Advertising Rules Update

While I'm personally not currently too involved in the community right now (uni work and some other interests are consuming my life), I'm going to have to throw my voice in with the people that are against this change. Don't get me wrong I can absolutely see the problems, though most of them can be applied to external links in general instead of specifically discord invite links.
As someone that has worked actively on Wynntils, where bug reports are only accepted through discord, this could have caused serious issues to the development of the mod as it was growing (it probably won't due to the fact that we’re now at a size that allows users to find their way there without using the forums).
I think there are better ways to have tackled this before outright banning all discord links (specifically on the forums, I think banning them in-game, where the majority of completely new players are before the forums is definitely the way to go), such as only allowing discord links that are pre-approved; or adding a warning to external links on the forums that the Wynncraft team is not responsible for the content found there. If you still ran into issues, then you could consider outright banning them from public content.
Either way, specifically regarding this change our forum thread currently contains a link to our discord, but is locked and has been for a while, will we be able to change it before the thread gets deleted (I don’t remember, but I don’t think you can edit locked threads)? Also, will we have to remove links to our discord from our Github repo, website, or Curseforge page because those are all also linked on that thread?

 

Even less will change if people say nothing at all

 

I still feel like it's much fairer and more effective at accomplishing the objective, and has less negative knock-on effects to just handle misuse of discord links (like malicious links etc) on a case by case basis rather than an outright ban. Unless there has been widespread outbreak of said offenses as of late but to my knowledge there have been none. I feel like the staff team should be able to go into these links and be like "okay this link is legit" and then forgetabout it, or be like "oh this is a security concern" and remove it + punish the offender. There are plenty of innocent uses of discord links which introduce people to new communites and help the function of guilds and generate more commerce.

But here's what ticks me off the most; I thought discord content was not the responsibility of the wynncraft staff team?

 

This is dumb.
Its fairly easy to tell an actual discord link from a fact one, as a real one has "discord" somewhere in there.

If the issue isn't something like that, then tell us what the hell it could be. Thats the only thing I could think of.

 

I have no problem with banning discord links from shouts as I can understand players clicking on that and accidentally getting to a place they shouldn't be. But for forums this is just utter bullshit because if anyone running a guild is stupid enough to post a fake link on their guild page they will get in trouble for it regardless. All this is doing is making community connections more difficult than they need to be without really accomplishing much of anything.
I for one would like to hear a few good arguments of removing discords from forums that cause problems that can't be delt with any other way.

 

well then....

 

While I do understand where this rule is coming from, I don't support it. This severely limits not only guild recruitment but also event advertising.
I'm also not sure what security risks this helps to avoid. Does it avoid rogue/fake links that lead to malware? Spam servers? We need more information on why this rule was instated and what event or events could have occurred to make this rule absolutely required.

 

Also like, someone posting discord links with malicious intent isn't gonna stop just because the rule says so. It completely missed the target demographic.

 

but if it's illegal it means no one will do it duh

 

Aight dropping by to give the 100th negative opinion about this change on the thread. Let me start this off clear, the shout change I can understand and even though I don't think its 100% needed I can see logical reasoning behind it. But the forums change is not just stupid its outright demotivating and a slap towards the guild community indirectly and not just a small one either. Discord is one of the most useful tools a guild has if not the most useful. A lot of guild discords are used even more than the guild's in-game chat features. It's physically demotivating to see almost every rule change make it harder and harder to recruit players to the guild which is probably the most important aspect of guilds. the ability to invite people you do not yet know and befriend them. Shouting a bad discord link to hack people's accounts is understandable but it's incredibly stupid to put a malicious discord link on the forums somewhere much less their guild forum page. The shout change still hurts guilds but the forums change might as well be hitting it's shin with a bat. it hinders guilds extremely and demotivates the current guilds that not just might but **will** cause double the "guild spam" in shouts for recruitment. some people already complain about guild shouts so seeing 30+ guilds shout once and hour due to a rule change? yeah that'd irritate more than a few people. The guild community contains 20-30% of the average player count that logs each month so why demotivate them more? That's 1/4th-1/3rd of your audience and I'd reckon a higher percentage than that of the daily logins are guild peeps. So if you do want to keep the guilds happy please revert the forum thread discord ban even if you keep the change to ban discord links from shouts. That is a good compromise with the community while still keeping wynn safer than it was before.

 

literally any response would be nice, whether it's "this decision is final" to "we're working on a new rule" as this has gotten negative feed back for nearly a week now...

 

Or yknow, examples on what new 'security concerns' warranted the rule change or even just acknowledging our concerns. The silence just makes it seem like they don't care.

 

I cannot believe I have to bump this, but bump.

Several guild leaders and chiefs are expressing concerns about this change and are asking for more transparency on why this change happend.

 

haha no one cares about guilds

i say this as a joke of course but its clear to see that this is how management feels

 

I have not been around for long enough to really understand how some of the veterans feel regarding the neglect guilds have endured. All i know is that something isn't quite the way it should be but I don't know what that is.

 

hey remember when a lot of people didnt like this, ill put it back at the top juuust incase

 

No response yet from staff so bump bump.

 

The chain of command cant possibly be this dysfunctional...who is the person taking responsibility for this change..

Im staying here to take a stand for everyone else too lazy to do so!

 

Bump 10cars full of protesters