[Feature Request] A Website Forums page for a more open access to web only users.

[WallerTrevor]

It would be a wonderful feature to have it so that the website can reflect the mountain of information that the discord help section covers.

There's a hidden iceberg of information locked away from the average Workshop.codes website user that they may never see due to it being on a totally separate platform and on a server. I think having a way to link the help section with the website, would be monumental for the community. I'm not sure exactly how this could work in reality. but having a way to sync in both directions would be amazing. so if someone's on the website and makes a new post, or in the discord makes one, it will reflect across both.

For a simplified first version, just a cached version of the discord help section, that gets updated semi regularly would be good, if the full sync system is too much of a headache. perhaps make it so there's 2 forum sections, one of the archive of the discord, and a new section for all the website posts or them combined, but that's up to you for sure.

Another option, just start fresh and make a forums section without the discord stuff!

[CactusPuppy]

We previously used AnswerOverflow to make the Workshop help section more accessible. However, given privacy restrictions from both Discord and the EU, people who did not opt into having their messages mirrored (most people) did not have their messages visible, greatly hampering the usefulness of the service. It was so low quality and spotty that we eventually ditched it. Any first-party solution we come up with to sync Discord and the site proper would fall into the same pitfalls, while also placing quite a burden on our web infrastructure.

As for first-party forums, it's not entirely out of the question, but it would require a decent amount of work to create and would not port over any of the vast trove of existing help threads. Leaving the issue open to explore this idea, but a Discord integration is mostly out of the question.