Maybe add a Discord invite link to the "Help" menu
Opened this issue · 3 comments
The TASVideos.org Official Discord Server recently got its own #bizhawk channel.
And currently, two options in the "Help" menu already link to the Bizhawk wiki page on TASVideos and to the BizHawk subforum on the TASVideos forum.
So I had the idea that maybe a third link, a Discord invite link, would fit there, since the current chat trend seems to be Discord.
It seems Discord even has the ability to make an invite to a specific channel instead of the entire server, so that following the link directly opens the channel.
Just an idea I had.
(And while making this issue ticket on this github I noticed there are a few links to the IRC channel, maybe that's the preferred chat? Maybe that should be the link, or even a fourth link, or none at all, I don't know.)
Any changes to features which make web requests should be made with #2235 in mind (specifically the "fixed lifespan" part).
My personal belief is that, as an open source project, we should not be endorsing a platform like Discord. I haven't dared remove it from the readme because it has a large membership base, generated by our sister project TASVideos.org, whereas no libre alternative does. (Honestly I was sorta hoping one of the TASBot infra wizards would have gotten a Matrix server spun up by now.)
It should be about directing users to a place that already exists and is already used specifically for bizhawk talk. Previously it was IRC. Currently it's dead and we have a different place where we effectively discuss all this. It's convenient if we tell where it is. We're not "endorsing discord" by informing users where we already discuss everything. It would be that if we had several places and we wanted to promote the discord chat despite its low popularity (artificially, through advertising it). If/when there are other options (or when we need them, like if discord becomes a problem), we may switch eventually.
This stinks for a variety of reasons. But I'm not involved much with Bizhawk anymore. So long as someone else is doing the work to help end users figure out how to use the software, I guess we can link to it.