Oddly enough, Discord started out as a chat/voip tool for smaller gaming groups too, but as a side-effect of awesome engineering we've been able to handle large communities really well. Over the winter break, one community sprung up, going from no users, to about 2400 concurrents at peak, with about 600 of them in voice chat at the same time.

Also, our tech stack for the native/web client is React & our iOS app is React Native, so it was pretty awesome to see Reactiflux migrate to Discord.

We came to Discord from Hipchat... mainly because I'm championing it. The killer feature to me are the voice channels when you're dealing with remote staff. They nailed this.

However, for a company, there are a lot of missing features, so definitely take some time to evaluate it first to make sure it's a fit. For example searching chat history (something we miss a great deal, but can live without). Also, the permissions are horrendously complicated and the fact that you can't remove or lock down the "public" room is super annoying.

That being said, we're still using it and pretty happy. It probably doesn't measure up too well against Slack if you don't value the group voice channels.

Just saw the threaded discussions feature for Zulip from a thread in here. Wow, that would be killer.

Chat history search is something that's coming soon.

Although the permission system may be something that's complicated, it fits the gamer clan niche well. A lot of people actually have been requesting that we add more complex permission hierarchies.

I think your permissions are fine but the weird permission locking of the default room needs to go away. There's no reason that room should be more special than the other ones.

It'd also be nice to make it clearer whether someone can view a specific channel or not (eg see it in the list).

Oh and... IRC gateway? :) Or at least open spec on the protocol, pretty please.

I would say Discord is missing 2 crucial features that prevent it from replacing old software like IRC for large chat communities.

1) offline mode

2) different names for each server

No linux support either, sadly. The linux client has apparently been due "Real Soon Now" for nearly a year.

i've been using https://github.com/XNBlank/discord-linux for a while now, and it works quite well.

Offline mode?

The ability to appear as offline or at least away. It is a feature present in almost every modern chat application.

Thats pretty exciting. My work tried slack and it started dying around the 2500 user mark, and hipchat, what we use currently, is pretty horrible.

Do you guys have retention policy settings and are able to handle something like 7000 member rooms for announcements?

We do not have any retention policy settings right now. Messages are kept until you delete the channel they're in.

Our product focus is on making VOIP the best it can for gamers/gaming communities. Definitely not huge enterprises!

However, 7000 member rooms for announcements? No sweat. We've had @everyone notifications targeted at upwards of 20,000+ users at once in a single server. I actually wrote the code that handles that. Lots of streamers, game developers and stuff actually use discord for announcements. One of the bigger ones in my recent memory was the Star Citizen PTU server, the devs used it for chat + announcements.

You could make a good amount of money if you focus on the few and relatively easy enterprise features of retention policies, sso & message export. Many large corps are sticking with hip chat but hating it because it's the only thing that kind of works.

Rather, Slack isn't a tool for a 8000-person community.

8000 people? Is it like a forum with many threads and topics going on or is it really like an IRC chat room with 8000 people in it?

Is this the biggest react community? Is being on Discord something they prefer to being on reddit or perhaps a forum?

I exaggerated a bit - they have 7656 at the moment (after being 'shut down'). It was the mostly-official place to discuss react, flux, webpack, other tech and libraries in the react ecosystem etc.

In it's peak, there were lots of channels for all the different parts and facets, including geo-oriented channels as well.

Now, its mostly just the dancing shark gif http://i.imgur.com/I2CBRBZ.png

> 8000 people? Is it like a forum with many threads and topics going on or is it really like an IRC chat room with 8000 people in it?

I'm a member of the UX Slack (https://www.designerhangout.co/) who have ~6k members, and it's pretty active. It's a cross between a forum and IRC, and (from a user perspective) fails pretty badly because of it :)

A major reason is Slack's limit of 10000 messages per free Slack. So conversations get lost within 2-3 days, there's no way to find them unless you've starred them. With no threading discussions don't happen well - there's a lot of noise (like IRC) which can't be filtered out.

Summary: No way to organise/archive knowledge (same q's again and again); noise of IRC interspersed w discussions, Slack's hard limit of visible messages.

Ever consider moving to Discord? No chat history limit there.

Not my call :) But I think the network effect of Slack has got too big for a move - it's become the GitHub of chat systems.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Discord is exploding right now.

Well, we'll be finding out at my work if it is, where we just adopted it company wide for about that many people.

If you're not paying they won't be too keen. Slack just doesn't work very well with that many people and channels - the app just grind to a halt on my Mac.

If you're paying 35k/year however, it would be interesting to see how they react to that...

Yeah, we're paying as a company, not sure of the amount though.