[BOBOTWINSTON]

What? As someone who has been sitting in a voice chat at least 5 days a week for 15+ years (come at me I have no life), Discord is easily the best one.

It seems to run into issues at about the same rate as all the Mumble/Vent servers I've ever dealt with, except you can simply switch the region on a channel and immediately solve it.

Quick edit: Discord could improve by adding a better interface for testing your input/output, that is lacking.

[Nullabillity]

Let's see:

- The overlay still doesn't work on Linux

- There is still no voice ducking

- The text chat channels are persistent and decoupled from the voice chat channels (encouraging spam)

- There is still no way to self-host it

- The team keeps wasting their effort on stuff like this rather than fixing their broken core "service" (if it can be called that)

Mumble had all of this down to a T back in 2013.

[Spivak]

Perfect example of features hackers want which don't matter at all to anyone else.

- Nobody cares about Linux. They could drop Linux support today and it wouldn't matter in the slightest. I say as a 100% full time Linux user -- we get what we get.

- Users want persistent chat more than they don't. Spam isn't an issue for most people who are are running servers for their friends and coupling them with voice wouldn't really help anyway. Users want to be in a different chat than their voice coms

- Users don't even know what voice ducking is and would probably be surprised by it.

- Nobody cares about self hosting. Gamers clamour for dedicated servers to reduce lag more than than for P2P.

- Users want these features and their core service is best in class. There's a reason it basically killed their competition overnight. I haven't even seen a Mumble/Vent server in ages.

[Nullabillity]

> - Users want persistent chat more than they don't. Spam isn't an issue for most people who are are running servers for their friends and coupling them with voice wouldn't really help anyway. Users want to be in a different chat than their voice coms

Looking at my old WoW guild's channel now, it's 95% spam that was only relevant to the 4 or so people who were on voice comms at the time any given thing was posted. It'd be fine to have text-only channels, but each voice channel should also have an associated unlogged text channel. For bonus points: prevent people from sending messages to text-only channels without (temporarily) leaving the voice channel.

> - Users don't even know what voice ducking is and would probably be surprised by it.

Tell that to.. anyone trying to listen to music in the background?

> - Nobody cares about self hosting. Gamers clamour for dedicated servers to reduce lag more than than for P2P.

Yup, it's lovely when Discord crashes mid-raid, and there is nothing to do aside from twiddling your thumbs.

[penagwin]

I believe voice ducking is supported (at least on windows), I don't think their infrastructure is made to self host, it's not a self contained binary is a set of databases, different servers for voice vs text etc.

How does decoupling voice and text channels encourage spam? Why would you want it to not be persistent? Many communities now use discord instead of slack/irc/etc, barely touching the voice features if at all. Everyone already has discord and they have great community management features for groups of people.

I know several subreddits, gaming communities, youtubers, etc. have moved their "live chat" to discord. You don't even have to install discord to use it.

Edit: Mumble isn't bad and it sounds like you aren't the target demographic of discord. If you want a self-hosted, voice chat first program then mumble is definitely what you're looking for.

[Nullabillity]

> I believe voice ducking is supported (at least on windows)

I can't find it on the Linux client, at least.

> I don't think their infrastructure is made to self host, it's not a self contained binary is a set of databases, different servers for voice vs text etc.

Sounds like their infrastructure is broken then? Even if it's not something you supply to users you'd still want to be able to run a local testing server during development.

> How does decoupling voice and text channels encourage spam? Why would you want it to not be persistent? Many communities now use discord instead of slack/irc/etc, barely touching the voice features if at all. Everyone already has discord and they have great community management features for groups of people.

I've primarily been forced to use this abomination for various WoW guilds. The chat tends to be used for three things: 1) announcements, 2) discussions, and 3) context (links and images, primarily) for the discussions going on in voice.

Since Discord doesn't couple the chat channels to the voice channels people end up spamming #3 in the general channels, causing very annoying constant notifications, and clogging up the history. The persistent history is also an anti-feature here, since the history ends up being nearly useless without the accompanying voice conversations.

Since #3 invariably annoys everyone into turning off notifications it becomes an arms race to get people to actually pay attention to #1.

#2 tends to get sidetracked when people spam #3 all over the place, but even without that it's nearly impossible to keep track of multiple discussions at once. Trying to find and/or make sense of old discussions gets even messier. This case is always much better served by a real forum.

[com2kid]

> Since Discord doesn't couple the chat channels to the voice channels people end up spamming #3 in the general channels, causing very annoying constant notifications, and clogging up the history.

On Windows, voice chats are very much separate from Text chats, it looks like https://i.imgur.com/HBXMPY0.png

And no one in the target audience cares about self hosting instances. It adds 0 value for their core user base. People who want a privacy minded voice chat system can use one of those, it isn't worth Discord's engineering time to support a stand alone release to attract some small extra # of users.

[Nullabillity]

> On Windows, voice chats are very much separate from Text chats, it looks like https://i.imgur.com/HBXMPY0.png

That was exactly the thing I was complaining about?

[com2kid]

Oops sorry, I thought the complaint was about them being separate. I'm not sure I understand the spam complaint, if everyone is on voice chat why are they in general? But then again I mostly use Discord for community activities, not for group gaming.

[Tyr42]

Hm, I'm a little surprised, I actually opened up Discord to diagnose some windows / bluetooth headphones issues, and checked when the bytes were being sent to see if the mic was being connected.

It made it a little easier to tell if it was me or the other end at fault.

[dvtrn]

Discord could improve by adding a better interface for testing your input/output, that is lacking.

It's been pretty sufficient for me, all things given. Is the app detecting it? I can see levels, everything else happens at the system level no? Otherwise I definitely agree, Discord's voice has been a massive improvement for me. Plus, the overlay is a great feature baked in-Mumble, TeamSpeak and others require a third party download and often they're just....awful, obtrusive, resource intensive and otherwise in the damn way. Discord's overlay does what it can to stay out of the way. I like that.

Merely curious, not attempting to refute you here-but what would you like to see improved there?

[Nullabillity]

> Plus, the overlay is a great feature baked in-Mumble, TeamSpeak and others require a third party download and often they're just....awful, obtrusive, resource intensive and otherwise in the damn way.

Mumble has had a built-in overlay for years, and contrary to Discord's it actually works!

[salicideblock]

I used discord for the first time two days ago and I missed exactly this.

As a comparison point, I think it is Skype that friends you to a test bot who replies things to you. This would have saved me some awkwardness when joining the group.

[dvtrn]

Ah yeah, the Skype test call bot. I agree actually, this would be pretty handy to have.

That said, I really wouldn't be surprised if Discord gets to the point where they start supporting calling phone numbers directly. It's replaced a lot of voice communication channels with a segment of my friends since we all have it on our mobile phones.