not a big fan of discord...but its replaced traditional "Servers" with cloud hosted solutions, you can customize with webhooks.

I don't either
heck I don't use lots of Apps

i tried doscord and i hate it. its ridiculous to think that doscord can replace the fourum format. its worse in every way. of course, the only thing that ever happened to me on the FA forums was some swagless guy said my art sucked when i first joined the fandom, so idk if its a big personal loss but i do love forums in general and hate discord so that's my peace. and yeah, its like they keep dropping stupid stuff and expect us to just take it. i'd be cool if one of those FA-alternatives caught on at least enough to make them feel like they could fail and have to listen to their users. i used to be good friends with Dragoneer (he and my dad worked closely together a looong time ago) but he isn't even reading my messages anymore.

It's just weird how often a company or website with a large userbase does things its users will hate. See also: YouTube. I guess they figure they'll always have more than enough new users to offset the angry ones. Bleh...

its not how businesses work. they're only supposed to exist to provide a service/product that their customers want to buy at a price they want to buy it at. larger websites with more active users need to be run that way. if they can't do that they do not deserve to be in business. and as with other perpetrators of this breech of duty i won't name here, i'd much rather they just fix that easy thing and be what their customers want (even if their ceo makes a tiny bit less money, or whatever FA/YouTube's version of that is) than go belly-up. after all, i'm only against them because they turned away from me & what they promised their customers and thereby got the support to stay in business to do. i simply want what i was promised.

100%

I'm inclined to agree. My first thought of the news was "That's a stupid move" followed by "great, another site/organization that's making the jump." By that, I mean there's been a recent trend with groups/studios/organizations where people seem to think Discord can substitute a forum or Wiki page because it's customizable and cloud hosted.

Call me old school, but I much prefer locally hosted forums for the more granular control of the operations of the site. Yet I can also acknowledge it takes significantly more sysadmin maintenance to run one. I think this is purely a cost cutting effort on FA's part, and Discord has proven to be the go-to Swiss army knife of web hosted chat rooms these days. >.>

Personally I don't understand the Discord hype. To me it seems to be not much more than a gamer-oriented version of Telegram, right down to the interface.

Me neither. Group chats are nothing new, and I honestly didn’t like Discord when it first launched. I still don’t like it to this day, but I just have a number of friends who use it exclusively. In other words, I don’t have much choice if I want to DM them. >.>

I'm fortunate to not have met anyone so far that insisted I download and use another program just to talk to them...because I won't XD

So they got rid of the forums just so that the spambots could be offloaded onto our accounts... No fucking wonder barely anybody bothers with this site! God, most of my favorite artists, if they're even here, they're lucky to get even 1K views. You asked where we can go to complain? I know! Here! Oh, look, and now we have time limits on our edits! Why! So you can "catch people in the act" for thought crime? Fuck you, seriously, FA! Blow us! Yeah, you don't get my normal politeness and bolds-n-caps, you get the bird!

Yeah the spam replies on this journal have been INSANE. Fortunately they don't appear to be harassing me anywhere else at the moment...

Literally the only interaction I've had with people on this site in the months before/the days after the last outage has been complaining/shooting the shit in comments and replies on the main site. Oh well, at least on DA, people act normal, even if I'm pretty sure a lot of those accounts are bots too... Thing is, I kinda like bots, when they're useful and cool. Some creators have mastered the art of making bots you want to interact with, but no, that's not the kind of AI FA "embraces."