@blinky465 sorry possibly didnt explain that well enough, I didnt mean that in the context of the people using it but in terms of the effort and support they get from the OTT team in terms of development. Being one is a “service” that you get as is and the forum is something that the OTT gang have to update and maintain themselves in terms of adding functionality and improving performce. In that regard I meant its not taking anything away from a technology and team effort side (outside of their conribution to discussions).

Having been out most of the day in that “outdoors” place, being able to pick back up on a tread on the forum is quite refreshing, and I its really good to have these more indepth discussions on here whatever the topic. Having attempted to connect to the forum while out and about the performance made it nigh on impossiable so i totally get @arloid you point about it being slow offputting.

Discord certainly isnt for everyone, I think one of the challenges is there isnt a converstation thread as such, just a continually evolving discussion, cog-sanctuary is a very good/bad case of that it eb’s and flows and changes topic on a dime, its more akin to live chat on twitch or youtube. That can be great if you say post a link to a product and ask is it a good deal, you get an instant yes/no but its poor for having a coherent conversation. I’d also say that discord isnt the best tool in the “chat” category you cant start a thread on a message somebody has posted for example, and the way its setup means theres only limited scope for the the “chat rooms” we have.

Some food for thought but i wonder if OTT on a whole is struggling with a bit of a dilution of its userbase, I’m sure there were more invidual people involved in discord last year too. So that may be related to lockdowns? Theres also been an explosion in the hobby so maybe people are also looking elsewhere? I know i’ve found and started contributing to a few more groups related to this hobby external to OTT?

I’d agree with @laughingboy that for a new forum going the PaaS or SaaS (preferable) route would be the better way to go, that comes with costs that may or may not be justifiable to the larger wayland bank roll. And by the same thing im also agreeing with @sundancer that a new more modern forum solution would solve a bunch of challenges and maybe removing that barrier of slow performance etc. would help grow the forum userbase alonside keeping the quality content.

Hopefully this “red paint” (some sort or 40k ork in joke?) will give OTT some of the performance boost it needs and deserves, but for an entire platfom based on wordpress i think theres going to be serious limitation as to how far things can improve. A seperate forum move any performce issues one might have on the other and allows them to scale independentely. It also doesnt mean OTT has to become less integrated, any modern forum worth its salt will have good API’s that allow forum content to be pulled into OTT in much the same way it is now.