Alteryx Socials - Discord Channel?

[TheOC]

Hey! I just wanted to test the waters for whether a discord channel would be of any interest to anyone?
I was going to post it under Ideas, but I don't believe it falls under any category, and this may be something I setup myself for Alteryx to help the community!

I use discord on a regular basis, usually to keep up with friends, join servers based on my interests, and connect with new people.
However, currently there are 0 communities for 'Alteryx' 

A reason I think this may be useful is I feel it would create a nice environment for new members of the community to learn. I believe one criticism of a Discord channel would be that it would circumvent questions and ideas being posted on the community, which is why I would suggest the discord instead being a place of interactive meetups, making it easier for people to join user-groups, and chat to people about similar interests.

Two posts I saw that provoked this thought to me, was one detailing that it would be nice to have a space to chat in more detail to people whilst watching inspire sessions, and have a 'viewing party'. Another was a careers advice post, which i think would fit the discord perfectly.

This could be managed by text and voice channels, which can be made to be public, or private only to those who belong to a specific role (For example, North East England members could have a chat channel specific to them and their user group). 

There are many open-source moderation bots readily available, so a blanket of moderation would be easy to be applied.

A good example would be something like this, pre-existing community around programming:

Any user that joins is presented with rules, recommended programming languages, interesting projects, daily progress, and FAQ's, all with their respective chat channels. Chat channels are also split into categories, with multiple under each:

Please let me know if this is something you would find interesting, I think it would be a nice way to get to know a lot of the community more!

Cheers,
Owen

[atcodedog05]

@TheOC 

Would love to be part of this 😎

[TheOC]

hey @atcodedog05 
Fantastic! I'd be interested in hearing your ideas for this if theres enough interest!

Cheers,
Owen

[WillM]

@TheOC thanks so much for your idea!  The community does not have plans to host a discord channel or anything similar at this time.  One of the main reasons for this is the fragmentation that separate platforms can bring to the experience for community members.  By having multiple channels that don't necessarily work together, it can become a bit overwhelming to manage from both a membership and content perspective. It is also generally more difficult to navigate/curate topics within a chat channel as opposed to the format of a forum (especially with the rate at which community activity occurs).

In your post, you mention the ease of user groups and events as one of the draws, and we actually have some new community functionality coming soon that will help with exactly that. Stay tuned for more information on that front, because I think it will really address some of the things you've brought up!

[TheOC]

hey @WillM 

Thanks for the in-depth reply! Super excited to see the new features to the community in that case, and can totally see that side of making a discord (the fragmentation).

I think my only thought that persists is the idea of an easy room to join to chat over a voice channel with other community members, out of curiosity, do you know if theres any intention of implementation of this in the future? Currently if I want to jump on a video/voice call with someone, it usually means organising a teams meeting, exchanging emails etc, not much of a big issue but one that would be nice to be more streamlined!

cheers!
TheOC

[WillM · Accepted solution]

@TheOC Sorry for the delay in responding to you here! I'm not sure if we have any current plans for something like this, but it's definitely something that would be a perfect fit to put in the Community Ideas board. That way we can look at the overall interest from the community and have it on our radar!