[META] Does AskHistorians have a discord server where people can chit chat about history 'in person'?

by rastadreadlion

If there was such a thing I would give it a try. Does anyone think that would be a good idea? You can even get drunk with people from all over the world simultaneously while at your computer.

Georgy_K_Zhukov

I will note that while we don't have one for AH, /r/history does have a Discord if you want to have some history-centric live-chatting.

Elm11

Hi there!

We don't, I'm afraid, and unfortunately we really can't implement one either. The idea has been floated before, including quite recently for just the flaired community. The requirements of effectively moderating a Discord or IM community are basically just impossible to meet - we don't have the interest on the mod-team to police such a community and even if we did, we simply wouldn't have the time. We've discovered from messy past experience that such communities are a stunningly effective drama magic which this community simply doesn't need - the flaired community used to have an IRC which was a plague to moderate and successfully produced more drama for /r/AskHistorians than probably any other issue ever has. If we couldn't even maintain a healthy and robust flair IRC, you'll hopefully see why we wouldn't dream of trying to implement one for the wider community of nearly 600,000 - it'd be a nightmare!