Discord - The Backup Community?

[Fall]

Originally Posted by CleverCowboy

At this juncture, the Discord community would be an extension of this web site, not a replacement. When naming the community, I think it should contain "Alizee America" in it, or just be named it and nothing else.

I disagree. When this site was created, it's name of Alizée America was meant to signify that its members were a community from the United States in general, and maybe Canada and the rest of the Americas. At the time and until recently, Alizée Italia, Alizée France, Alizée India, Alizée Brazil, Alizée Russia, Alizée Spain, Alizée World (from Mexico), and many, many more fan websites and forums existed to represent a particular country or region of fans in the world. The dream was to try and build a large enough community that it could be recognized and perhaps bring Alizée over to perform or tour.

We've had many members from all over the world, and today, maybe 5 or 6 of us active members are in the US, with everyone else representing other locations. I think at this point, if we want to build a community for all Alizée fans, we should come up with a new name. Especially if the Discord server is not meant to be a replacement for Alizée America.

[Ben.Daly]

Originally Posted by Fall

I disagree. When this site was created, it's name of Alizée America was meant to signify that its members were a community from the United States in general, and maybe Canada and the rest of the Americas. At the time and until recently, Alizée Italia, Alizée France, Alizée India, Alizée Brazil, Alizée Russia, Alizée Spain, Alizée World (from Mexico), and many, many more fan websites and forums existed to represent a particular country or region of fans in the world. The dream was to try and build a large enough community that it could be recognized and perhaps bring Alizée over to perform or tour.

Are all of these forums gone or are there still a couple that linger on? As someone who joined AAm only this year, I got the impression that it must've evolved into the place for English-speakers, and that perhaps there were other forums for those speaking Russian, Spanish, Italian etc. Considering how you see fans from all over the world in YouTube comment sections and on Instagram, are we sure all the other forums are gone?

Originally Posted by Fall

We've had many members from all over the world, and today, maybe 5 or 6 of us active members are from the US, with everyone else representing other locations. I think at this point, if we want to build a community for all Alizée fans, we should come up with a new name. Especially if the Discord server is not meant to be a replacement for Alizée America.

I agree with this sentiment, though it shouldn't really be too much of a problem either way. Guess we'd need a new name for it.

[CleverCowboy]

Originally Posted by Fall

We've had many members from all over the world, and today, maybe 5 or 6 of us active members are in the US, with everyone else representing other locations. I think at this point, if we want to build a community for all Alizée fans, we should come up with a new name. Especially if the Discord server is not meant to be a replacement for Alizée America.

There is a reason why Alizee sites are regional, and that is because of language. As far as I can tell, there are no native auto-translators on Discord. I see there is at least one add-on that can do translations, but at a cost. The more it's used, the more it costs. Otherwise, do we really want an international community all communicating in their native languages? From a moderating point of view, it would be a nightmare.

Don't underestimate the importance of our brand, which is Alizée America. Alizée knows us well. She has received gifts from us and there are a number of YouTube videos of her saying hello to us. There are videos posted from Scruffy representing AAm. If you do a Google search with Alizée as the search word or part of the search word, AAm comes up as one of the top results. Our threads have been crawled by every major search engine out there.

It's my opinion that starting from scratch would be a mistake, but that is only my opinion. We had a member in here not that long ago promoting his new Alizee site. It lasted two months and no longer exists. If the majority decides to start fresh, then I'll go with the flow and no feelings hurt, but there is value in name recognition.

Edit:

Originally Posted by Ben.Daly

Are all of these forums gone or are there still a couple that linger on? As someone who joined AAm only this year, I got the impression that it must've evolved into the place for English-speakers, and that perhaps there were other forums for those speaking Russian, Spanish, Italian etc. Considering how you see fans from all over the world in YouTube comment sections and on Instagram, are we sure all the other forums are gone?

Alizee Ukraine still exists and I believe that Alizee Spain does to, but it is just a flickr site. They are mainly picture warehouses and no way to chat or communicate with other members. It just highlights the uniqueness of what we have going here at AAm. Before we all rush off and start a new thing, we need to consider what will be lost, and a bunch of old threads is not the only thing.

[Fall]

Originally Posted by CleverCowboy

There is a reason why Alizee sites are regional, and that is because of language. As far as I can tell, there are no native auto-translators on Discord. I see there is at least one add-on that can do translations, but at a cost. The more it's used, the more it costs. Otherwise, do we really want an international community all communicating in their native languages? From a moderating point of view, it would be a nightmare.

Don't underestimate the importance of our brand, which is Alizée America. Alizée knows us well. She has received gifts from us and there are a number of YouTube videos of her saying hello to us. There are videos posted from Scruffy representing AAm. If you do a Google search with Alizée as the search word or part of the search word, AAm comes up as one of the top results. Our threads have been crawled by every major search engine out there.

It's my opinion that starting from scratch would be a mistake, but that is only my opinion. We had a member in here not that long ago promoting his new Alizee site. It lasted two months and no longer exists. If the majority decides to start fresh, then I'll go with the flow and no feelings hurt, but there is value in name recognition.

If the purpose is to create an online home for Alizée fans, then naturally we would have dedicated spaces for different language users. As the need arises, Mods for those channels would have to be recruited to keep things civil. FerAunger, for example, whose videos have recently been discussed on this forum, is a fan from Mexico who could be counted on to moderate a Spanish language channel(s). Jenny, a well known German member of AF and AAm, could be a moderator for a German channel(s). SkeLeton could moderate a French channel(s) and so forth.

For one thing, the efforts of our members, more than our name, have brought us a couple of miracles. Besides that, it hasn't yielded any fruit. Alizée has been to the US many times, but only on vacation and nothing more. And again, a Discord server would not replace AAm any more than the AAm Twitter account has. That was Ben's suggestion in the event AAm was gone for good. But you're right that we're the last established name and for that reason I don't think we should offer users the choice between AAm and AAm Discord. AAm should continue to exist for its users and a Discord server can offer something different for those comfortable with that platform. And lastly, Google search results vary greatly by locations, not to mention by user. Google wants to serve up the most relevant results to you.

Edit:

Originally Posted by Ben.Daly

Are all of these forums gone or are there still a couple that linger on? As someone who joined AAm only this year, I got the impression that it must've evolved into the place for English-speakers, and that perhaps there were other forums for those speaking Russian, Spanish, Italian etc. Considering how you see fans from all over the world in YouTube comment sections and on Instagram, are we sure all the other forums are gone?

Of the names I listed, I visited or was a member of, Alizée France, Alizée India, Alizée Brazil, and Alizée World. All of these were forums like AAm where fans posted about news, shared pictures, created threads, etc. From what I can tell, none of these exist as forums any longer. They only have IG, Twitter, Facebook accounts. The Russian community I believe existed mostly on a site called VK which is similar to Facebook. AAm was definitely intended for English speakers, as was Alizée Forum who used it as the standard langauge, but offered subforums for German, French, and Spanish I believe.

[CleverCowboy]

Originally Posted by Fall

If the purpose is to create an online home for Alizée fans, then naturally we would have dedicated spaces for different language users. As the need arises, Mods for those channels would have to be recruited to keep things civil. FerAunger, for example, whose videos have recently been discussed on this forum, is a fan from Mexico who could be counted on to moderate a Spanish language channel(s). Jenny, a well known German member of AF and AAm, could be a moderator for a German channel(s). SkeLeton could moderate a French channel(s) and so forth.

For one thing, the efforts of our members, more than our name, have brought us a couple of miracles. Besides that, it hasn't yielded any fruit. Alizée has been to the US many times, but only on vacation and nothing more. And again, a Discord server would not replace AAm any more than the AAm Twitter account has. That was Ben's suggestion in the event AAm was gone for good. But you're right that we're the last established name and for that reason I don't think we should offer users the choice between AAm and AAm Discord. AAm should continue to exist for its users and a Discord server can offer something different for those comfortable with that platform. And lastly, Google search results vary greatly by locations, not to mention by user. Google wants to serve up the most relevant results to you.

Having a Discord community and separating the members by language into their own respective channels is no different than having an Alizee America, Alizee Spain, Alizee (pick your country). It still falls short of the original intent, which is to somehow bring together under one roof the world's Alizee fans where they do not have to worry about what language they speak. They would still be separated into their own rooms.

If we would have to recruit moderators by language, such as Jenny or FerAunger, they can just as easily start their own Alizee Discord site in their own native languages and we wouldn't have to worry about recruitment and being sure they are following up on their commitment. For all we know, there might be communities dedicated to Alizee on Discord already. If there is, and we create ours, what would make a new Alizee fan choose ours?

Kajue mentioned there is no way to create a thread. So I am assuming a channel would be like a fancy chat box with one long continuous conversation that can go in any direction. Is this correct? If so, what would you chat about today? Alizee's makeup line? Alizee does not produce breaking news. Maybe she will in the future if she ever releases a new record, but for now, I am envisioning that an unstructured chat would go off topic continuously. Or maybe people will get bored and quit coming. There are a lot of thread topics here, and most of them are reminiscing. But reminiscing of what Alizee was and what she is today and everything in between is interesting and fun. I'm not sure whether this can be pulled off in Discord.

So, I know I am being difficult here and I am not trying to throw cold water on the whole idea. I am just trying to talk this through and see if it makes sense to have a site in that format. Kajue volunteered to create a site and he should feel free to do so and see what happens.

[Ben.Daly]

Originally Posted by CleverCowboy

Kajue mentioned there is no way to create a thread. So I am assuming a channel would be like a fancy chat box with one long continuous conversation that can go in any direction. Is this correct?

Yes, that's essentially what it is.

Originally Posted by CleverCowboy

If so, what would you chat about today? Alizee's makeup line? Alizee does not produce breaking news. Maybe she will in the future if she ever releases a new record, but for now, I am envisioning that an unstructured chat would go off topic continuously. Or maybe people will get bored and quit coming. There are a lot of thread topics here, and most of them are reminiscing. But reminiscing of what Alizee was and what she is today and everything in between is interesting and fun. I'm not sure whether this can be pulled off in Discord.

You can create separate channels on discord all under the one server, with each channel being about a specific topic or subgenre, similar to how we have different megathreads here (Media, Discussion, News etc). So that would make things a bit more organized and help keep conversation on topic, at least more so than just 1 big chat.

It's still not the same as the Threads here where everything is more structured and you can have many more smaller threads within topic threads, but it would help. We would definitely have an off-topic thread which I suspect might be the most popular channel.

[CleverCowboy]

Originally Posted by Ben.Daly

You can create separate channels on discord all under the one server, with each channel being about a specific topic or subgenre, similar to how we have different megathreads here (Media, Discussion, News etc). So that would make things a bit more organized and help keep conversation on topic, at least more so than just 1 big chat.

It's still not the same as the Threads here where everything is more structured and you can have many more smaller threads within topic threads, but it would help. We would definitely have an off-topic thread which I suspect might be the most popular channel.

OK. Thanks for the explanation. So for an international audience, we would need a Media (English), Media (French), Media (Spanish), Media (German), etc. and so on through all the different channel topics. I would think this would really spread the members out.

So, I really want to get sold on this idea. Right now I have hesitations. Maybe it's a generational thing? I come from a time when emails were the hot thing. I still like emails because it gives me time to think out what I am going to put in it. Posting on a forum is essentially the same. Younger generations seem to not take so well to email and prefer texts and social media where things move quickly.