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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/strong><\/em> to maintain Slack.<\/p>\n Umm, no.<\/p>\n So, for now, we seem to be cooking along OK on Slack, but meanwhile, we have opened a Discord channel<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n