It's been long enough and my patience has run out, so it is time to tell my story of why my Minecraft Derp & Chill community uses a forum and not Discord.

A long time ago in a support ticket far away

It all started back on the 24th of March, 2024. All of the sudden I am being asked to confirm my account with a phone number. "No problem." I think to myself. This is my account and this is the phone number I've had longer than Discord has been a company.

This was the beginning of poor support from Discord and nearly 6 months later, I'm still not back.

First support

What's this? That phone number is linked to another account? That's weird, but okay. The automated support email I got back says to log in by that phone number and say I've forgotten the password, then delete the phone number from that account to link it to my main account. Easy enough, let's go.

Wait a minute, the account linked to the phone number has been disabled? Oh, well. It should be easy enough for support to remove my phone number from that account and allow me to link it to my main account. I'll just respond to my support ticket and let them know. It's the weekend though, so I'll probably need to be patient until the weekdays to get a real person looking at it.

Hmm, no one has gotten back to me and it has been a week. Maybe they fixed an issue that was causing it and I can just log in now. No. Still need to verify. Let me try the phone number thing again. Same outcome. Okay, I'll just be a little more patient.

April was a time of me sending many emails to Discord with varying results of getting a response. I even reached out to the Discord support account on X. I gave them my support ticket number and they said they would pass it to the advanced team. All in all, told once again to be patient a lot. It's only been a month. I've worked in support before. I can be patient.

Somewhere during April I created my Derp & Chill community/Minecraft forum so I could stay connected to my D&C community and discuss what is happening on the server as a group. Also, hopefully, build a community of people who watch us and enjoy the peaceful realm and acceptance of simpler play and silly ideas. That led to the Spoiler said: post by MadmanAcrossTheWater (one of the Les Derps). It meant a lot to me because I was very emotional about the whole thing and appreciated my community supporting me back.

Also, I was paying for Nitro every month. It just so happens that charge happens on the 21st, 3 days prior to the last time I could access my account. It was a pain to cancel Nitro without access to my account, but everything is easier when you can just refute the charge with your bank.

I repeated the support email cycle around the month mark in May, June, July and August. Sometimes the "be patient" response made me confident something was about to happen but I was wrong. Nothing has happened.

At this point, my benefit of the doubt has me thinking that the account which has my personal phone number associated with it must have done some nefarious things so they think I'm a griefer/hacker/bad guy. I've only been a bad guy in the wrestling ring, and that was entertainment - so needless to say that thought has me sad. I'm a good guy damnit. Why am I being punished? Would someone tell me something?

Missing out on other things

Recently, I was sent an email that said I could join the Stars Reach by Playable Worlds beta. The problem, I would need to join the Discord community to get information on how to do this. Well, crap.

I played Everquest and EQ2. When I worked for a company that got bought by Playdom, so did Raph Koster's company. I got to go work with him and thank him for his work as someone who enjoyed it. I trust that what his team is building will be cool. I guess I'll just "be patient" and wait until the game is released and I can buy it through normal channels.

Also, as a Developer Advocate at work there was some talk about reaching out to virtual communities. Discord was mentioned, of course. Well dang, I'm someone who is constantly online and I can't reach these communities. Luckily, I'm not measured with how well I connect with people on Discord, so I won't lose my job over it.

Conclusion

What I'm reminded of through all of this is, Discord is a great combination of many things that don't have an exact replica outside of Discord. It is basically free, with some benefits to paying for Turbo. But it is a bouncer that keeps people out of your community without your input. Once Discord kicks someone out, you can't let them in without moving your community elsewhere. You give up all control and receive the illusion of control but feature rich tools.

I'm pretty sure my community is less active because it isn't on Discord anymore. They got the network effect, many people work to make plugins and extensions for other things to work with Discord. I have a forum that people have to remember to visit. I have to work extra to also have a feature like voice chat, which is built into Discord and at no cost.

I hope you never lose access. I hope they never change their Terms & Conditions to something that is bad for you or your community but you are too entrenched and it is hard to get out because you don't actually have any control. This will happen for some of you. I'm sorry.