User blog:RansomTime/Unofficial Community Channels

Hey all. This blog is a quick FYI on unofficial Wikia community groups.

For background, community central is an official wiki, it's ran by Wikia and Admins and Mods are chosen by staff. By contrast, the Wikia community channels I'm listing are unofficial, ran by Wikians according to their rules, but as general purpose hang out areas for the Wikia community. Most of them were made before chat was a feature on Wikia, and so there was a greater need to have a way of communication with Wikians. Some of them can be useful on mobile devices (where we can't get to chat), and they're also useful because you can send a message (public/private) to someone who's offline, and they'll get it later.

IRC
IRC is a text-based chat platform. Way way back, Wikia used to have an official IRC channel #wikia on freenode. Eventually, staff stopped going on IRC and it was converted into a community channel ##wikia. Nowerdays, there's not that much activity, but quite a lot of people still "lurk" there and there are occasional conversations. Unlike the other channels, IRC, like chat is temporary - so when you leave IRC you won't get any messages.

To join, you'll need an IRC client, then join the freenode server (chat.freenode.net) and the ##wikia channel.

Skype
There's a Wikia community Skype channel too, it's much more active than IRC. Again, back in the day Staff were active on skype, but it is mainly a community channel for community help and general chatter. To join, speak to Josephyr

Discord
Discord is a fairly new platform, It can be accessed via the web like Special:Chat, but also with a client like Skype and IRC. There's a mobile app too for Android and iOS users. On Discord there are many channels, including a general channel for help, and channels for Anime, Gaming, Music, Technical help etc. There's also a voice chat (although I've never actually seen people use it).

To join, click here within the first 24 hours of this blog being up. Otherwise use this link: http://discord.me/wikia-community - the password is brandonisawitch

That's about it, hope to see you around in one of these channels, or just Special:Chat! If I missed anything, let me know in the comments.