The road to a functioning “forum” feature here at Oxebridge has been rocky. The original O-Forum never took hold because it came at a time when forums in general were declining, and everyone was moving to social media platforms like LinkedIn. Fair enough, and Oxebridge now manages a number of LinkedIn Groups that comprise more than 250,000 members. Not too shabby, and none of our moderators are former felons or copyright thieves.

But they aren’t necessarily Oxebridge-specific, for folks who want to chat about our news, programs, or just see the darn cartoons. So we rolled out a Slack channel which has proven to be pretty popular. The “#general” chat sub-channel has over 650 members in it, and folks can get all sorts of free consulting — often in real-time — just by chatting.

But Slack has been aggressive about pushing us to convert to the paid plan, which would cost an absolutely ungodly fortune. I think Slack never saw itself as a replacement for chat forums, and so they don’t see the possibilities there. Instead, Slack thinks it’s for business teams — like Microsoft Teams — and not as a useful social engagement platform. Now Slack is pulling some dirty tricks, like blurring out older messages until you pay up. At a base plan rate of about $19 per person per month, Oxebridge would be paying nearly $20,000 a month to maintain Slack.

Umm, no.

So, for now, we seem to be cooking along OK on Slack, but meanwhile, we have opened a Discord channel. That’s free and will largely remain free, although I did buy the Nitro plan, which adds some features. That costs a few bucks a month instead of Slack’s mortgage-your-house rates.

What I’m seeing, however, is that the Slack folks are not really migrating to the Discord channel. Not sure what that’s about, except that many people still view Discord as a “gamer” platform, so non-gamers might not understand the rationale for using it for business. But Discord offers a ton more moderation and conversation options than Slack does. Again, that’s not because Slack is … um, “slacking” … it’s that Slack sees itself as doing something entirely different from Discord. Which is fine.

So for now I urge you to join the Discord. You can keep using Slack, and it will probably be around for a long time, but I do suspect at some point they will just pull the plug on free accounts with hundreds of users, and it may go dark overnight.

One exception: if you’re an Oxeridge clint and we have set up a private Slack channel for our project, keep using Slack.

One problem we are having is that the Discord invitation link — like this one — seems to keep timing out. It’s supposed to be permanent, but users report it sometimes expires. For now, it does seem to be sticking around, but let me know if that one expires, too.

 

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