Hi @Tanner_Scheurer! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts.
I hear you! Having “lackluster” community engagement is frustrating, and I defiantly want to see this change as well—but I must respectfully disagree.
While creating a Discord may seem like a good idea, I am not sure a Discord would solve this problem. It may get out of hand quickly due to the large group of users to the handful of LR Team members.
Current (July 2023) Ratio of LR Forum Members to LR Team Members
I recently came across this number of current (July 2023) to the number of LR Forum admins :
6800+ users to 5 admins
That’s a lot.
LR team members could get even more inundated with notifications and messages that the developers are too busy responding to “fires” than making updates and features that improve the experience of all users.
It might be doable if the LR team had a ton of moderators to handle and streamline the discord experience. Still, I don’t see that as realistically happening when the community engagement and communication here also leave more to be desired for LR’s dedicated/passionate users.
Additionally, not everyone has a Discord nor wants to sign up for one.
I am for whatever encourages more community engagement, so I could be way off base here, and that’s fair enough. I just wanted to present some additional viewpoints on this topic.
Regardless, I hope that the LR team hears us out and makes some changes. I would love a more vibrant Language Reactor community.
P.S. Other ways to bring the community together?
Your post did prompt me to look for other ways to bring the community together and foster a sense of unity. I thought creating an additional forum category would be a more approachable option for the LR Team and those currently signed up for this forum.
What do you think? (If you have any thoughts, please feel free to add them to the
[Language Reactor Forum] Add “Open Forum” Category" request I created recently. Even if they are in polite disagreement )
I submitted the request to create an “Open Forum” category (on the current LR Forum) to encourage more community engagement since I feel that the categories we have just aren’t enough, especially since we can’t create any new topics in the #english category (we’re only allowed to respond to ones already there—as far as I have been able to tell).
Currently, I am trying to engage a bit more with the forum and see how this proposed addition could/would benefit the community so that I can update the request with more relevant ideas/feedback for the LR team.
Thanks for hearing me out! (Here’s to a response/action—to either of our requests—from the LR Team soon! )