Why is there no Discord server for Autcraft?

Originally posted by AutismFather on April 23, 2018

I want to answer this once and for all for everyone. That means that if you see someone talking about Autcraft having a Discord server, or suggesting it, or asking why there isn't one.. you send them here.

#1 - Monitoring

The simple fact is, we can't be there to monitor a Discord server 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We just can't. With that in mind, read the next two points...

#2 - Autism

- a mental condition, present from early childhood, characterized by difficulty in communicating and forming relationships with other people and in using language and abstract concepts.

Listen, I think you all are wonderful. You have made Autcraft what it is, the best community on the Internet. However, we are still people with autism trying to navigate a world that is very confusing and unusual to us. That means that putting 9000+ autistic children into one place to communicate, particularly by voice, just isn't a good idea.

On the server, we can monitor it. We have logs, we can filter out bad language, we can enforce the language (English only) and we can mute people if necessary. On Discord, all of that becomes much more difficult to do, particularly in voice chat.

Kids with autism (many adults too) have a very hard time managing emotions. Happy is very happy and angry is very angry. If you put dozens or hundreds of kids with autism into a voice chat together and just one of them gets upset, things will go bad very quickly.

Because we can't be there to monitor the server 24 hours a day, there's just no way that we can be around to handle every single argument, rage fueled attack or inappropriate thing said. And that's scary to us.

#3 - Whitelist access

Yes, Autcraft is a whitelisted server but you know what? Sometimes trolls get onto the whitelist. The good news is that we have plugins to filter out bad things they might say, we have plugins to monitor what's written on signs and in books. We have commands like /helpop and /modreq to report them with and we have logs to go back and check to see what they did.

The thing is, if we have a Discord server, every whitelisted player would gain immediate access to that Discord server where they can say and do literally anything they want, in real time, with no way for us to filter any of it or go back and check to see what happened. They'd be able to DM people where we can't check anything... they could try to get personal information or start sending viruses. They could attack people with hateful, trollish attacks.

And again, we can't be there 24 hours a day to monitor it. Not that it would help. Since voice chats are in real time and private messages aren't anything we can see, much less do anything about, we'd be powerless to stop any of it.

#4 - Patreon Discord

So what we've done is the nest best thing... the only thing we can think of to have a Discord server and still keep it reasonably safe, is to offer it to patrons who support the server. There's less people on it that way, making it easier to manage and you have to pay to use it. Yes, it seems unfair to have to pay to get access but you know trolls won't do that. And even if they did, they'd be removed and just be out the money for nothing.

In conclusion

Discord is great, it's amazing... I have nothing against Discord. In fact, the makers of Discord love Autcraft too! However, it's just not safe for us to use as a public communication service for Autcraft. Nothing is. We can't watch 24/7, we can't be sure who will and won't get access and we can't ensure things will go smoothly with dozens to hundreds of autistic children all learning how to communicate with each other for the first time.

We wish we could. We really do. But for Autcraft, for right now, there just isn't going to be a Discord server. And we expressly forbid anyone and everyone from making one... especially in our name.

It's happened in the past and some very bad things happened because of it. No, I won't give details but believe me, it's was very bad.

There's a reason that we don't do it and there's a reason that we don't want others doing it. It's not just because we're strict, it's because we've seen what can and will happen.

Your safety is our primary concern so please believe that we have your best interest at heart.