UT99.org | Unreal Tournament Community

We should have a discord viewer on the front-page to encourage to join and talk to each other, like the one I use on the left side http://unrealmayhem.com/

Interesting

Idk feels like it's "Hey we full on moved to Discord", to me.

the other problem is ...we have a lot of people not interested into Discord and that would shove it into their face... a little bit.

I say interesting, but not really for our forum. Who wants to be on Discord see our link and join. The others ignore it.

what can go wrong, more ppl connecting to chair their knowledge is always a good thing...

Well, the ut99.org Discord already has a channel which is updated with new topics created here in the forum, so at least over there people should be somewhat aware of the forum and such, however it doesn't really seem to be the case, because every time we have to redirect someone to the forum, it's news to them that the forum exists.

Likewise, having a Discord chat here would likely be left largely unnoticed, and the technical debt created by keeping such a thing in this place is a lot higher than keeping the aforementioned channel in Discord itself.

Furthermore, there's also a potential problem in the opposite direction: while the ut99.org Discord is publicly accessible, it is not immediately accessible like the forum is.

By this I mean that you can see the forum by just opening it, but in Discord you must have an account to access the contents of that server, regardless of whether or not the server has a public invite link.
The problem this potentially creates relates with members whom may get banned from there: since there's some sense of "privacy" in a way, you expect that banned members can no longer see the contents of that server, and by making it visible here that would no longer be the case, potentially betraying that expectation.

Of course, the latter isn't that big of an issue, but it serves as a point to demonstrate why they are different and that there are some disadvantages associated with doing that that must be considered first.