Discord is great for having casual, fast-paced, niche conversations throughout the day with friends and strangers who share your interests. It’s not so great for anything focused, permanent, or that you need to find easily, which poses a problem for anyone who uses Discord for anything else. Forum Channels, a new feature Discord is introducing today, seems like a possible solution.
Forum Channels make Discord a bit more like Reddit, and it should hopefully help the messaging platform be a better tool for all of the new ways it's used outside of gaming-centered messaging.
Dedicated threads —
Discord already offers threads for conversations that branch out of the main subject of a channel, but it archives them automatically after 24 hours as a way to remove clutter. Forum Channels lets them stick around. Now, as a server moderator, you can create a new Forum Channel that allows for an unlimited amount of threads to exist inside of it — a place for focused conversations on a specific subject matter that can be easily referred back to later.
“When you explore a Forum Channel, you’ll see a list of posts that start new conversations, complete with big bolded titles and relevant tags,” Discord explains. “You can hop into one of them and join in, use the search bar to find more posts in the archives, or even create your own — complete with a helpful, descriptive image that will display for anyone scrolling by.”
A bad fit —
Forum Channels should be useful to anyone who doesn’t keep with servers they're a part of regularly, but it’s pretty clear Discord’s designing the feature for any business who switched over to Discord in place of a dedicated forum or support wiki because their audience was already there.
As Discord’s popularity has grown, so has the number of groups who use it in professional settings rather than just as a place to organize casual communities. It’s pretty common to be directed to a dedicated Discord server if you have a question about your new favorite game rather than a dedicated solution. The problem is, Discord was never really designed for those use cases, and valuable information can get lost in the oncoming rush of new messages, regardless of the channel. Forum Channels should keep the useful stuff protected, and a bit easier to find.
Forum Channels start rolling out to servers with community features enabled today and are visible on mobile and desktop versions of the app.
