Contentful Developer Community
Hey Folks!
This year Contentful has committed to improving and deepening our relationship with the developer community. Over the past several months we've been working to better understand the community's needs and wants. We've realized that Slack falls short as a community platform due to its inflexibility, limited message history, and lack of moderation tools. After surveying our community members and gathering your feedback over the last several months, we are excited to migrate the community from Slack to Discord. We’ve captured the rationale behind this decision below.
What is Discord?
Discord is a hugely popular community platform, where members can interact via text, video calls, voice chats, with the ability to easily moderate and manage. It’s become an excellent place for those with online communities to meet up virtually and engage with each other.
What will happen to the Contentful Slack group?
Our intention is to maintain the current Slack channel for a few months, aiming to facilitate a smooth transition and offer assistance to anyone requiring help with Discord setup. In order to ensure a seamless change, all the familiar channels will be replicated in the new Discord server.
How do I access Discord?
Whether you’re new to the community or a long-time member, joining the fun on Discord is simple. Here’s the process in five steps:
Download the application or use a web browser. Note for Mac users, Discord asks for permission to receive keystrokes — which improves accessibility by enabling system-wide push-to-talk (PTT) to work. If you disable this permission, Discord will still function just fine, you’ll just need to open the app for your PTT hotkey to function.
Create an account. If you have a personal account, you can create another profile, or professional account, and switch between the two as you’d like.
Here are the reasons we've decided to make this decision
- No message limits
- Increased flexibility and customization options
- Easy voice chat and screen share
- Moderation tools
No message limits
As stated above, our current usage of Slack is limited to the Free plan, which restricts us to viewing and searching the 10,000 most recent messages. While 10k may seem substantial, as our community expands, we quickly surpass this threshold, resulting in the loss of previous discussions.
In contrast, Discord does not impose any messaging limit, alleviating concerns about losing context and conversations as our community grows. This not only enables our members to search through past messages for answers but also allows us to reference previous messages as valuable responses.
More flexibility for everyone
Discord offers a wide range of channel and group options, allowing for precise organization and structuring of conversations. The ability to create categories enhances channel organization. Discord also supports threaded conversations and embedded forums, providing users with interactive communication options. Additionally, Discord has detailed notification settings on a per-channel basis, allowing users to customize their notification preferences. The customization options available are extensive, offering users a high degree of personalization.
Easy voice chat and screen share
Discord provides us with a flexible solution for creating voice and video rooms that suit various purposes allowing us to better serve and interact with our global community. By simplifying the process with one-click screen sharing, we can quickly jump into voice calls to troubleshoot or share ideas without the hassle of managing Zoom links. This functionality allows us to host a wide range of virtual events and meetups, giving us more opportunities to connect with and get to know our community on a deeper level.
Moderation tools
As our community continues to expand, the significance of moderation and permissions escalates. Discord offers better capabilities to immediately flag unwanted activities through its built-in Auto-Moderator, as well as requiring new members to acknowledge and adhere to our Code of Conduct before gaining access to the server. Although we anticipate a positive atmosphere within our community, equipping ourselves with the appropriate toolkit will assist in cultivating an inclusive environment for both newcomers and longstanding members.
Cheers!
The Contentful Developer Relations Team