***The Future of CZ*** READ ME!

[Vol]

Did I scare you?

No, nothing bad has happened. Rather, Mazder has finishing making a CZ server on Discord. We've talked about it briefly years ago, but with the SQL database silliness, he went ahead and built it and made me an admin.

It was natural we'd shed members over time, Bioware hasn't been inspiring fanaticism anymore, Tali (still and always the best waifu) is half a lifetime away for some of us, and people otherwise just moved on. But with even Alien inactive since November, and about half of who was still around leaving in the last year, the $300+ a year to keep the site online is becoming very difficult for me, especially with the bad economy. Plus the software is years out of date, as I couldn't figure out how to update it correctly, and there's long-standing bugs and issues I do not know how to fix. It works insofar as I don't touch anything, heh.

That said, my promise to keep the lights on until I'm the last one left, to lock the doors, is still true. But with the free option of Discord, we need to make a decision. At the very least, the new Discord server would be a backup in case GoDaddy really screws something up bad. Or, we can migrate there for the indefinite future. I in turn would then put the forum in maintenance mode, inaccessible but still online, and downgrade the hosting package to the cheapest possible option (1/5 the current cost), and put up a splash page telling visitors where we are and how to get there.

So in short...
1) Nothing is changing right away, the site is paid for until August.
2) I want all of your opinions, and it's perfectly fine if you prefer the site over Discord or Discord over the site.
3) The site will remain online no matter what, either in a hidden archived form or as it is right now.
4) If we migrate, and ever need to migrate back here, it would be relatively simple to "flip the switches back on."

So let me know what you guys think, if anything, about what we should do. I'll be around, no matter what.

And that includes you lurkers and people not signed in!

[NCLanceman]

I, for one, think it's a welcome change. I'm a lot more likely to check Discord for updates than I am to check these forums, as unfortunate as it is. This is ultimately a continuation of the Bioware forums, and Bioware hasn't been worthy of forums in a good, long time. What's keeping us together is our shared history and common interests, and it might be easier to maintain over Discord. If nothing else, it'd be easier to get together to play video games or watch streams or something.

And hell, 99% of activity in this forum is a single thread. If that's not a general chat section, I don't know what is.

I'll be sad to see the lights in this place go out, but I can keep the fond memories of this place and it's many predecessors with me.

[magnuskn]

I for one dislike Discord, since there is a great feeling on inpermanence to the site. I would vastly prefer to stay on a forum and am much less likely to participate on a Discord server.

Also, that only one thread is active is just not true. I count ten threads which were active just this month.

[TTTX]

I feel like if this group is going to have a chance to keep being alive, moving to discord might be the best shot.

who knows maybe some old members might come back.

[Mazder]

I feel I need to clarify my intentions for creating the discord in the first place.
It was in it's initial creation, intended as a back-up, a place we could all go in the cases of site outages that were happening more frequently. It was never initially intended as a replacement for the site, merely a supplement.

Now, given this me and Vol had a chat and we decided that the backup could always become the true place if/when the site ever went down, so it should be built with that in mind, so it changed.

I "own2 it technically, but Vol is, and always will be, in charge. I come in only if there is something Vol doesn't know how to do, or if in the off chance he doesn't want to get his hands dirty or feels conflicted. But only after it's put to a vote among modding team.
As of right now we're still deciding who shall be mods but take it into account that the old guard is pretty much a given, seeing as track record is good enough for our size at present.


Now, as for why discord over the site being reformed is, quite simply, Discord is easier to grow/maintain. What Vol would have to take a day and a half to do I could, in theory do in a few minutes once the change has been decided.
It's also easier to recustomise once we find out niche/if we ever get more outgoing interests, or to add and remove things, and people if needs be.
As far as permanence goes, that's kind of null and void considering how many people seem to use it. It seems far more permanent than we shall be, if Vol's estimations are correct.

As far as there being "one thread", it's not literally correct, but it depends on what you see as "active". A few posts a week, might be active for some, but for others, it might seem dead.
Now we can all agree that the most popular/used one is the chat thread and, honestly, it seems to be all we need right now, so the rest of the site is kind of null and void in that sense, it's only our organisation that stops us collapsing it into one chaotic and fast moving thread, lol.

I get it, people don't like change. But I do believe that having the discord as a back up, in the very least, is a good idea and a necessary one if the site is going to have more hiccups.
I would be in favour of moving it all to a discord as it's just plain easier and more rapidly able to respond, which means a greater level of interaction. Hell me and Vol chatted directly more in the past 2 days than we did in the past 2 months alone, lol.

[Dragaros]

If the upkeep for this site is untenable in terms of costs and whatnot, then its not fair to you to keep maintaining it, especially with us losing members/decreased traffic over the years, so if you guys think Discord is the better option, then that's ok with me. I'll miss this place, but I get we have to be realistic.

And who knows, if the new upcoming Mass Effect actually proves itself to be an amazing return to form we could always migrate back here if we yearn for the old format and get a flood of people returning to breathe some life back in this place.

Huh, I've never actually used Discord now that I think about it, so this will be a new learning experience for me.

So August would be a good tentative date for making the jump?

[Vol]

Thanks for the feedback so far, guys!

My personal opinion is similar to magnus, I do enjoy the old fashioned forum more. Though funnily enough, CZ was formed from the very fast moving Tali threads in the open BSN forums. But at the very least, having a known backup, like Mazder said, is a good idea, given the host has been screwy more times in the last few months than the last few years combined.

All that said, the point of even making this site as BSN closed down was to be the "last stop," and I figured people would fade away over time, as life went on. Surprised me that Hackett disappeared so soon, hope he's doing well, wherever he ended up. But seeing familiar faces show up briefly, like good ole' Troodon, and Thunder, was lovely. It would've been nice to be active, to grow again, but I never expected it, given the limited scope of the group, and the changing times. It was heartening, early on, when we were doing monthly writing prompts, and had a little bit of the old spark, and I take it hard that I lacked the spirit to keep that up.

So my goal then, and now, is to make sure there's _is_ a CZ, until I'm the last one left, to turn off the lights and close the door. Meaning, so long as I have money to my name, I'll pay the hosting costs, as I promised. That we've lost about half the regular members we had in the last 2 years is what makes it harder, but does not mean I'll break my promise. As much as I miss Raga, Alien, Dark, Tranz, the PnP group, Theo, Mob, Alphyn, and so on, I don't expect them to become active again here, there, or anywhere. Ultimately, what I want is you guys to be around as long as you care to be around, a little digital slice of comfort from better times.

All that said, there are issues with the format. Password reset/recovery has been busted for a long time, and I have no idea how to fix it. The admin email stopped working, randomly. Get a hundreds of Russian bot applications that I have to manually delete every few weeks, always worry if someone legit is in those long lists of fake accounts, etc.

Ultimately, what I want is CZ to exist as long as possible, even as we start (or continue) to go grey. Which is contingent on what you guys want to do far more than what I want! Heh. I'll keep the site online as long as I can, we'll have the Discord as a lovely backup, that much is certain.

[TTTX]

from what I understand Hackett had a stroke and hasn't been online since.

I still have him as a friend on steam and he hasn't been on for like 5 years.

[Someone With Mass]

I'll fully admit that this site serves mostly as a nostalgia cookie to me and that I haven't been that active lately (work, new pets and other things got in the way at times), but if maintaining it becomes troublesome, I wouldn't mind swapping to something else.

I've know a lot of you for more than a decade now and changing the way we interact won't change who we are, even as our numbers dwindle because people move on. It's a part of life to grow into new things and I'd be nothing but naive if I'd think that something will last forever, no matter how much I try to cling onto the nostalgia of it.

I also haven't interacted with people in a more personal manner (like playing games and such) nearly as much as I wanted to in hindsight, but my social phobia is not an excuse to make someone stay if they don't want to.

Bleh, my thoughts were all over the place on that one. Point is: do what you want.

[Deano]

This is a tough one, times are difficult everywhere and expecting you to pay that amount of money for an outdated site seems unfair. Personally I would be fine migrating (heh) to discord, but I can see why some people don't want to, so it would likely reduce the numbers again to the point where you ask, "is this even worth it at all?".

So difficult choice but I favour discord.

[Vol]

Strictly speaking, there is no deadline, but August is when payments for the SSL/hosting have to be made. Finances-wise, if this year is better than the last 3, won't even be an issue for me, and if it's a bad year, I'll see what I can do to trim the fat. But the site remains up regardless, either as it is now, or in a referral/archive mode.

If you guys are interesting in new users, new life, do you have any ideas for how that might be done? I've thought of doing something like putting up long-form reviews on a main page, that any of you could submit, or trying to run an RPG game like Buddha used to (with Lance's help), or otherwise "rebrand" from some old Talimancers chewing the wheat, but I don't have any great ideas otherwise. The only time I've been asked to authorize new users was a few years ago, and some might remember how poorly that went, heh.

@TX: Where did you hear that? I remember SU37 asking about him from time to time, but we both never knew what happened. Poor man, if so. Damn.

@SWM: That's pretty close to my view. I like seeing what's new, thanks to Drag, any conversations that are going on, then add a little comment myself. I'd like to last as long as it can, and looking at the member list by "last active," we're down to us in here, and Sci. Which is fine, I'm grateful any of you are still around, all these years later. Definitely doesn't help that Bioware's not given us anything to work with in a while, heh. The ME4 teasers have been the most nostalgic activity we've had in a while! The vastly different time zones hasn't helped with organizing community stuff, to be fair.

@Deano: Yeah, there's a little bit of trying to guess the future. If ME4 news starts dropping, it looks good, would people come back to talk about it, get hyped? I don't know. We're all much older now, and I imagine a lot of old friends are off getting married, having kids, or otherwise not the 20-somethings they used to be.

@magnus: So it's a deal-breaker if there's migration to Discord? I've appreciated chatting more with you in the last year than all the previous combined, and as roughly 20% of the active users, I'd hate to lose you over this, especially since I agree about the preference for forums.

[magnuskn]

@magnus: So it's a deal-breaker if there's migration to Discord? I've appreciated chatting more with you in the last year than all the previous combined, and as roughly 20% of the active users, I'd hate to lose you over this, especially since I agree about the preference for forums.

If push comes to shove, I'll of course migrate over to Discord as well, but I think the interface is terrible and ugly. I just prefer a forum with all the options about editing (especially since I tend to insert ortographical errors into my posts all the time and then correct them afterwards) and the look of a forum just being visually much better.

Then again, the Discord chats I've been participating in were all for World of Warcraft, with really big communities where you are just one little speck of dust against the walls of text published each day.

[TTTX]

@TX: Where did you hear that? I remember SU37 asking about him from time to time, but we both never knew what happened. Poor man, if so. Damn.

If I remember correctly one of our other members who isn't on anymore told us that Hackett had a stroke and had since lost contact. I think there is a post somewhere the group where it is mention.

could be wrong though it was a long time ago.

If you guys are interesting in new users, new life, do you have any ideas for how that might be done? I've thought of doing something like putting up long-form reviews on a main page, that any of you could submit, or trying to run an RPG game like Buddha used to (with Lance's help), or otherwise "rebrand" from some old Talimancers chewing the wheat, but I don't have any great ideas otherwise. The only time I've been asked to authorize new users was a few years ago, and some might remember how poorly that went, heh.

I have no clue.
well to be fair the people you did let in were let's say were really racist.

[TTTX]

If push comes to shove, I'll of course migrate over to Discord as well, but I think the interface is terrible and ugly. I just prefer a forum with all the options about editing (especially since I tend to insert ortographical errors into my posts all the time and then correct them afterwards) and the look of a forum just being visually much better.

Then again, the Discord chats I've been participating in were all for World of Warcraft, with really big communities where you are just one little speck of dust against the walls of text published each day.

obviously not going to happen with us since well we are so few now.

[SciFlyBoy]

I guess this is my chance to really get to learn how to work Discord. I'm all for whatever keeps us in touch.

[Mazder]

If needs be I can make some tutorials or something and embed them into the server so that it's among the first things you see

[Vol]

If push comes to shove, I'll of course migrate over to Discord as well, but I think the interface is terrible and ugly. I just prefer a forum with all the options about editing (especially since I tend to insert ortographical errors into my posts all the time and then correct them afterwards) and the look of a forum just being visually much better.

Then again, the Discord chats I've been participating in were all for World of Warcraft, with really big communities where you are just one little speck of dust against the walls of text published each day.

I understand, and largely agree. Though there is an edit feature of Discord, and we're not a fast-paced community these days (though I hope ME4 changes that, as ME:A briefly did). The few servers I'm in, I rarely say anything, but they're slow-paced enough to think out my messages. Though the limited text box is annoying, another point for forums.

@TX: Ah. That sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't be sure. I assumed it must've been something terrible, and that makes as much sense as anything else.

And yeah, that incident blindsided me, wasn't quite what I expected.

@Sci: Good to know. It's a glorified IRC with centralized servers and a newer interface that integrates into all the Web 3.0 stuff.

@Maz: That'd be helpful, I think! There's a brief learning curve with these services because they don't label buttons or give you command lists, heh.

---

Alright, so I'm very happy no one as of yet has been dead set on the site or nothing. Obviously, I'll take into consideration if anyone does show up who does. As I've said, there's no rush, Mazder has the Discord all setup, and we're paid for here until August, so I'm not in any rush until late spring to move things along. Need to figure out how to do some tech stuff on my end, to preserve the forum and put up the redirect page, since the mass emailer broke many years ago, need to manually let everyone know the situation who's been registered here, etc.

Please speak your mind if you have anything to say, we could jump right away if you'd all prefer not waiting several months. As the original intent was to provide a backup, with the hosting provider being spotty the last year, doing invites sooner rather than later is wise.

[SciFlyBoy]

Sure. Discord is...I'm just dumb with it.

[TTTX]

Sure. Discord is...I'm just dumb with it.

I haven't used discord outside of a bit of lurking, so I am not much smarter on that front either.

@TX: Ah. That sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't be sure. I assumed it must've been something terrible, and that makes as much sense as anything else.

And yeah, that incident blindsided me, wasn't quite what I expected.

---

Alright, so I'm very happy no one as of yet has been dead set on the site or nothing. Obviously, I'll take into consideration if anyone does show up who does. As I've said, there's no rush, Mazder has the Discord all setup, and we're paid for here until August, so I'm not in any rush until late spring to move things along. Need to figure out how to do some tech stuff on my end, to preserve the forum and put up the redirect page, since the mass emailer broke many years ago, need to manually let everyone know the situation who's been registered here, etc.

Please speak your mind if you have anything to say, we could jump right away if you'd all prefer not waiting several months. As the original intent was to provide a backup, with the hosting provider being spotty the last year, doing invites sooner rather than later is wise.

as something who has had family members suffering and died from blot clots, I can say strokes are no joke. they can really mess you up.

well there were 2 incidents since both were racist and didn't keep there views to themselves, I don't care people are racist in their RL, but they should keep those views to themselves when hanging out here even in the political thread, we don't need that here.

-----

I don't see the need to rush personally, I am autistic I like to take my time.

[Spartanburger]

I'm largely in favor of moving to Discord, if for no other reason than simplicity & consolidation. Discord is my primary social media - I'm almost always online in some form, it's how I connect with all my friends, it's where I go to interact with others. This site on the other hand is a place I go only ever to connect with this community. So being on Discord basically consolidates the number of places I need to "go" to interact with friends / colleagues / acquaintances. If I want to post here, I have to type in the URL (I don't have this place bookmarked lmao), remember my login, and then actually have something to post about. With discord, I just click the server icon, and then click the channel I want to read / post in.

Some other benefits that Discord may have over a site like this are much easier management & cost (already stated), but also things like voice chat, events, media embedding, notification management, things like that (you can do a lot of that here, it's just far easier on Discord imo). Each channel operates basically like a thread does here. Plus you can do account management, like setting up titles for people or granting titles to people that come with higher level privileges (like setting certain channels to only be visible to people who have been granted a specific title). It genuinely is fantastic.

However, I share the fears about impermanence. All it takes is one bad actor with admin privileges, or a compromised account on discord to demolish a server - it's never happened to any of the servers I'm in over the ... fuck me, 7 years??? since I've started using Discord? but it's definitely a risk. There's no guarantee that discord will last as a service, and AFAIK, there's no API to plug into to back things up. Finding old posted content can be difficult, though not impossible once you know how to use the search tools.

At the very least though, I do think it would be an improvement, plus I might actually start being more active. No such thing as perfection, there are always tradeoffs.

[Vol]

Discord isn't hard to learn, it's Web 3.0 GUI design, meaning, extremely simplistic interface, unlabeled buttons, and integrated into every other popular service. If you guys could figure out BSN and here, I have no doubts you can figure that out too.

@TX: I'm not autistic, as far as I know, but I dislike change and rushing things just as much, so no worries.

@Spartan: Thanks for the input! I assumed that was the case, for better or worse, people like being where everyone else is, and consolidation helps traffic. Given our low level of traffic, I don't *expect* to need more admins than myself, and as far as I'm aware the largest complaint against me was being _too_ reluctant to use my powers when I should've. But I've seen enough internet communities be utterly imploded by giving power to the wrong people that I'm not intending to start handing it out unless we revitalize, we come to a communal decision, or Mazder insists.

The impermanence is what bothers me the most, I don't actually know how far back Discord convos are stored. In a perfect world, there'd be a way to mirror anything posted there, or here, to the corresponding thread/channel on the other service, but I am not remotely smart enough to write that, nor does that software appear to exist. That said, if I do this right, if Discord should happen to disappear one day, I should be able to resume the site as we left it in about 5 minutes of work. I may use the opportunity to try and figure out how to update the damn software too.

[Mazder]

The impermanence is what bothers me the most, I don't actually know how far back Discord convos are stored. In a perfect world, there'd be a way to mirror anything posted there, or here, to the corresponding thread/channel on the other service, but I am not remotely smart enough to write that, nor does that software appear to exist. That said, if I do this right, if Discord should happen to disappear one day, I should be able to resume the site as we left it in about 5 minutes of work. I may use the opportunity to try and figure out how to update the damn software too.

If it helps I recently looked into that and I have my messages I have with my mate I have been talking to on it the longest dating all the way back to when I first used Discord in 2017.
So...yeah it holds on to it pretty well so long as the server isn't deleted.

However if things are embedded it relies on the source of the embed to keep some things alive, as some links are broken.
So if there is something SUPER good we want to keep we should, in theory, hold it of-server. Like if it's really fucking good fan art or something.
But that's only IF the thing it's hosted on goes. So if it's shit like Twitter, Reddit links, imgur, etc, it's all dependant on the host anyways, same as it is now.

[Vol]

Huh. I only have 1 conversation I've ever needed to scroll back on, and it's all there as of the last I checked. Probably have some complicated dealie where chat older than a certain threshold/number of messages gets saved to storage drives somewhere for use as requested. At their scale of users, a single Nitro sub probably pays for hundreds of GB of storage, heh.

[Spartanburger]

It's the same for me: I can go back and fine the earliest messages and shared content from back when I first started without issue and without having to wait for things to load. The only things that don't exist any more are from messages that I or a mod deleted.

I cannot into code or webstuff but for archiving stuff, but there could be some tools here to look into?

Also, if you're having trouble finding something in a server, the search tools are fairly easy to use and can be quite powerful, especially in really large servers or when messages go back long times.

Native media embedding and file sharing is also nice to have, though the size you can share is limited if you aren't a Nitro loser like me. tickets to the 50mb spongebob squarepants movie anyone?

[Vol]

Yeah, I suspect storage is so cheap, and Discord's storage needs even with a massive userbase is relatively minimal, keeping full archives of *everything* is worth it for many reasons.

Glancing at the first, says scraping is a TOS violation, heh. But I'll give it a proper read!

I subscribed to Nitro solely to exchange long PM messages with a specific person, then forgot to cancel it, so I let it ride, heh. Given our normal situation already is external linking, I'm not terribly concerned with data loss, though I still prefer archiving on principle. But if anything important should pop up, I can always store it with the this site, or on this site, depending on how I work that out.

[SciFlyBoy]

Is there a link set up to the discord, or do we search for it by name?

[Mazder]

Is there a link set up to the discord, or do we search for it by name?

No link yet.

Going to wait for splash page to be done first and then see how we go with the switch over.

[SciFlyBoy]

Ohhhhhhhh. Okay.

I changed my Discord name to Sciflyboy#7872. I'm open to have someone give me a run down of how to discord if they want to add me.

[Riptide]

Hey everyone, been a long time. Nice to see some familiar faces (and some not so familiar avatars!)

Saw this posted here, so wanted to chime in. Me and the rest of the Night Crew from the old BSN days have been using Discord for years now. It's where we run our RPGs (the ones we got started running with Nuke). The interface isn't that bad, I actually think it would open up new possibilities. Voice communication, for instance. Me and the rest of the Night Crew were ultra shy about that kind of thing, but now we regularly sync watch movies together and stuff, actively discuss things together on a nightly basis. Was a big game changer for us. Impermanence is a thing if Discord ever crumbles, sure, but this group has jumped sites like, five or six times over the last fifteen years. Wouldn't be the migrant fleet if it wasn't.

As ME4 becomes a thing, Discord will probably be a better way to stay active in the Mass Effect community, too. There are doubtless plenty of Discord groups with plenty of traffic between them, no reason people here couldn't spend time there while having a safe haven for all your other interests, too.

Vol, if/when you get a Discord set up, let me know? I'm on there every day, it would legitimately make it easier for me to keep up to date and drop by once and a while.

I'd also like to backup some of the RPGs me and my guys did on here, if possible, if this site losing its domain becomes a thing that's going to be happening soonish.

[SciFlyBoy]

Good to hear from you, Rip. Still love your killer avatar.

[Riptide]

Thanks. I like yours, too.

[Someone With Mass]

Huh. I thought everyone scattered to the wind after the last migration. Good to hear that there's more than one group of us running around. Haven't heard from some of the old members in years to the point where I'm not sure if they're still alive.

Speaking of which, hi Rip!

[Vol]

Hey, Rip! Glad to see you around, even if I was away at the time!

Yeah, I'm hoping the more popular, casual nature of Discord keeps things at least a little lively, and easier on the people who only stop by once in a while. That and it's free. We'll move before August, when all the hosting costs hit, so you have a good bit of time to backup what you want, and I'm going to keep both a local backup of the entire site and intend to keep it all online, though inaccessible, in case Discord explodes or whatever. I'll take the opportunity to try and fix the broken updates too, without freaking out if everything breaks a few times

Mhm, I'll invite you soon as we're ready, be glad to have you around again. Even if I can't finagle keeping the board itself online, though again all backed up, I'm definitely keeping the domain name registered. No worries about that, mainly a financial decision.

[Vol]

Alright, lads, we're in summer. Canceled the auto-renew for the SSL cert, which expires at the end of August now. Downgraded the hosting plan (accidently) to bare minimum. Hope everything doesn't immediately break, since it only allows 1 SQL database and I don't know if there's more than 1 necessary to function here. Assuming so, that's $60 a year to keep the site online, $20 for the domain name, and I can afford $80 a year easily for the sake of owning CZ.com just in case. Went digging into the board settings, and I can just disable board access for everyone but myself, with a short message up to let people know what's happening. So in effect, everything would still be online, but inaccessible, with a notice to go to the Discord. Then if Discord should go down, it's 1 button to turn this site back on, if there's anyone left at that point.

I'm thinking by the end of July, the 31st, we make the move to Discord, unless you guys would prefer waiting until August, when the SSL expires and everything else comes up for renewal.

Plan is to generate a permanent invite link to the server then. You'll all get it, of course, and I'll email out everyone registered here the link, and then when I disable the site, I'll put the link in the message.

TLDR: By July 31st, everyone will be in Discord. I will then disable the site, but it will remain online, with a link to the Discord invite.

[Deano]

TLDR: By July 31st, everyone will be in Discord. I will then disable the site, but it will remain online, with a link to the Discord invite.

Sounds good and thanks for keeping the website up all this time.

Will feel weird not having my CZ tab up the whole time.

[Dragaros]

Alright, lads, we're in summer. Canceled the auto-renew for the SSL cert, which expires at the end of August now. Downgraded the hosting plan (accidently) to bare minimum. Hope everything doesn't immediately break, since it only allows 1 SQL database and I don't know if there's more than 1 necessary to function here. Assuming so, that's $60 a year to keep the site online, $20 for the domain name, and I can afford $80 a year easily for the sake of owning CZ.com just in case. Went digging into the board settings, and I can just disable board access for everyone but myself, with a short message up to let people know what's happening. So in effect, everything would still be online, but inaccessible, with a notice to go to the Discord. Then if Discord should go down, it's 1 button to turn this site back on, if there's anyone left at that point.

I'm thinking by the end of July, the 31st, we make the move to Discord, unless you guys would prefer waiting until August, when the SSL expires and everything else comes up for renewal.

Plan is to generate a permanent invite link to the server then. You'll all get it, of course, and I'll email out everyone registered here the link, and then when I disable the site, I'll put the link in the message.

TLDR: By July 31st, everyone will be in Discord. I will then disable the site, but it will remain online, with a link to the Discord invite.

Gotcha.
The 31st works for me.

[SciFlyBoy]

End of July works for me, too. And just like Deano, it'll be weird not having CZ in the most left corner of my tabs anymore.

[Vol]

Heh, had CZ, in one form or another, as my leftmost tab for over a decade now. Might still keep it that way.

[magnuskn]

The apparent habit of just leaving a browser tab open all the time is just weird to me. I close my browser when I'm done with them and open them again when I need them. ^^

[Mazder]

Heh, had CZ, in one form or another, as my leftmost tab for over a decade now. Might still keep it that way.

Yooooooo, same.

Back in the day when they still existed it was always;
Tali Group, BSN, Then all else.

[SciFlyBoy]

The apparent habit of just leaving a browser tab open all the time is just weird to me. I close my browser when I'm done with them and open them again when I need them. ^^

My boss keeps 70 tabs open at all times. It's maddening and I've started doing it too.

[magnuskn]

The apparent habit of just leaving a browser tab open all the time is just weird to me. I close my browser when I'm done with them and open them again when I need them. ^^

My boss keeps 70 tabs open at all times. It's maddening and I've started doing it too.

I just don't get that. ^^ I'd get confused immediately when there are more than ten tabs open at the same time and always close whatever tab I'm using right after I'm done there.

[Mazder]

Just so everyone knows, there will be tutorials on the discord for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing.
I have hopefully laid them out so they're easy enough to follow, but might seem a little (or a lot) pedantic, especially if you've used Discord before and know what you're doing.

Also as a side note, if you could try to edit your nickname on the server to match your current username on the site, that'd be amazing to give everyone who's allowed it the "Ancestors" role, where we can hopefully let you see everything if you're having trouble finding your way.
It also helps us know if you've invited friends and if we need to roll out the welcome wagon.

[Dragaros]

Just so everyone knows, there will be tutorials on the discord for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing.
I have hopefully laid them out so they're easy enough to follow, but might seem a little (or a lot) pedantic, especially if you've used Discord before and know what you're doing.

Also as a side note, if you could try to edit your nickname on the server to match your current username on the site, that'd be amazing to give everyone who's allowed it the "Ancestors" role, where we can hopefully let you see everything if you're having trouble finding your way.
It also helps us know if you've invited friends and if we need to roll out the welcome wagon.

Ok, set up my profile, joined the Clan Z Discord successfully. Interesting new layout, Discord has. Its strange, but I’ll adapt, as I always do. I’ll tinker with the settings and whatnot later.

Now, at the risk of making an embarrassing dumbass out of myself, how do I send a request to get approval to become an “Ancestor” for full access to all areas of the server? I feel like a fool because I just know I'm overlooking something childishly obvious.

I tied looking through the tutorials but 2 out of 3 of them don't show anything on my screen for some reason.

[Spartanburger]

Now, at the risk of making an embarrassing dumbass out of myself, how do I send a request to get approval to become an “Ancestor” for full access to all areas of the server? I feel like a fool because I just know I'm overlooking something childishly obvious.

All of the roles in the #fleet-roles channel are server specific. Not every server will have roles like that and in this case, the Ancestor role is one you have to request (the ones with the buttons underneith can be obtained simply by clicking the button). To request the role, send one of the "Admirals" a direct message requesting the role. If you don't know someone's role, the user list on the left categorizes all users by role. Users who have multiple roles will have the one granting the highest authority as the one they show as. Mazder for example is also a "Grand Admiral" role as basically the server admin, so they show up as that role primarily. But, you can right click any user to see their roles. Basically, find anyone with the "Admiral" role and select hit "Message" to open a DM chat box and request the role.

[Mazder]

As Spartanburger has very helpfully stated whilst I was away sleeping, yes Ancestor is given title by Admirals.

If you'd like to know the background reason I've not told anyone, it's part of a 2 stage verification process.
Well technically 3.
1st stage is it shows you've set up, and read things enough to know to ask.
2nd stage is to make sure all members from the site are ported over and verified in case they use a different nickname in discord.
3rd stage is to make sure if my tutorials worked. So partial success on that one, as I originally wrote it as if someone that is not one of us found the server. Just so I can know if we were growing or not.