Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-8-20190712165708/@comment-5811199-20190713010016

With Discord, you will now have a lot more flexibility for chatting as well as for talking with staff members. You'll see a list of staff members, wiki managers and content team members that are active and they'll be able to answer your questions more than what was offered in Staff Hours.

Chat is just unfortunately not as feature packed as Discord for us to put in the resources to keep it open - it's very difficult to moderate even with bots and scripts. Messenger, you'll know this from your experience on your wikis. In Discord, we have a way of throttling user messages (slowmode), more ways to know whether someone is busy or not, in-built history and logs of all chat and channels to sort out conversation.

We measure participation by a variety of measures, based on our logs. While there were a fair number of people joining for that first hour when we opened it up, the number has been decreasing. It's been especially low after introducing Discord. This week, there were only 6 users and 3 admods/staff. Two months ago, that number was in the 20s.