Hey there @JakeDaPhunk
Personally I’m not against this idea, now I think the real question is " what does an extra interactive discussion solution for S.A community has to offer ? ". Also, I’m not familiar with Discord servers but I’ve heard that they often get spammed quite a lot after a while of existence.
I find the forums here very underrated and not really used that much, S.A also have a Facebook private discussion group and recently @phil_johnston also created a Sonic Academy subreddit, do we need more ?
The way that I picture Discord and could see some benefits to this platform would be by instantiating things like interactive workshops or more active interaction on chosen & specific topics than just another mean of communication & chat tool for the community. Therefore it’s not only about providing initial launch & moderation IMHO, to make it really interesting & beneficial it involves more time & human action to organize, schedule & maintain the all thing.
Another concern is the choice for a company with a major activity based around providing payed or subscription based tutorials to invest time & human resource on something extra like this and free. Is there not a risk to see more & more people relaying on the free side of things rather than thinking about buying a course or getting a subscription ?
So, yeah, again, find the idea interesting but at the same time I feel like things such as purpose & goals and what to expect and not from such service has to be well thought after & defined.
As for launching a Discord server ( or any other platform ) 100% user based and creating it ourselves, it doesn’t sound right to me, it will fall down to just be another “unofficial” community exchange area. It will work for some time, as long as things are going on nicely, but after a while with an increasing number of users and potential arguments about settings rules and what could/should be done or not on the platform, it could be hard to maintain and make all members agree without being able to rely on the official company staff & rules. Let’s say that someone’s doing the admin & moderation for this and decide to ban a member because he’s not playing nicely or really adding positive interest to the group, then there’s a chance that this banned member will carry on shouting bad and moaning about Sonic Academy on the Internet for a while. You can set what ever good conduct & practice rules you want, it’s only based on people good will & behavior in the end, and if you’re not the official authority it could be hard to keep it a nice place. Hopefully, as a moderator here, I can tell that I have a very happy experience with S.A community members so far, there’s a very high level of respect, nice spirit & behavior in the community IMHO, but from time to time, you’ll always have to deal with a few people that won’t have the same good spirit unfortunately.
Just sharing my very own thoughts on this here, would be nice to read what you guys at @Sonic_Academy think about this as well 