Quote: "You would've hated IRC back in the day! But yeah.. it's a mess."
I hope you don't mean the TGC IRC., because it was ONLY a hot mess whenever one of the Team made a rare visit to do an AMA and Question Bots would have to be setup to make sure they weren't instantly bombarded with a sea of questions and chat moving too quick to follow as 50 - 100 ppl would descend just to get some sense of feedback from SOMEONE who had an idea about WTF was actually going on.
Still that only happened for what like an Hour every 6 months., the rest of the time it was either the same 8 - 10 of us with it constantly on in the background until we either needed feedback on an idea, code, etc. or we were bored and wanted to shoot-the-breeze; and every so often Dark Mouse would come online; and start an argument with me over whatever bee was in his bonnet that day (that guy REALLY hated me, but also couldn't just leave me the heck alone).
Although fun fact it's where the Podcast stemmed from., as effectively those on it were the regulars on the IRC Channel.
The Podcast was quite fun to do... talking about the various Regular Updates to Dark BASIC / Dark BASIC Pro... new Expansions... new Technology... etc.
Unfortunately when TGC began work on FPSC., and updates somewhat began to be sporadic; and we'd find we had to keep branching further and further out into a more generic "Games and Game Dev" Podcast; until we called it quits when we realise we were barely talking about TGC Products anymore.
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I tell you what though., back in the day on IRC... we'd have killed for features like those that Discord has built-in.
Better Mod Control... Integrated Bot Support... Forum-Like Channel Hierarchy... Role Management... Access Management... etc.
Discord is an exceptionally useful Community Tool., when managed and maintained correctly.
I mean it could even be integrated with the Forums; so that topics talked about in the Discord could be pushed out as Threads on the Forum (or Reddit)
The problem a lot of Companies have is... well they never have anyone to maintain their Discord Server; instead they take a "Setup and Forget" approach, usually resulting in an unmitigated disaster.