford?
Rutherford is the bot that’s been linking all of Particl’s chat platforms together. To incentivize people to move over to Discord, we will deactivate it on Telegram and put the platform in a read-only mode in just 7 days, meaning you will be able to read what people say on Discord, but won’t be able to post messages.
What About Riot?
Riot is a different beast and will get a different treatment with this move to Discord, at least in the beginning. It doesn’t attract spammers, is relatively secure by allowing end-to-end encryption, and is where most of our developers hang around. For these reasons, we will keep Riot and Discord connected for the moment and will see how it plays out. Due to the low number of community members on Riot, this shouldn’t impact the user experience too much. Still, we recommend users looking for a more interactive experience to move over to Discord.
Officially moving to Discord has been something we’ve been looking into doing for quite some time now, and with the marketplace looming and the potential uptick in new users it may bring, it only seems logical to make this move now. We are extremely excited by the new possibilities having our entire community gathered within the same platform opens up, and we fully intend on making the best out of this situation to enhance your community experience.
So come to join us today on Discord and let the fun begin!
The Particl team
