Babble: An embedded chat

#1

Hi everybody,

We’ve recently been testing a new chat amongst the @team, and are now expanding the test to other groups within the community.

This new chat is called Babble. Although not as slick as Discord, it offers a few important advantages:

  1. We own all the data and history, which means we are not at the mercy of an external company.

    • This might not be an obvious issue, but other communities have lost their Discord servers, members, and chat history before. This is always a risk when any 3rd party owns your community’s data.

  2. The community can self-moderate via the post-flagging system.

  3. It can eventually be hooked directly into the game.

We still have Discord for now, but we will be slowly moving specific groups and channels onto Babble to continue our testing. As always, your input is welcome in #support:feedback, #support:questions, and #support:bugs.

Thanks.

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#2

Just don’t PM anyone with it. You can’t actually see them, at least on phone unless you specifically look up a person, and hope it was them that sent it.

#3

That’s probably why I have a notification I cant get rid of…

#4

Ditto

#5

Xenon slaps @TheBigOne around a bit with a large trout

#6

Soooo can I use it now? @moderators

#7

It should be usable for everybody now. If it doesn’t work for you, please post any relevant details in #support:bugs.

Thanks!

#8

@I_like_pie… I have to admit, I’m not convinced by babble. I understand the motivations for adopting something other than Discord, but this feels like a step backwards…

For me, Discord works as it is a native app, meaning I can get alerts on the go. A pure browser-based chat doesn’t seem to be able to offer the same capability. It feels as though adopting an industry standard tool such as Discord would mean you can focus on the game…?

I get that a consolidated community forum and chat feature would be amazing… but for me, Babble just doesn’t seem great in terms of functionality, or use ability.

I appreciate that “I don’t like it” is never useful feedback…!

#9

It’s useful feedback if it’s constructive. :slight_smile:

I admit that Babble falls short in its current form. I am exploring ways to help this, including seeing how viable it is to use it (and/or Discourse) purely as backend for a new in-game communications interface.

Despite Discord, people still do use our in-game messaging system quite a bit, so there is clearly a need for an integrated experience. It wouldn’t have to be complicated, just accessible.

Fwiw, I don’t ever intend to shut down our Discord server; it’s especially useful if/when the site goes down. The change I see is to what extent can we move those conversations into the game. Babble or otherwise, there is a lot of value in doing so.

#10

I keep wanting to read it as Babbel, I guess because I keep hearing ads for it on the streaming stations I listen to. B A B… B E L DOT COM. Is Babble a European-made learning app? :stuck_out_tongue:

#11

I do like the idea of using Discord as a backend.

For me, one of the key benefits of the forums in the “old” incarnation were the ability to create threads.

Right now on Discord, most of the chat drowns out things that I should have read… so it does come with its own negative points.

It’s almost as if building a game is easy, but building the community is much more difficult…!