 Hey, how's it going? It's going pretty good. Hello to all of you for joining us today. This is our last session of our flex course on building community with discord. Today, we've got a super casual conversation with me and Taylor kind of the resident ed techs at reclaim chatting about the future of discord at reclaim. Really what we want to talk about is what we have noticed the past year, which was reclaims official first year of ed tech and how discord has influenced it. Also what we've, this court has shown us about engagement and community building and then going forward how we could imagine things looking and kind of just discuss what we could imagine changing. None of this is like official announcements or anything that is set in stone. It's just kind of something to get the community thinking with us about how we want to move forward. Yeah, it's kind of relevant and cool to note that basically right after this flex course is kind of over and as we roll into May that will be a year of the reclaim ed tech discord and kind of reclaim ed tech itself. So this is not coincidentally this this this course is placed here kind of while we are thinking about you know how we build obvious. I mean we've been transparent through this entire course I think of like kind of looking at community discord through the lens of how we're building it and trying things out and this is a part of that too. So we've talked about session one of you know how we've used it in the past session two with pilot and Meredith was about like all the interesting like integrations and cool things you can do and kind of getting started and session three is really looking forward for us here. And, and what we are kind of a reflection in certain ways and things that we're interested in kind of trying out next. Yeah, and what I will say, just from my perspective, as somebody who joined reclaim in the end of June in 22. I felt like my so my first kind of exposure to the reclaim discord was when I was a staff member at SUNY Geneseo, and I took domains 201 in May. I said 101. It was 101 and 201. It was 101 and 201. That's why I got confused, because it was both. And I'm looking at the log you're like the fourth person to join besides the reclaim staff. I know I saw that stats for you all, and I was going back and I was like, whoa, I did not realize that that was the second month that discord was even a thing and I was in like that first big batch of folks who joined. Because it was so well put together, kind of right from the get go. And I didn't have any previous experience with discord prior to then. And it just felt like such a natural thing for this company and for the community that was coming in. I had no clue it was brand new at the time. And so now looking back at that. I, you know, can't believe a that that was almost a year ago now and be it feels like this has been a community that's been developing over much longer than just a year. Yeah, I mean, literally, I'm up so I'm literally I'm looking at this right now because I want it when I said it's been almost a year I had to look when was this I mean, we had we made this thing in mid April but we didn't open it to anybody until I think May 3 and I saw I'm pretty sure your day one sign up here. Because because we literally announced it and concurrently with all right domains 101 201 is going to use this. So you probably got probably two emails one that like hey this is the thing we're trying and hey this this workshop you signed up for is going to happen here. And yeah, I mean that's one thing. I don't know if we maybe spelled it out, but I think you could probably tell based on especially some of the stuff that that was touched on the first two sessions that Lawrence talked about with her like virtual, virtual event template, and then like some of the stuff in session two with the bots that can offer different things. Yeah, I actually think that goes a long way to to making something that feels, you know, like a community and not like a room you walked in and there's only one other person in like, don't want you don't want the third person joined feel like this is it. It's just me here. You know, and I think that a big part of that is kind of what you're talking about with this court and being able to set it up so it feels a little lived in already. But then the other part of that is, you know, this community is so excited and enthusiastic that you felt the energy immediately. Even as early as I signed up, it was, it was the reclaim team that was like very excited. And then every single person who joined after that was just like dancing into the server essentially is kind of the vibe that I got. Yeah, I feel the same way. I mean, and that's, for me, a big part of why I'm here at Reclaim is the community around sort of the tools Reclaim supports in the domain of one zone and it's always been a welcoming and really exciting one for me to be a part of. And so it's been really rewarding to see us try and expand that in a different direction, not a different direction in a, in a new way, I guess, a new platform, whatever you want to call it with discord and see, you know, different people involved in different ways to and see if we can maybe meet that meet some some people that we weren't hearing from as much and what, you know, what they might get out of this too. I think that's a great point. And, you know, the last thing I'll say before we kind of continue is just that, I think a big part of why we are so excited to discuss the future of of this whole. When we say future of discord. You know, it sounds to me it can sound a little bit tool oriented, but really it's it's the future of how we're cultivating this community, and we want to honor the community and what people still need, you know, like we don't have it all figured out. We don't have the perfect setup. We think we've done a lot of great stuff and the community has made this space what it is, but we also want to be very open and responsive to the way that the community is growing, and not just growing and bringing more people in but also the people who are who have been here and make sure that they still feel like this is working for them. And so kind of with that said, how about we start looking at a little bit of what's been going on the past year in discord, numbers wise, and kind of some of the cool relationships that we've been able to see happening. Based off of that as we kind of prepared for this final session. Yeah, yeah. So here's a slide deck. We don't, we don't get to a lot of slide decks. Yeah, I'm always inspired by Meredith in general in life. I'm inspired by Meredith. But also, you know, she's just had awesome slides. And so I thought, you know what, yeah, let's do some slides. So this might be a little awkward and thank you for bearing with us because again, not the slides person. Yeah, I'm more of a screen share and like, awkwardly wave my mouse like I'm hand gesturing with it. So this is new territory in terms of probably old territory. I don't know. Bear with us. We're going to get through this. Okay. Now, I had a lot of fun with this slide because this one is showing a lot of different things. I've labeled it discord membership as a graph. So what I did was I went back, as I mentioned a little earlier through discord, and looked at and tracked who all joined and did a tally and figured out when all these peaks were. So like Taylor said, the discord began in April, but wasn't actually open until May and you can see that clearly here in April. It was just Jim and Lauren who had joined and they were kind of playing around experimenting. And then in May, we got about 56 people who joined. And that was exactly around the time of Domain of One Zone 101201. I have that mislabeled here. So forgive me. But that is obviously a huge spike. It's the biggest spike that we see. And what we can draw from that is that this is kind of the core community from the beginning that has maintained a lot of the energy and a lot of the engagement throughout the next 12 months. And then you can kind of see, you know, there are some dips and a couple other peaks that I wanted to just point out here. Another kind of peak that happens after May isn't really until October of 22. And we had a lot of flux courses happening around this time at the end of summer, beginning of May. And to me it feels like a blur because we were in constant prep and motion for them. And it was really exciting and energizing. But I noticed that it was kind of right in the middle of this hacks for hybrid working flex course that was a collaboration between Lauren and from ALT. And that was kind of like, it was very different than the flex courses that we were doing up to that point. A lot of them were very tool focused, very process focused. And this one was very strategy focused. It was super community and relationship and just kind of self reflective. And it provided people the opportunity to think through what they've been doing in terms of hybrid working and talk with other people about that. And even, even though it was kind of an asynchronous course in the way that Lauren and Marin weren't, you know, chatting live with people on video, Discord allowed that live interaction that was really powerful, I think, and kind of resonated. And then you see a big dip around holidays, but then another peak hits just this past last month in March for domain of one zone 201, which again makes sense those are kind of our big workshops we're going to get people in especially if this is how we're running them is in conjunction with Discord. So I think that makes a lot of sense. And even though we're kind of focusing here on the peaks, I will really direct your attention to some of these, these valleys, because we actually found some interesting things about these valleys, especially the December 22 one where it looks like nobody joined but in fact one person did join thank you very much. And on the next slide I'll be able to kind of talk a little bit more about that. Unless Taylor you wanted to make a few comments. Yeah, I just wanted to mention that, you know, I guess except for December we only had one person is kind of interesting to see up, you know, keeping in mind this is not should be obvious by now but this is this is not a chart of membership it is gained, you know, membership people joining so it is interesting to see a pretty good baseline of it looks like, you know, I would guess five or six people pretty much every month at the least. I don't know what July is but you know maybe that's like four or something but it is kind of interesting to see that And I also mentioned to that one thing it's kind of curious for me is September of 22 was another domains 101. And we had, you know, we use discord for that too but we didn't see quite the membership as join as domains 201 in March. I don't really have answers for that I mean, though I will say our march event was our largest domains workshop in a little while, I think, even larger actually than that may one, even though the membership is huge. A lot of people joined for that but a lot of people just joined because discord was also new at that point too so I think those were two forces kind of working together. But I also, you know, the part of that might be the back to back nature as well of having in February the WordPress multi site workshop. And so I'm sure some of that kind of plays in. And these 201 workshops were new for us at every claim of the idea of like hey let's let's not just do a beginner one but let's have a split out for specifically folks who aren't new, or at least completely new. And I think there was a lot of folks asking for that type of workshop so you know that that's had something to do with the discord membership and folks attending like that as well, but it is kind of good to see healthy to me healthy. And membership, pretty much all all here. Yes, and thank you for clarifying that Taylor I'm realizing now looking at this that it does seem like we are losing people know that I have this graph set up. But now this is this is new membership people joining. And so that, yeah, glad you clarified that. And the other thing I will say about that, because I do think it's interesting the difference between the domains workshop in September versus the domains workshop in March is that I think that I think we got a little bit better at communicating with folks as well, because again, what you're looking at isn't just a year of discord it's a year of ed tech, right. And so you're seeing us develop throughout these months kind of how we reach out to people and how we communicate what's going on. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that had a little bit of an effect as well on on higher numbers near the end of the year the workshop for the end of the year. For sure. 212 is another is the number of total people in our discord as well that I kind of wanted to point out and it is kind of cool to see. I guess by some you know depends sort of how you measure it but to me I'm surprised that we've actually said it's a big number for us here you know we're not going and promoting our discord. In a lot of places you kind of have to find it, or be told through something else, you know, so that's specifically reclaim. Yeah. So, I had mentioned that we had one person join in December, it was kind of seemed like a quiet month for discord. And that the flex course that was happening at that time was actually the open media ecosystem flex course, and it was true it was a little quiet, I mean, it was December. And so that is holiday time. It is also end of semester time for a lot of folks. So there's kind of a lot going on. But if you take that fact and then you look at the amount of views that are videos after they premiere they're on YouTube they're on our YouTube channel. And you look at the views. I mean, from what you can see here, we just have mega views on a bunch of these open media ecosystem courses with a zero cast coming in at 386. We were all just kind of stunned by that. And this is the kind of thing that is easy to overlook because it's like okay the big event is is done it's over. Maybe people weren't as active in discord. Who knows maybe they this wasn't as popular right, and then you look at this other metric and you're seeing Wow. This particular type of course I mean there could be so many factors that are playing into this right but like this particular type of course worked really well for people to go back and watch later. And I mean I also just have here that our average video views are around 5051 views on each video that we have from like our ed tech based videos. And so these are definitely above average. But that's also not to say that we don't get any views right so we do but we do get a pretty consistent viewership but these these were kind of huge. And so we thought that that was interesting, just because, you know, we don't know people could be looking back in the discord at the conversation that's happening, or that has happened, and also just watching the videos after the fact. And it's just a really interesting kind of relationship that came out. Yeah, you know, this to me is sort of the flip side of the coin when you were highlighting the hacks for hybrid working, right on the slide of that was a course about discussion discussing places it sort of depended on that as like, you know, we can share best practices or what we like to do here at all to reclaim, you know, from Marin and Lauren's perspective, but also we want to hear from folks. And of course we always want to hear from folks, but I think these open media ecosystem courses were more about just sort of highlighting these cool tools and what they can do and what they make possible and say, other things were messing around with it reclaim. And maybe they have a place for you in some way or maybe just want to learn more about them. So it's a very different like objective, I guess, in the course. And we did have discussion around it's not like we didn't have anyone saying anything but we didn't really, you know, have clearly have a bunch of people join discord specifically for it. I would also say this is at a time when we probably didn't do a great job of like promoting this course in any way before it happened it kind of just started happening it was coming right off the bat back of of hacks for hybrid ghost. And before that I guess the WordPress multi site workshop so, you know, I would say we hadn't like, especially like you and I hadn't gotten into a rhythm of how we're like laying these courses out and preparing for them until maybe like a month ago. Like we've been preparing for them but it's been a lot of it's just been like in my head or just like, you know, us talking in meetings and go, Oh, this should happen and more recently kind of gotten a formula of like we need to make sure we email folks about this we need to make sure we, you know, put this in the discord early and have those timelines laid out. And so I would say it was around this course I personally hadn't thought of like we should really be like systematizing this a little bit more to make it easier for us to get the word out earlier and not that we're experts at that yet but I think that is probably another way where this this course may have a long tail in that way too because it probably wasn't promoted particularly well at the time. And, you know, there's also probably something for YouTube itself here we're talking about YouTube views. And these are these a lot of our course videos are public YouTube views but these have keywords people know about right like if you're looking for, I mean is Uracast is a niche tool if you want to do internet radio but if you want to do internet radio and you want to self host it. It's like, pretty much the only good tool out there for it, at least in my opinion, and if you're looking for information about it, you will probably find our video, you know, so there's there's an element of that too. And I think it kind of highlights, you know, or at least it for me it sort of validates the idea of these courses and that we want some of them to be technical and exploratory. And we want some of them to be not that and we want you know we all of them should be exploratory but we want some of them to be focused less on the technology and more about the people and how they use it. And to me to see these two very different kinds of engagement kind of validates that in a way. And, and I guess I'm saying is, I think we might lean into that because at the time I remember coming out of the course, being like, I don't know if that was one that people liked, you know, but looking back it's kind of clear to me that it was successful just in a different way. Yeah, that we weren't thinking about at the time, and actually maybe wasn't even evident at the time because it's been a long tail on these views we, I didn't notice this until like a couple weeks ago. Yeah. Yeah, and also like we don't have great tracking metrics either, you know, we're just kind of like throwing it out to you guys. And sometimes we hear back about them in really interesting ways. Yeah, for sure. And you know, we're not like, like making money off of these videos in a direct way, right, like, so, you know, we're not going in the YouTube dashboard and looking at these videos. We're not looking at it weekly or anything like that. So, I know now I happen because I got so excited about this. I was like, Oh, what else are people liking. But no, they were, they were definitely some peaks there. And Taylor, I don't, I don't know if you want to touch on this now but just like, I think that what is interesting. As Taylor keeps saying this phrase of like long tail right and what has, what's the reach of these things. And as I was saying, while we don't have like tracking metrics for that we don't have, you know, keywords and notifications set up across, you know, different platforms of like who's talking about what we're doing. We get the opportunity to hear from people directly that we never really thought our our our content would make it to. Yeah, yeah. In this one in particular, and kind of what actually got me to look at this is I remembered anecdotally that the developer of own cast because it's it's really a one person project. Almost entirely reached out to actually to me on mastodon was like, Hey, I saw your reclaim hosting video and thought you might find these things interesting. And it wasn't about all cast who's actually reflecting on I wasn't even in that video either. So it would have been weird for him to reach out to me anyway. But, but he was talking about a Zura cast and sort of I think in I think the Zura cast one was pilot and I, and we were talking about like wouldn't it be cool if a tool that did this and this and this exists and he was kind of like, Yes, they do. You may be interested in this. And yeah, I mean, I was not familiar with the person who developed own cast at all. So it was kind of cool to see that that reach hit someone probably not really in the reclaim sphere. You know, I don't really know how he found the video. Maybe maybe he's got a Google keyword up for own cast saw that and then the next one in the series came out or something. But yeah, it was kind of interesting to see that happen. And, you know, I guess this is maybe even less discord and reclaim ed tech focus, but it is definitely part of reclaim ed tech is another one to hear a lot about is the recordings of the community chats. You know, we've been doing these community chats for almost a year and a half now and they're, I think really value, I think maybe, maybe as valuable for like us as it is other people. But, but we also hear from folks who really appreciate that we can record them and they're watching later and say I've never attended one but I always watch the recordings or I've watched some of the recordings and so it's, you know, it's interesting because we, we believe a lot in this video format of Hey, let's put these out there and people can watch them anytime like that aspect of it, just because we think it's important that we are serving folks where they are right discord is great for one type of participation but not everyone could be there at 11am Eastern, you know, not even everyone's awake at that time depending where you live so it's, or I guess it's not it's 12 Eastern 11 my time usually is when we do them, but, but so it's it's I think validating to see that that that this recording plus live interaction aspect has been valuable in multiple ways. Yes, absolutely. So, kind of talking about that what we're also kind of wanted to look at sort of the layout of our server, you know, Meredith and pilot did talk about this a little bit and it's actually come up in all in the first session to learn and Jim talked about a little bit too but these are all of the channels on our server right now and we do have for our reclaim ed tech subscribers they actually do have access to a few other channels in this domains pen pal section, and then there's the sections with a lock icon that are for folks who attended that particular paid workshop or course. But, you know, the rest of these should be ones that anyone can see, we do have a few other hidden channels that are just for reclaim folks but this is, in effect, what is happening on our server. And we've been thinking a lot about sort of what to do where a year in we've learned some things about how these conversations go. It's proving to be a valuable space. And we're learning about what are people coming for here and what do they want to get out of it right when we came into this. We were. We thought a lot about this what belongs in this general discussions thing. And this is before even Amanda you're here but you know we talked a lot about like we want it to. We want the channels to feel inviting. We don't want them to be too specific because where we were worried that if it was it would sort of feel exclusionary of other ideas or topics or whatever like we were like should there be a wordpress channel. You know, it's like well people are going to ask about wordpress we're not really worried about that like we talk a lot about wordpress in this community. So maybe it doesn't need its own channel or you know that was thought at the time. And then we had this events channel here or sorry category here where every single event gets its own channel and you know this again this is very connected with how we're delivering these events so it made made sense. We have this pen pals thing and the pen pals idea if folks that are unfamiliar is the subscribers get paired up into like part pen pal schools and we kind of made introductions between them and many of them meet on whatever schedule they decide to kind of chat about how their projects are going. And then these channels were sort of meant for those folks for like a private place for them to discuss some of these things that were of interest that we were told about were of interest. And it's been great to see like the in depth conversations happening in these channels. But you know these are of course just for those folks right now and then of course we've got our like one voice channel that we use from time to time. So kind of thinking through like what is year two. Like what can we improve on in terms of these the layout of our discord and there are a lot of challenges around restructuring a discord that already exists. One of the things that is tricky is I mean if you delete a channel it is gone and the entire history of the conversation there is also gone. There is I mean maybe that should be obvious but like there's not but the tricky thing with that is there's really no way of preserving it in a different format because this is not at the open web right. This is a discord proprietary thing. We can't like archive this and put it on a website somewhere right it's got to live in discord or it's not going to be something people can access. So that's one thing we can rearrange channels we can rename channels but you know we have to be careful that we don't want to like reinvent the universe every single year or or more often even worse. The other thing is this has been kind of our philosophy throughout but important to reiterate is the channels should reflect you know what people want to talk about. I mean I know that's probably obvious but it is what I mean by that is it is a mixture of we want to create a space and make it feel welcoming and part of that is sort of what we choose to highlight as things that is conversation areas but also we need to meet people with what they want to talk about right. And so it that is a two way street we. So that's a balance to be had, but it also tugs at the first thing which is like, okay we can make a channel for every cPanel app. But that would be insane. A lot of channels and many of them would be not used a lot of things. Exactly, like being able to kind of be responsive to what the community is actually talking about because like Taylor was saying we can make our best guess at the beginning. But then it's only when people are actually talking that we can that we can know and so you know a lot of that is just kind of like thanks for being patient. Let's let's see how we can kind of rework this. So to meet people where they are. Yeah, and in keeping mine to like we haven't modified other than this event we've been adding events channels as events happen. But other than that we have not modified this list really at all. I will say I renamed community chat to community chats after I took this screenshot because I felt like that's kind of weird it should be plural. That's very, very bold of you to me. I made that executive decision. I didn't even know about this folks. Yeah. But other than that, you know, we have only been adding those events channels as needed and that's really been it. For all the reasons I just mentioned in terms of, you know, not wanting to leave things like that. So one vision that we have moving forward I mentioned that the domains pen pal stuff there's really cool conversation in there. And it's really great to see that be just to witness that conversation be part of it. But we I really feel like I want more people to be in there. Sometimes when I see this the conversation is happening in here I'm like, I wish everyone in this discord could benefit from this. Yes. And the other thing is actually think we just have too many channels it's been a year we've done a lot of events. And this isn't even one for everyone right like some of these have reused the domains and WordPress ones are have been used five times across the two channels. So yeah, it's a lot of stuff so we want to kind of simplify. Take stock of what people are wanting to talk about and finding useful and also make this more inviting and more open space for these conversations to happen. So this is kind of one idea I had that I'm we're toying with in a direction we make go in the future for the reclaim discord. So, you know, we've got our information sections probably good to stay the same. And then in general discussions to be mostly the same. I think having a dedicated introductions channel is a good thing. I really like having these ideas and projects and resources and tools right there. Because to me that is a I'm probably overthinking this but to me this is a statement. There's a reason these are listed number two and three right after introduction is when we'll come to the discord. I put them there because I want people to think this is what this thing is for. It's to talk about ideas and projects and tools that I might use for those ideas and projects. Is that working? Is it subconsciously working? I don't know. But the idealist in me wants to keep that there. So and people do use those channels to be clear. I'm not saying it's not working. I'm just saying I don't know if the psychological effect of putting them second or it does anything, but who knows. These other channels here blog posts and RSS. So, yeah, that's where blog posts feed in from feeds.reclaimed.tech. Meredith and Pallett mentioned that in the last session. I think one thing I'd like to do with that channel is possibly prompt people. Maybe when they join the server or maybe there's like a reoccurring monthly or twice a year something message and resources and tools. Sorry in blog posts and RSS that's like, hey, you can add your RSS feed to this because I mentioned that a lot when discord first started. And I kind of forgot at this point and I wonder if people even know that that's not just supposed to be the reclaimed teams blog posts. Yeah, it's supposed to be anyone. And Tom's in there. And I think Ed Beck's feed is in there. I think I harassed him and they're getting at it. I'm not even sure if your blog is in there, man. I'm going to call you out. I think it is. Okay. But do you know the probably the reason you don't know is because I haven't posted in a while. It's been a bit for me too. So it's okay. But yeah, because it does it does right now just look like it's just reclaim. It should. It's meant for just reclaim. It's really not though and I think that that is really exciting. I know I have members of our discord community. I have their blogs on my own RSS feed that I have stored on Zotero. And so I do try and keep up with them. But I would love it if folks would plug their blogs in to this because it would just be less steps for me to read what you guys are all talking about. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I am an RSS junkie. Like I've been using RSS readers since high school and what because I'm the worst kind of nerd and I have literally like hundreds of feeds in it. Most of them are tiny blogs that don't post often from people whose work I admire or this community. So I'll threaten you. I'll just start adding people. I've got the links. I don't need that. But obviously I'd want people to know. So, yeah, but I was just thinking about like how could we, you know, make aware of make people aware of that maybe, you know, maybe in the introductions process in addition to like picking a pronoun. It's like, hey, keep in mind, you can go to this website and submit your blogs RSS feed if you like, you know, or maybe we remind people periodically. I don't know. But that would be cool. I don't want people to think why don't they just call that Jim Groom RSS. None of us can keep up with Jim. Not all prolific bloggers but, you know, with enough of us in there we can balance it out maybe. Yeah, make it look like Jim Groom and another full community of people. So another thing is we have a tweets channel. We should add our message on in there. I haven't done that. So I also have to check to with Twitter. I think the Twitter integration is broken. I don't, it might be because of the API stuff with Twitter. I don't know. It might be a workaround, whatever. I have to look at that because that hasn't been updating. And then it's very easy for us to actually add in Macedon integration because Macedon supports RSS. So I can actually have that check. And Macedon feeds the same way as the blog post stuff works. So we should add that. We use both a reclaim now and there are like a mixture of social media uses here at Reclaim. We don't have, I guess we've never ebbed to now envision this as like a community thing. Right now it's just been sort of reclaim folks in there. But, you know, maybe that's something to think about too. Maybe we should have a process for folks to be able to submit their own social media posts there. I don't know. I have to think about that. I personally haven't put any thought into that other than just saying right now. Just now. Yeah. So, yeah. Again, a lot of this is just kind of like, I wonder what we could do. Yeah. Obviously there's things to think about with that, right? Like, you know, how people represent themselves and stuff. But that's not really any different than the blog post thing. So, yeah. Forums, that's just a direct feed of when someone posts in the forum. It gets pulled into Discord. We really, I really want Discord to feel like a valuable space for people to be able to show up and kind of know that almost anything reclaim related they're going to hear about. And so that's, yeah, that's why the forum comes there. I, the forums are a big part of things here. I know when we launched the Discord. I had more than one person being like, oh, I prefer forums. And I was like, okay, I mean, we're not getting rid of that. We probably never will because forums are a webpage and that's kind of what we're about here. But the Discord is, you know, an opportunity to have a different sort of mode of communication. So, yeah, this is a small way to bridge the gap here and let folks get from Discord out into the forum. See questions people are asking and discussions are having. And then free form. Free form is where you don't know where to post something, which is where you could post it. It's our most used channel. We knew it was going to be. I personally don't think it's a bad thing. I've heard from people, I've heard some folks say like, oh, you know, not really in reclaim, but just like generally about Discord of like, hey, you know, if you haven't everything goes channel, all the conversation happens there. And I'm almost kind of like, so like, I don't know if that's necessarily a problem. Right. And part of the thing that's been good about that is looking back at what people have been talking about there has kind of helped us inform this next two categories. So are really the interest category. So the events category. This is basically similar as to what it was, except we trim this way down. I think we keep our domains one oh one two oh one and we're press multi site one oh one two oh one courses because those are going to keep recurring. But then have a channel for flex courses specifically. And we would use that for each flex course that way this list isn't constantly growing and then we're having to like, delete the old conversations or keep adding to a massive archive. It's not great and those flex courses channels are valuable the conversations are valuable but we're also not seeing people like go back to once from a year ago and post very often. Sometimes it happens but it's not a natural thing to do I think for folks because it feels like that's used up and done so why would I go back there. Right. Yeah, and I also think that what is nice about consolidating that into flex course into a single channel is that it people can know. Okay, there's a flex course going on I don't maybe maybe you don't remember exactly what the topic was or which one it was specifically and you just know you can go into flex course. Flex courses and see if one's going on you're you're there. But if one just ended then you can look back at it. And, you know, look forward and all of that kind of stuff and again, similar to free form. It's informing more sustainable and engaged channels that we can make that aren't that don't just turn into ghost channels like Taylor is talking about. The other thing with that to is it does allow people to manage notifications in a more easy way so one of the things that discord lets you do is you can set notifications settings per channel. I don't know how many people in our discord are doing this and this isn't really something I do a lot with my usage of discord, but one of them. I think it's a great tool as you can go and say I want to know every time someone posts there, like literally send me a message on my phone. You can do that. You can instead have, you know, little activity dots. That's the normal thing. Or if you don't want even those you can mute a channel and it won't show anything unless you go and visit there. And so if we have someone that's like, I don't I'm sick of hearing about this flex course that's happening right now. You can mute the channel. And of course you could do that with these individual channels too. But you don't have maybe maybe you're not wanting to get that activity show up at all for you. You could mute the whole events category. You could mute just flux courses if that's not something you're interested in. You can even snooze it too. So you can say mute it for a week or mute it for a month. And it not constantly changing that list will make people will make it easier for folks to kind of set rules up how they like it too. So, you know, forum tools like discourse have that ability. Discord has that ability. But because we're constantly changing that list, it's a little bit easier for or it's a little bit more difficult for folks to stay on top of that. Another way to solve that that we could do that was touched on last time was have sort of more complicated roles and a bot to manage them. And we could do that. I've thought of doing that. But to be perfectly honest with you, I don't know that our needs are quite there. Like we're not a large enough community that it's so noisy that folks are going to are asking for that yet. And I don't want to add that complexity until we need it basically. Right. So then the interest channel. So this is a combination of looking at what people are asking about in free form and what they're talking about and what some of the kind of cool conversations we've seen in the domains pen pals category. So this would be sort of topic specific things like let's talk about WordPress multi site and to be honest with you, like this, this to me is the biggest question mark category in terms of going forward. I threw these in here as an example. But I could see this list changing significantly. Like you can see we have domain on one zone and WordPress multi site and reclaimed cloud. I also have accessibility WordPress and Omeco Mecca s. Okay, well, like, do we need a WordPress and a WordPress multi site category? Maybe, you know, personally, I think that could be valuable because the types of questions in WordPress multi site are going to be much more about it. Ministering a large multi site similar to domain on one zone in terms of like this is a project and WordPress maybe more about like plugins and, you know, settings and things like that. But you could make an argument either way. The idea has come up internally like what if instead of having a specific WordPress and Omeco channel to have a C panel applications channel. That's just generally about running things in C panel or maybe that's an addition. WordPress and Omeco are popular. Like that's the most common thing we hear about in free form that is about a single application. So maybe they need their own homes. I could be convinced. I think I think if I think if the team talked about this in an hour and the objective was a change Taylor's mind, you could probably do it six times in an hour. So it's there's a lot of different directions to go. I mean, to be clear, I don't think WordPress is a risky channel to put out there. I think that would be a good one. But, you know, we really want to make this feel again welcoming by what topics we choose to highlight and and say, ah, this is what people like to talk about here when they join the server, but also not overwhelming. And we don't want people as much as possible. We don't want them to wonder like, oh, should it go here or here? Because the answer is it doesn't matter. Like it usually doesn't matter. I have never had someone post something on a channel and me personally go, what are they doing in that channel? It's discord is messy. You know, it's not a forum and that's okay. To me, the most important part about the channels is to loosely organize conversation, but more to encourage conversation. And then finally, there's our voice channel. One thing I'd note is I do have some ideas on like some more some some different types of formats of events we could do in the future that may facilitate more than one voice channel. And so it's important to note that we can add more voice channels as needed and delete them that I'm not so worried about because those don't really have a history associated with them like a text channel does. So although they technically do have, you can chat with text in a voice channel, but it's not really the same purpose. So, you know, you can add many of those. We've only really needed the one, but you know, if we ever need more than one to do some kind of breakout activity, then we could do that. In addition to that, we've got this archive category that I have collapsed. And for all the channels that we would retire what we from from this version here, which it's not as many as it looks it mostly be the specific event categories. We'd probably move into that archive thing and make read only so people can visit them, but you can't post in them. And then we put it way at the bottom of the list with the intention that folks can actually even collapse it to so it doesn't take up any visual clutter. But also you don't even see it until you scroll all the way past everything that's active. So that's a pretty common way to handle the do I want to delete things situation that we were talking about earlier. It doesn't have too many downsides. I don't know for sure, but I don't think there's a way that we can automatically collapse this for folks. That would be kind of cool. We could do that. But as far as I'm aware, there isn't. I was looking at that a little bit this week and I haven't been able to find anything. But that's a minor thing, ultimately. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. I think, you know, as we've been saying these this is just an idea and I appreciate how we've been able to kind of go through this this potential version and kind of go through what our thoughts are and justifications are for why this might work. But, you know, on the other hand, we are doing a pre recorded video right now. And so we don't know exactly what you all are thinking. And that's why, you know, we have the beautiful opportunity when this premieres in discord to chat with you live time about all of this and kind of hear from you and, you know, even in the last session that we had Meredith and pilot session, people were putting in, Oh, I wish this foot, you know, was a thing in discord or that, you know, this, you know, this server had that kind of feature or quality or characteristic organization. And we really want to encourage you all to do that and and really don't hesitate to chat with us about what you think might be best. Because this is for you. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have anything to add to that. I think that's great. And yeah, let us know your feedback where we're more than open to it. So, thanks everyone for joining us for this short little flex course that we had three sessions but I think they were three very fun sessions. And I hope that you learned a lot and that you are getting excited about another year of ed tech with reclaim hosting. And we'll see you on the flip.