Announcing the Quilt Forum

Hey everyone! I and the rest of the Community Team are excited to announce the final result of just over six months of planning, development, and a not insignificant amount of DevOps headaches. Namely, Quilt's new community space, the official Quilt Forum. The forum is being hosted and kindly sponsored by Starchild and their upcoming startup, Starchild Systems.

You may have some questions about why we've launched a forum, and what will happen to our existing Discord spaces, but before we answer those, let's get one universal question out the way:

Where do I sign up?

The forum is live now at https://forum.quiltmc.org, and you can sign up with a standard email and password, or using GitHub or Discord OAuth. Please make sure to read our Privacy Policy if you have questions or concerns about how your data is handled and managed.

With that out of the way, let's address some other common questions.

Why do we need a forum?

Currently, our primary community space is the official Quilt Community Discord, and while it is very good for short-form discussions and has served us well, a forum provides two distinct advantages over Discord: Openness, and Control.

Openness

One major problem with Discord is that it is a closed platform. To read the announcements and discussions we have in the Discord, you need to have a Discord account, and you need to explicitly join the server. This creates a barrier to entry for those wishing to learn more about Quilt and see what we're doing beyond what's on the website, which many people won't bother to pass. With a forum, while you still need an account to participate in discussion, if you're just looking, you can just visit it. There's no form to fill out, no password to create. A forum will also be indexed by search engines, meaning that any discussions or support requests can easily be found by future modders with a quick search query.

Control

The other major advantage that a forum has over Discord is that it is fully owned and operated by us. Currently, if Discord goes down, we'd all be completely unable to communicate, but having a forum provides a backup place to use if this happens (and it works the other way around too). As well as this, Discord might someday change in a way that make it unsuitable for us to use, or it could even go out of business entirely, but a forum that is controlled by Quilt will exist as long as Quilt does. Even if Starchild Systems becomes unable to sponsor or host us in the future, we'll still be able to pack the forum up and move it elsewhere, while still preserving its community and discussion history.

What will happen to Discord?

Not all that much. We'll link up some channels to feeds from the forum so that you can keep track of what's happening over there, but we have no plans to replace or otherwise deprecate Discord in favour of a forum. Discord is great for hanging out and having easy, short-form discussions, and it's still our main community space, something which we don't expect will change any time soon. Our Discord spaces will remain the active and cared-for places they are today, but the forum will also be available for those who prefer to use it.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to https://forum.quiltmc.org and join in the fun! Unless you don't want to, I suppose?