How to organize play?

I'm trying to find the ideal way for our player group to stay connected and organize play. We have a lot of different channels, but it seems that no channel encompasses the entire player group (meaning , there is always someone not active on the given channel). For exemple, I'm not really active here on the forum and Jonathan has neither FB or WhatsApp for us to connect. So the question is: what channel(s) should we keep alive, promote or preference?

EDIT: it seems you can only choose 1 option in the poll. On FB, you can choose multiple options to let your voice be heard.

Hi Tom !

Good initiative, and I was wondering the same.

Here are my two cents.

I'd say : the more the better.
Is there an issue promoting on several, if not all the possible, channels ?

If we had to choose, here's what I think :
- WhatsApp : great and mandatorily linked to a phone, which makes it easier to reach anyone from anywhere. My issue about WhatsApp is I usually use it for family only, but it is my way of using it. I don't have gaming groups there aside from our playgroup.

- Website/forum : of course, it has my preference, as I am the webmaster here. But to be more neutral, I'd say historically, we have always organized our games from here. Why would we change ? I know the forum is rather old and doesn't have all the options we want (like for multiple choice polls ...), but I offered multiple times to upgrade to XenForo which is the best forum around. Although, most members of our playgroup found it not necessary. Even in the latest discussions with Michel, he thought it wasn't needed and we should keep Joomla/Kunena (which is very limited compared to XenForo).
Last opinion about vtes.be, it's also a website actually. We never built it back online, but it could hold much more information than just a forum. Michel and me are currently working on this, but both of us having private priorities at the moment, it is reported for later. ^^

- Discord : I have recently created a Discord channel, with multiple sub-channels, for us. It seems not very busy though. But Discord is exactly what we need and is organized for gamers : voice chat (online games), easy app on smartphones, web discord for business computers (lol), and lots of dev tools to combine with forums, ...

- Facebook. Yeah, personnally, I have deleted my FB account and won't go there anymore. I know other players from our playgroup who don't have Facebook.
Of course, you can reach more people there ... I'd say 'external' players ... but I wouldn't rely on Facebook to organize anything. My humble opinion, not yours obviously.

What is kind of a pity, is to hear the Belgian National Coordinator is not even visiting the website dedicated to VTES in Belgium.
The majority of belgian players check this regularly.
If you check the history, this forum/website was up even before you started playing VTES.
So if your hidden agenda is just to close this website to focus on Facebook, just say so ... thank you.
I'm offering this, hosted on my server, for free, for the community.
Michel and me are investing time to bring back the website part of vtes.be and improving forum features.
But yeah ... I just don't understand.

As I said above : the more the better.
So I'd personally vote for :
- Website/Forum VTES.BE
- Discord
- the rest as a relay for information.

Personally, I chose this forum as a preference.
It is accessible through internet on pc and smartphone as well without installing anything (installing could be a problem on professional pc's).
Discord could be a good channel. But I am not used to it and do not have the habit to check there.
Maybe we do have to take new habits.
WhatsApp could be good. The only weak point in my opinion is that it is a part of the facebook spider web...
And that facebook will save all the content of the messages we exchange and use it.

I am not again Xenforo (that I do not know much) but is it worth to go to it if we want to make a real website again ?
With the risk of loss during the migration.
Maybe we could also search for a better forum using Joomla.

I went away from facebook and do not want to go back there.

An interesting idea (but maybe difficult to implement) should to send a message from one platform to another.
For instance when creating an event here, sending a message on the FB group.

pcmichke wrote: I am not again Xenforo (that I do not know much) but is it worth to go to it if we want to make a real website again ?
With the risk of loss during the migration.
Maybe we could also search for a better forum using Joomla.

Hi Michke !

To answer your question, I can confirm what we agreed last time we met
It is indeed better not to migrate to XenForo, taking into account the current state of things.
First, vtes.be could be more focused on the website aspect, I totally agree.
We could keep the forum, as it is now, for organizing weekly games ...
And for official announcements of tournaments and for reaching a maximum of people, it's true Facebook is the best solution (even though some irreductibles, like Michke and me, don't have Facebook lol).

Great idea about sending messages cross-platforms ! I guess it should be possible, but it depends of what media will be chosen by the community.

Last point, I agree Discord is more 'computer gaming' oriented. I just imagined it would come handy for the online VTES games, but as I don't play them, I actually have no real view over this.

So indeed, it's a complex subject and there is matter to discussion. So thx Tom for bringing this up

-L-

Hi, let me offer some feedback.

Regnak wrote: I'd say : the more the better.
Is there an issue promoting on several, if not all the possible, channels ?

Well yes, the main issue I have is having to spread the same message multiple times to reach everyone. For example, our national tournament has a thread on vekn.net, on this forum and an event on Facebook and I will try to give it some attention in the other channels mentioned. So this means I have to collect participants from all those channels to get an idea of the number of players and make sure I don't count them twice when they answer on multiple channels. What I'm trying to get at is that I get the feeling that our multi-channel approach makes it much more time-consuming for me. It really was an issue for our Sabbat release tournament, where people could order decks and I had to try to stay on top of who had ordered what exactly.

Regnak wrote: What is kind of a pity, is to hear the Belgian National Coordinator is not even visiting the website dedicated to VTES in Belgium.
The majority of belgian players check this regularly.
If you check the history, this forum/website was up even before you started playing VTES.
So if your hidden agenda is just to close this website to focus on Facebook, just say so ... thank you.
I'm offering this, hosted on my server, for free, for the community.
Michel and me are investing time to bring back the website part of vtes.be and improving forum features.
But yeah ... I just don't understand.

I am visiting this website/forum (if not I wouldn't be posting). I just have to admit I'm not using it for weekly play anymore, as I have noticed the people from Ghent & Bruges (who are closest to me) have stopped using it in favor of other channels. So this means I come here once or twice a month mainly for the tournament info (and a bit more if we're getting closer to a tournament we're organizing ourselves). There was a time we made Praxis seizure topics here for every Friday evening. I think we have to admit this isn't the case anymore.

So is this to close the forum? Well, maybe. I honestly don't know. This is a discussion. I'm just trying to figure out in our multitude of channels, if I can make things easier and more efficient by losing 1 or 2 (out of the 6+) channels and still be able to reach everyone.

Regnak wrote: Last point, I agree Discord is more 'computer gaming' oriented. I just imagined it would come handy for the online VTES games, but as I don't play them, I actually have no real view over this.

Actually, there is a worldwide VTES discord. I believe you can organize online play (lackey) with it.


Lastly, I'd like to share the responses to the same question I posted on FB (another great example of me having to move info from one platform to another, by the way). The poll has been running for almost a day and as you can see, it does get a lot more attention and replies than the forum. But you can also see the forum is still loved by the players and should continue to play a role in/for our community.

Tom

I think (but this is to check) that some modules in Joomla could share events with other (social) medias.
But it could only be related to an event module on websites, maybe not with Kunena (also to verify this).
So it will be to check when we put the website part alive again.
And i will not be truly available for this before mid-May.

So if it would be possible to send messages to other social media when creating an event here, it could solve the problem of multiple platforms.
And avoid to lose more time by copying or send on other platforms.
But it will take some time to do it, if it is possible.