ways_back_room | (no subject)

(no subject)

Greetings Crackrats!

All Apps have been processed, and the Cast List has been updated to reflect the changes.
The Contact list...will be done soonish.^*

Question for room:
How accessible is the AIM chat?
Are people still using it?
Do people still like using it?
Would something prefer/like something more along the lines of slack?

Comment in the thinger below.

Happy Hour potential offerings this week include:

Today!
Tomorrow!
Wednesday!
Thursday!
Friday!
Saturday!
Sunday!

Have at!

* i hope.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thoughts on mass game communication...

I'm a very big fan of Discord, personally. You can set up a channel, and then have side-rooms that people can pop in and out of. All chat history gets saved, including chat history that happened while you weren't actually in the room, which could be useful for a game setting like this where the chats can be relevant to what's going on in-game. It's also a lot easier to use on mobile. In fact, I can't get into chats at all on mobile, and I've tried three or four different clients. If I want to be in chat, I have to be at my computer. If I wanted to always be at my computer, I would not have bought an iPad.

I have not seen this Discord. *will check it out*

It's big in the gaming community, as a way to use voice chat without using a memory hog like Skype. But the voice chat is entirely optional, and rooms can even be set up to be text only. But the way the chat logs work with it just seems especially useful to Milliways for plotting reasons.

Discord is brilliant. We use it for my other game and I love it.

' All chat history gets saved, including chat history that happened while you weren't actually in the room'

If we're going to use Discord, this probably ought to get pinned somewhere prominent. Chat doesn't do very much bitching but it does periodically blow up and if we're going to use that, people need to consider that everything they say is visible to all players (or is it completely public?).

You can have private servers. But honestly, people ought to consider that even on AIM, since what gets said is saved locally for anyone who's in the room.

And pinning isn't necessary, since it's not some hidden log. Chat history is right there in the window. All one needs to do is scroll up.

Edited 2016-09-20 20:56 (UTC)

Bring me the finest Slack chats in the land! AIM and I haven't gotten along for years now, and I know stuff like email/DMs can be cumbersome at times.

This has nothing to do with anything...but I thought you needed to know:

"Bring me the finest slack chats in the land!" nearly made me snarf my drink.
Well done.

Yeah, I've got three AIM accounts at this point, and only one of them even tries to work. I have no idea what's wrong with the other two.

I've had good luck with slack for various and sundry groups that want to chat on phones or similar, or occasionally. They seem pretty easy to set up and arrange, so.

I've never used Slack before and I know that AIM can be a major pain. I think the main issue is making sure that the most people possible can connect and be comfortable.

I have no idea what Slack is.

I haven't been in AIM chat in a long time - I hear that AIM is virtually abandoned these days in favor texting, Facebook chat, and maybe Google Hangouts - but I always found it easier to use than anything else.

Fact is, I rarely need to communicate with anyone in the game and when I do I just do it through DW or by email.

I would be highly in favor of making a new Slack chat! I've been using it for work as well as personal chats.

It's so nicely browser based and mobile...

Trillian died on me not so long ago, and I haven't touched AIM in years. It's nice to have a real-time option available. Especially one that allows for private side windows.

I have heard of Discord, but haven't tried it. Do we know how many users each option allows? Because if EVERYONE joined that would be a lot of users...

Discord can handle hundreds. You'll get like, entire Rust or Minecraft servers using it, and then having separate channels for individual factions or whatever.

Yeah, I did a little googling and they both seem to allow unlimited access to whatever group you create.

Edited 2016-09-20 01:52 (UTC)

I would wholly support a Slack crackchat! I haven't been able to do AIM effectively in ages.

I can't make AIM chatrooms work consistently, but I'd be happy to try anything that is a) free, and b) allows both individual and group chats. Even an IRC room, really.

I'm quite willing to abandon AIM, too -- I will gladly go where the majority goes, Slack or Discord. I do like what Zed has to say about Discord, but will gladly go with the majority.

Edited 2016-09-20 12:48 (UTC)

I have no problems with AIM at present (I have had issues in the past with it being temperamental) and the idea of having to relearn 11 years worth of sns makes me recoil in horror.

But that's probably Dislike of Change on my part, doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

I will do whatever the majority decides to do - but I have no experience with any other chat clients like this because I only use chat rooms for Milliways.

As someone who does use crackchat more or less daily, I have the following suggestions.

1. Whatever gets chosen, it needs to be clear whether what is being said is public, group members only, etc and also whether they have that feature Zed mentioned about being able to read a room you weren't in. Because there has been occasions off topic when chat has got into a fight, or people have talked about personal stuff, or people have talked about other players (though that doesn't happen often) and stuff.
Admittedly people should be careful what they say on the internet anyway, but it's good to at least know what the privacy level is meant to be.

2. I suspect that part of the reason why crackchat is quiet at the moment - and it is quiet, often only a couple of people - is that we don't actually advertise it that often. Perhaps we could pin the location of the chat at the top of the Back Room or in another prominent place?

3. If we're going to mass migrate to a particular site, it might be helpful to make a list of just sns and mun names somewhere in alphabetical order. It would be nice if people started putting their sns back on their user info again, but that practice seems to be long out of fashion, alas.

Well, the thing about AIM is that it's so outdated, it doesn't even behave the way "normal" chat clients do these days. The ability to change nicknames separate to what your username is is fairly universal. Even Skype can do that, and Skype's pretty terrible. I've no experience with Slack, but I'd assume it has the same deal.

The biggest problem with AIM for me personally (and I know I'm not alone in this) is accessibility. I just can't use it on mobile, period. Neither the official AIM app, or any of the aggregate apps I've used on my iPad have the ability to join existing chat rooms. I can't even receive invites when they're sent to me. I only brought up Discord because I know it well, and it was designed to be used as a chat client for games in general. But if Slack has mobile capabilities, I wouldn't mind going there either. But I would relish the opportunity to finally get rid of AIM.

Yeah, Slack has both mobile capabilities and the ability to set a nickname that's separate from your username. It sounds like Slack and Discord share a lot of the same basic features; Slack's targeted more toward the professional world, so some of the really specific game-oriented features don't exist, but you can set different channels depending on topic, create private channels, DM people, etc etc.

My text-based chat/communication path went something like IRC --> AIM --> text messaging --> Slack, and I found Slack's learning curve to be very very short! Seriously, twenty-ish minutes of WHAT DO and joking about the kids these days, and I was good.

Yep, this is pretty much exactly me, but replace Slack with Discord. The most trouble I've had with it was installing a timer bot on my server to run word wars so I didn't have to keep watching the clock. And even that was pretty easy once I actually read the damn user manual.

But honestly, my vote's for anything other than AIM or Skype.

Lol clearly I'm just ten years behind the times.

People seem to like Slack and/or Discord anyway, daresay I'll learn how to work something new and it would be nice to have more people in chat.

I use slack a lot for a few things - my D&D game (where it's handy to keep track of what's going on IC, in a channel for that, and also "hey are we on for tonight?" etc in a separate channel) - and my calligraphy secret chats where we have channels for whatever topic and it's just a place to hang. It sounds like Discord is similar. The benefit of that is being able to split discussions up into different topics and keep things centred; really good for planning and organising. You can have slow-moving conversations as well as fast-moving conversations and not lose track.

It's worth noting that the free version of Slack only archives the last 10,000 messages, so it's not a case of "everything you say is here forever."

Slack also offers a built-in easy PM functionality. Also you can respond to messages with emoji and you can create custom emoji, which is very important because I no longer know how to communicate with people without heavy use of "see-no-evil monkey" and "smiling poo pile."

I don't know about Android, but Slack for iOS is great - I use it across ipad, iphone, imac, and also on my windows PC without issue. The mobile app is as functional as the browser-based version.

Slack also offers the ability to pin messages to a channel to save them, so you can avoid losing things in the chatstream if they're important things like "the big event is happening at x o'clock AEST!"

So baaasically, I think slack is great and I think we should go there, cos then I'd get to chat with people again and I miss all yr faces.

Yeah, it is sounding like Slack and Discord are basically interchangeable. I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that Slack has a bright, clean GUI, where Discord is all black and purple and not going to blind you while you're raiding dungeons at 2am.

<3 <3 <3 I miss your face.

I don't know anything about Slack or Discord, but I tend to use Plurk for OOC communication these days if that helps!

I would be fine with a switch, as I can only get into the current chat if someone else invites me.

I know nothing about either Slack or Discord, but a lot of people here seem to only have good things to say about Slack, so that seems pretty sound.

I'm new but I'll throw my 2 cents in!

I vote for Slack :D and one of the reasons I d/led Trillian was because of the group chats, so I'd definitely like to participate.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

(no subject)

The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

Re: The aforementioned thinger.

no subject