Hello everyone!

Today, we would like to announce the launch of something we have been carefully assembling: an official Mycena Cave Discord server!

We are excited about being able to introduce this to all of you, and would like to go over some of our thought processes and reasonings behind moving forward with an official Discord. We have been weighing the pros and cons of this over time, and think it will be helpful to share this insight with you all.

Our desire is to retain and facilitate more activity on the forums. As such, we have been hesitant about trying to revitalize a live chat setting—this hesitation is born from the desire to have our forums be more active and thinking that a live chat would be counter to these goals. We also knew that it was unlikely that a revitalization of our current live chat system would be feasible without a lot of time sunk into coding features that made it more like Discord or similar chat systems—we didn’t want to go that route since there are a lot of other coding projects dividing our time. We had two primary concerns when considering the decision to encourage a live chat again, especially one that is off-site:

• Moving casual site-related chat off-site could prove harmful to on-site activity and engagement, and can feel alienating to players who aren’t with comfortable being in a live chat environment
• An off-site chat would present new challenges and added stress to our moderation team, who would be responsible for monitoring an environment that was both fast paced and always “on”

However, we acknowledge that players are, in large part, interested in engaging through a more casual and immediately accessible medium and that many are already doing so in player-created Mycena Cave Discord groups. This makes our first concern much less relevant in the context of what adding an off-site chat would do since this has already happened. As an unforeseen consequence, a lot of staff have felt disconnected from players and player feedback: we work on Mycena Cave because you are an important community to us and we derive a lot of enjoyment out of your happiness at our projects and activities. Staff being able to regularly experience that connection and seeing happy feedback is essential to keep us going and prevent burnout.

Forum posting can be daunting to some and may feel like a less natural or more formal means of communication, so it’s understandable that casual chatter has been drawn more to a live chat setting. Discord feels less intimidating for many and has a lot of great features that make it appealing to a wider variety of people. As the interest in a faster chat medium has been high for staff and players alike, we made the decision to begin more seriously considering how we might make this a reality.

We have already been at work boosting engagement on our forums as that continues to be a big priority: forums will always be our focus when it comes to hosting activities, encouraging roleplay, releasing and discussing news, hosting serious player discussions, etc. We think it is worthwhile to assess what the forums do well, and to make the forums even better in those areas.

We have also been working hard to mitigate areas of concern listed in our second point. Our goal with the official Discord server is to create a safe, moderated environment that emphasizes positivity and community. To this end, we’ve spent a great deal of time working to update our live chat moderation policies and developing a set of simple, straightforward rules for the server. You can view our moderation trajectory which includes goals and specifics about live chat moderation on the discord page. The rules have been changed to reflect these updates.

We’ve also updated staff policies regarding live chats, emphasizing that new information should always be posted to the forums first, and have made our policies public for the sake of transparency and so that players better understand what staff can and cannot discuss in a live chat setting. That is also viewable on the discord page.

One noteworthy step we’ve taken to ensure that our server remains focused on our community is an authentication process that essentially links your Mycena Cave identity to that on our server. Your display name in the official Discord server will be the same as your username on Mycena Cave, and cannot be edited. This is as much for moderation purposes as it is to discourage unwanted third parties such as spam bots from participating in the server.

While we as staff have all gone through the authentication process and have done our best to work out any kinks, we realize that there may be a few hiccups in introducing the process to a broader group. Please let us know if you encounter any issues with this process, or if you feel any instructions could be made clearer.

You can find the open invitation to the server on this page, or in the drop-down menu under the ‘Community’ heading!

I’M SO GLAD THERE’S AN OFFICIAL ONE NOW.

See you all in the server >:D

Glad to see y’all considered my suggestion! Idk who else may have mentioned it before (if anyone did). I’m excited to see how this turns out!!

Question: How will the username thing work for us?

Edit: for clarity we do not share a discord account

Ishy and Sapphy Access to the Mycena Cave Discord server is linked through your Mycena Cave account. If you have multiple people on a single Mycena Cave account you’ll need to designate a single Discord user to be its representative, or you can make a shared discord account and use that for both of you.

That’s extremely disappointing. We understand limitations on events and such but not allowing both of us to use site features when account sharing is allowed via the rules is incredibly disheartening.

I genuinely hope there are other avenues to communicate with staff since currently the discord server seems to be the way conversationally, and we’re not allowed to participate. :)

~I

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To be honest, I’m actually really upset/disappointed about there not being some sort of solution to the account linking.
I understand and even support the limits in events and on games- that’s balancing issues for a game and it’d make it unfair if they didn’t exist. But, with this- it feels a lot like we’re being disallowed to an area of the community, and what’s probably going to be a major way to communicate with other users and staff.

~Sapphy

glitch (Pinging just incase you saw Ishy’s response and not my edit.)

Ishy and Sapphy If you are both wanting to participate in the Discord, we would encourage you to create a shared discord account and use that for both of you, or to separate your accounts so that you can have separate Discord accounts. I understand why not being able to each have your own Discord is upsetting, but coming up with a way to correctly support what you have in mind is non-trivial. This Discord server is a direct extension of the Mycena Cave community: if you want to be treated as separate entities, you should have separate accounts.

You cannot be signed into two discords at once. There are also additional issues with two people who do not live together using the same discord (notably the constant “someone has hacked your account” emails and locks that happen. I’ve tried this before. It’s not nearly as convenient as you’re making it seem). Even if we were to find a way to make this work, us both having the same name in discord is going to be confusing, as where on the site we always sign echos and try to sign forum posts where relevant. That’s not feasible in a chat program.

If you do not want shared accounts so intensely, I genuinely don’t understand why they’re allowed within the rules. We’re absolutely being specifically singled out (or doubled, in this case lol) refusing us access to the community and I can’t even begin to fathom a reason that doesn’t have a simple solution.

~I

You chose to occupy a single account on Mycena Cave. That is, it was your active decision to be seen as a single entity by Mycena Cave. This manifests in many ways: you have a single player profile, you play towards a single games cap, you participate as a single entity in events and activities, you are linked to a single Discord account. Mycena Cave does not prevent or discourage you from making this choice. But it is your choice, and it is not Mycena Cave’s responsibility to figure out how to make things easy for you when you find your choice inconvenient.

I appreciate the increased transparency and the explicit list of mod guidelines and admin/mod/player interactions and look forward to seeing how this goes.

Though it is a shame that shared accounts are locked out from participating. I understand there might be technical hurdles to overcome but it does seem unfair that MC’s authentication process bans a subset of MC’s users that are playing within MC’s rules (that’s a technical shortcoming on MC’s side, as far as I understand it, not Discord’s). Hopefully some other solution might present itself.

Ishy and Sapphy Briefly butting in but I’ve run multiple discord accounts for the sake of RPing before - the way I always did it was to use the app for my main account and then use a browser to log in to another account.  When I had like 4-5 accounts going I’d be using the different profiles on my chrome, and since switching to firefox I’d probably go right ahead and use Container Tabs there to do it if I needed to hop back into that.

Just some options!

Glitch, your solution is actually impossible (two users cannot share a discord account via separate IPs, it doesn’t work, it’s not “inconvenient” it is actually just completely impossible [edit: Kippie editing in a ping so you can see that those aren’t really solutions for the problem that we’re having.]). We are not inconvenienced by not being able to participate in a significant part of the community, we’re extremely disappointed that because we have elected to utilize a method of play acceptable by the rules, we’re an easy sacrifice to make because we play differently than other players.

I am absolutely appalled not only by your decision, but in the way you’re speaking to us as users. It’s up there with some of the worst staff interactions I have ever had. In fact, just about every interaction with staff either of us on this account have had since we came back, privately and publicly, aside from when we spent money, has been like this. And now the only potential we have for positive staff interaction is being barred from us. It’s no wonder users are struggling with a sense of community when this is the reaction they get for wanting to participate in it.

I hope for any other users who share accounts, as few and far between they are, you come up with something that works for them. I genuinely do.

~I

Edit: I’m editing in to clarify that this post was edited by staff. There’s no notification on the post saying who makes the edits so I just thought I’d note it personally since I don’t think that’s fair.

Ah, well, Ishy and Sapphy, all I really saw was difficulties involving being able to access multiple discord accounts at once, so I figured I could at least contribute a workaround that I had.  Sorry it wasn’t useful.

I’m quite consistently a lurker in live chats, but I’m really excited by the official discord! It’s already been awesome seeing the staff being a little silly and watching such a large portion of the site interact! I love the transparency with staff rules and think it’s set up quite well. I really appreciate the account linking too — the name linking makes things really simple and I like that it prevents random people from stumbling into the discord.

I am excited about this but I linked my wrong discord account. I did pm glitch on this to get this fixed.

RIP safe (onsite) Mycena Cave chat ;-;  .... we had a lotta fun.  *sigh….. ah well, the whole world is changing atm, so not surprised at this one too.  Have fun, but I won’t be joining in as I have tried Discord in the past and greatly dislike it.  That’s my personal choice though, so no worries.

I was reflecting on your lack of forum interacting and noted it from the first time I came on here.  I had to go to the chat to get any info and although I was terribly shy, I soon got used to it and had a lot of fun.  That said, I can certainly see why you struggle with forum interactions.  I am ‘old’, old enough to have been playing on the internet when forum boards were huge and much like the forums on here, there were big blocks of writing sprinkled with photos.  Facebook and Twitter changed things intensely for the younger generations starting around 2006.  So for the younger population, they are going to be familiar with seriously shorter and faster interactions.  While this creates a ‘chat’ interaction, it does not encourage full fledged discourses, or support the forum format.

I like the addition of an official Discord and I’m looking forward to further interaction with the community. It’s convenient for me, since I’m already on Discord often and I like the features it offers. I’m hopeful the Discord will contribute to a more active community and, in turn, more active forums. I can see myself interacting more in both forums and chats as a result.

Thanks for setting this up!

I know that is a choice to have a two user/one account situation, but since it’s allowed in the rules on the site, I would hope that other site-related things would support that choice rather than alienating those users and causing them to go through extra hoops to access something that is a wonderful tool for communication with staff and other users. :c Pretty disappointed in the delivery of that particular reply, especially considering it is a valid concern being brought up.

I do appreciate that good steps have been taken to ensure that the official Discord will be (hopefully! *crosses fingers*) free of spam bots and the like. Running a large server is certainly a task and a half!