Increasing Forums vs Discord

There is one thing that seems to annoy some people, especially with big discussions that keep getting repeated in the discord, thats the fact if it was in here it wouldn't be as repetitive and annoying.
But most dont use the forums or forget about it...

Why people use Discord over the forums

Most sbox issue discussions happen on Discord because it’s always open, convenient, and provides instant updates. The forum doesn’t get the same activity because there’s no built-in way to receive notifications, or it being always there like the discord.

so people don’t keep it open, they do with discord since they use it for other stuff ( like me with smallfish dev chats ).

Obviously it has the downside of being a blackhole for discussions instantly getting lost

Proposed improvements for forums engagement
Notifications and taking advantage of the discord to show the forums posts would drive up its usage much more imo.

This removes the need to manually check the forum for all this stuff.
Other modern day forums i use do this, i will actively use just because im reminded with the emails, 
Otherwise i get annoyed having to manually check for this stuff and stop using the forums and forgetting about it.

2. Discord forum-feed channel
Add a #forums-feed channel that posts new threads and replies

This takes advantage and exposes the massive userbase in the Discord, to active forum discussions, 
likely bringing people over who would otherwise never notice or see the threads.
( this already happens on some github issues from the issue feed, people see them and join in the discussion )

tru

I think a good idea in the future, when we catch ourselves in the middle of a sort of complicated, contriversal, or helpful topic someone should suggest bringing it to the forums for discourse. It makes it easier to follow along, and can be referenced better in the future.

1. Last thing I want is more emails. Anyone that has email notifications turned on for most things are not reading their emails, anyone that does read their emails do not want more of them.

2. I like this idea - it would bring attention to some threads that would often be missed. Threads and replies is probably too much/things will get lost - but maybe limiting it to new threads/every 10 replies/10 reactions (hot thread?)?

I would personally love to have a more active forum, Discord is just difficult to use and I feel like a lot of people, myself included, are more inclined to just say random shit - where a forum feels like it makes you think a bit more about it before hitting send.

The original vote about removing the wiki etc. came out with a lot of people wanting a wiki incorporated into sbox.game - if we had a public wiki with some forum crossover again that might help keep people active on the forums, kind of like how API pages have comment sections that are somewhat connected to the forums?

Also, can we bring back smartness please?

I agree with a lot of the suggestions here, and do think discussions or points can be missed very quickly and easily - step away from the channel for like 5 mins and depending on how hot the topic is; good points can be buried. 

On the other hand; there is a lot of knowledge already present on numerous channels; solutions to problems or useful code snippets.

I think a lot of folk like fast and instant responses hence why the discord is more utilised. At least if the forum is used; these discussions are easily accessible and archived to help folk with future issues or talks. 

@fish
I think bringing smartness back would actually be a good idea too. It was excellent at filtering out a lot of low effort bullshit. I was banned plenty of times back in the day and it genuinely made me pay more attention to grammar and how I wrote things.

The downside is that it would hit people who use English as a second language, and it would create a lot of moderation overhead with constant unban requests. If smartness were implemented today, it would need to be more flexible, and I am not sure anyone wants to maintain something like that now.

@harbour 
Watching genuinely useful information get buried sucks. I end up copying a lot of those Discord posts into Obsidian just so I do not lose them. But if I have to search Discord for something and I do not already know the exact phrase to look for, I usually cannot find it. That is where a forum actually helps, because the information sticks around and is easier to locate later.

@all
Regarding email notifications, I think having the option would be great, but it should be off by default. It does not even have to be email. Even a simple notification box on the forum that shows replies to your threads would be a huge improvement without cluttering anyone’s inbox.

this would also be a nice thing for notifications on threads to quickly enable and disable them