@Maggotjuicebox Thank you much! I promise I was trying, but I think I came off passive aggressive by accident!

I'm autistic, and was being sincere but that especially doesn't translate well over text. I'll use this as a learning experience! <3

@Star I apologize if I end up repeating something I've already said, I can't keep track of how many paragraphs I've rewrote from scratch at this point haha

I think the difference, for me personally regarding why reddit is so different, is that reddit is a useable site without an account. Lorwolf is not a useable site without an account. If you get banned on reddit, it's not really a big deal if you just had an account to comment. You lose your karma. If you get banned on Lorwolf, you lose the entire account and everything tied to it. I'm acutely aware of how many links I'd lose access to, because every link I open though discord on my phone opens a login page except forum links, and what good are forums you can't participate in? That's my big difference. There's a lot more on the line, especially if you've paid any sort of money for moonstones.

The forum needs improvements to compete with the discord. As of right now, a lot of people think the discord matters. I think there's an important place for both.

There is nothing stopping anybody else from making their own Lorwolf discord if they wish. I feel like people on the site would end up just making another space to talk in the same manner if the official server got shut down. At that point, what is Lorwolf supposed to do? Lorwolf needs to compete and make its own forums viable and enticing versus the discord. With regards to the feelings comment, the userbase should feel welcomed. It's an online site, we're all aware we're spending our time on a pet site. Wanting to get more joy out of that time isn't bad. If the discord brings joy, that's good! People are still thinking about Lorwolf, even if they aren't on it. The server is basically a little constant ad on my discord server list.

Personally, your comment felt like it had a bit of snark, just a bit, but that's the problem with conveying emotion through text. Some things may come across harsher than intended. It happens to me all the time! So often! I try so hard to word things nicely and politely and still miss something that makes me come across as rude. I know discussions like these sometimes get my heart racing for absolutely no reason and I misread things on occasion. Emotions, they're wild.

To throw my hat in the ring rq, i just wanna say i think giving rewards for forum use are not a good idea at all. on dv they do that and all the spam/game threads have 1000s of posts and the others have like. 10. I do think that discord shouldnt be the main form of communicating on the site now that the game is properly out. The person that said they reported a bug and was told it was reported on discord already is a good example of this. I feel like the website should be the best place for that, no?

@foxriddles

Totally my bad on sounding snarky, I'm sorry!! I genuinely feel like disagreements about games go way down hill when you tie personal feelings and slight to them instead of having boundaries with agree to disagrees, and I wasn't very good at conveying that. I super appreciate the good faith <3 and thanks for being candid with me! If you disagree with me I take no offense! I enjoy talking about it :)

You make a good point on low stake vs high stake. How getting banned isn't as big a deal elsewhere. I have a question: are you required to link your LW account when chitchatting in the Discord? Is that anonymity a big playing factor in people's migration? If so, that's interesting! I still am curious to think of solutions. If anonymity is a big factor, should LW and other sites with high stakes be more lenient in bans vs suspensions? 🤔

Lots to mull over!

I don't use the forums often for the very simple reason that ease of use is significantly higher on Discord. User interaction is much faster and real-time on Discord. You can scroll through channels and posts and easily skip what you don't want to participate in rather than having to open...each...post... on the forums. As far as image sharing there's just no comparison either. The forums take a bit of work to use. Discord doesn't.

What the forums are good for are lengthy, detailed discussions like this one, text heavy, requiring thoughtful interactions.

But that's not a daily need for me in this game.

@Star To be honest, I don't remember if it was required to link your account, but after looking through the list of members, I don't think it is. I would love to know if I'm wrong here, for anyone who may have joined more recently and remembers the entry process more clearly. There are some names on the discord that don't match a name on here when I search for them. I know that it is encouraged to change your name to your lorwolf name and put in your ID number simply because it makes trading a lot easier. Me trading with User#123 goes quicker than me trading with User, where I need to ask if they're #123 to be sure I'm sending a trade to the right person. I've not seen it enforced, people just like to do it. There's also the option of picking a group to go with, so my username is purple because I'm in darkspine. I like that, it gives the discord more color and makes it a bit easier to read where messages start and end. ETA: There are white names too, which means no pack was picked and they're still in the channel.

I'm afraid to talk about much more relating to bans on here, because I don't want to accidentally break the rule about talking about moderation, so I will have to pass on your second question, sorry. Talking about the consequences of a ban are different than my opinion on how they choose to moderate on here.

@foxriddles ooo fair catch, my bad!

The sites that I'm on that don't have official Discords have fairly active forums; Toyhouse's forum is absolutely huge, Flight Rising's is very active, and PCE's is moderately active. (I'm also on a few moderately-active forum standalone sites.) Meanwhile the other sites I can think of with an official Discord had/have very little forum activity (Novilar, Dappervolk). There's other reasons that their activity is low, sure, but I don't think that correlation is entirely unrelated.

It all comes down to demographic preference though. I don't think there's a way to incentivize forum usage if people are already comfortable in a Discord, and I don't think the official Discord should be shut down (it should've just never existed). I think the existence of an official Discord shifts community perception simply by its existence, especially when news or tidbits or admin answers are posted there, even in a very casual fashion. It also adds extra moderation stress onto the admin/mod team, because now they have two locations to govern. And they'll probably be more active/accessible on the realtime platform. It just... asks "why bother with the forums?" when a Discord exists. Which sucks.

I hate using Discord servers and find them really uncomfortable, especially in large group settings. They're too fast-paced and lock information behind a Discord account and its terrible search feature, obfuscating anything that might interest me. And people talk over each other all the time. And the amount of... basically spam I've seen is just frustrating. I could not type out a message like this on Discord.

Disclaimer: I'm not in the LW Discord so I'm not passing any judgment on any people in there, this is just my previous experience with large servers, and why I don't join them ever.

And the people who prefer Discord will probably not at all migrate to the forums. For as much as I hate large Discords, there are people with totally valid and detailed hatred of forums. They would feel slighted and hurt if the Discord was shut down, which is why I don't agree with removing it. That ship has sailed, and unless the reason is "we can't spare the moderation hours" I don't think there's a good excuse to close the Discord.

So... what can we do to encourage forum posting? I'm not sure. Nobody is really incentivized to post on a forum for a pittance of in-game currency. The number has to be small to avoid abuse but nobody is going to jump at the bit, I don't think, for like 10 pebbles/post. People are incentivized to reply if there's a great discussion going on or meaningful conversation that can't be replicated elsewhere. That's partially why this thread has so many replies, y'know? This is a topic that engages people and encourages responses. And stirring up discussion like this becomes rarer and rarer as the site's overall activity drops further. Less people to come up with posts like this, and less to reply.

Lorwolf's forums are also just a mess, visually and not. I hate that they take an extra second to load the actual forum posts when you click the pagination. I hate how they look, the editor is unpleasant. But that's just me whining; these aren't things that are easily fixed. I think this helped push people towards the Discord, though, because LW's forums are so very awkward. But that's not... really even worth the coding time to fix. It's a small niche of the site that has been de-incentivized by the admins themselves and they have much more pressing things to work on that will hopefully lift the site's overall activity again - professions, minigames, whatever, anything to get people to keep playing.

The best that can be done is to make interesting discussion posts, I suppose. Look at this big fat message I never would've written if you hadn't made this thread. I'm not even that active anymore, I just pop in on occasion, but you managed to inspire me to type all this out. That's worth something.

While I'm in the Discord and sometimes chat in it when Big Things are happening, I definitely prefer the forums and wish people would use it more. I know that shutting down the server wouldn't get everyone to move to the forums but I think it would get a decent amount of people to check out the forums more. I do think making the forums more visually appealing and comfortable to use is a something that SHOULD be done before doing something so drastic, though.

I don't think I can over-exaggerate how anxious discord makes me when it isn't DMs. It's horrible. In my experience, unofficial discords generally have to have a gimmick to draw people in and so they generally aren't as big an issue. I don't care (obviously) if they shut the discord, but if they don't (fairly reasonable choice, really) then it feels like something else needs to change.

I agree that there should be a clearer space for forum games and also, big issue, sharing images of wolves without a second party site isn't possible??? That's very obviously going to force people to use discord, since it's just a copypaste to share them, and its probably safer and more reliable to do that than use image hosting sites, and I would argue that this would stop any forum game dead in its tracks really if this stays unchanged.

You can't share pictures of wolves in the wolf game about making your wolves pretty. So frustrating to me, as much as I enjoy playing on this site.