Announcing the Raizing Cave Club Discord :-)

[qmish]

something like google docs

like those akashicverse (or force, cant remember) docs?

[Jeneki]

Kaneko Success Club Discord when?

[Mark_MSX]

Nothing like a good old fashion shmup forum dogpile ha. Glad you guys are having fun.

[maximo310]

I'm not sure what's going on w/ some of these responses, but there's nothing to lose here with having more public content & discussion on other platforms.

Ideally, I want to see more updated resources for the Hi-score & strategy sub-forums (especially with a megathread for each w/ hyperlinks), but I'm not sure if that will happen in the near future.

[Square_Air]

There's always been IRCs alongside the farm, so I don't think it's a big problem. The farm is a better long term solution though, since for reasons that other have stated, discord isn't the best place to find or store information. Discord can be great for continuous short term conversations though. I am a little confused by the oddly specific function of the discord, but I guess I understand why you would want to focus on the two most popular companies, I just wish it was a general shmup strategy discord instead so I could make actual use of it. The thing is, isn't the main shmups discord already full of Cave and Raizing discussion? I wouldn't know because the general shmups discord is just kind of an unappealing mess to me.

Wake me up when the Psikyo-Takumi Club Discord launches.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

p.s.
Af for forum, THANKS SHUB-NIGGURATH that system11 is good old phpbb (though there are modern solutions like XenForo or whatever AssemblerGames' successor uses) and not one of those "moder re-imagination" of forums like discourse (ex. https://forum.mutable-instruments.net/ ) or vanilla (ex. https://forum.audiob.us/) which are basically neutered parody of forums

Oh my god, those are genuinely awful to browse. This fits right in with my theory that people are easily swayed away from using genuinely practical and useful solutions to problems we already have because they're constantly distracted by MODERN!! NEW!! designs that look visually EXCITING!! but functionally are actually are worse solutions than what we had before.

Nothing like a good old fashion shmup forum dogpile ha. Glad you guys are having fun.

This seems like a somewhat flippant response and doesn't respond to any of the genuine questions or criticism... Like I said, if you want to make a personal fanclub for listeners of your "The Electric Underground" podcast, go for it. It's the trendy thing to do nowadays, every Twitch streamer makes their own Discord channel. I get that you're really enamored with DDP judging by your significant skill/progress in it, but it seems unusual to make a Discord advertised by your website that's focused only on those two specific companies when in your words: "The purpose of this website [for The Electric Underground] is to be an accessible home base for hardcore shmup content." I mean, if you're that into Dodonpachi and Garegga that you wanna make a fanclub Discord for CAVE and Raizing, go for it I guess, but personally it still seems like it would be better for your purposes to make a single Discord for The Electric Underground for general listeners, and then subchannels for #CAVE and #Raizing rather than excluding potential discussion of "hardcore shmup content" because it's not CAVE or Raizing related.

I feel like a consistently updated wiki is the best solution and I'm not sure why no one else seems to agree.

I think a good wiki would be a beneficial add-on, but it would not be able to actually replace a forum.

The forum has several major advantages to a wiki format for the purposes of community. Even with a wiki, you'd still need a forum for the community to be able to discuss and engage with people; a wiki is just a repository of information and not meant as a discussion forum after all. It's also harder to see discussions of how that information was obtained, the accuracy of it, etc, without going through a page's individual history. That's not to say wikis have bad information, there's solidly curated wikis out there such as https://en.touhouwiki.net that are a great source of information, but you also have to have the volunteers willing to do the editing and formatting. It's a lot easier to quickly chat about an obscure game on a message forum rather than making a decent wiki for it especially when concerned if your information is accurate.

The way the shmups forum is setup in its Strategy and Hi-Score section already emulates some of a Wiki's best elements, which is probably partly why nobody from the forum has setup a separate Wiki. There's indexes in the respective forums to current Hi-Score threads, and the Strategy Section highlights game discussion threads and marks the ones that are an indepth guide accordingly. It's also much quicker and easier to then see followup forum responses in the respective threads discussing information accuracy, updates, etc, than it is when looking through a wiki's history section. The information may not be quite as easily browsable and may be more fragmented than a good detailed wiki, but there are plenty of wikis where the game information is fragmented and incomplete, and no indepth strategy discussion is to be found. The forum in a sense gets the job of a wiki done more or less for the bigger games where there's a good wealth of knowledge, and even for less known doujin games there's often very solid quality information being discussed that's available.

A wiki would certainly be a valuable asset in addition to a forum but it's a LOT of effort involved. You need to curate the quality of the content, setup linking, categories, images, pay for the hosting, etc. Vandalism is also a major concern in that kind of publicly editable format, whereas in a forum post users cannot edit each others' posts (aside from a moderator doing it obviously). The indepth strategy discussions in the forum here will never be at risk of vandalism unless it's a moderator doing it (edit: or now that I think about it, if the user later decides to blank all their posts by editing them or has their account compromised, but those are relatively rare and unusual), so that's one major advantage of the forum's format. I can see it being useful to save the major game guides on a wiki style platform, but it could never entirely replace the forum since the way the forum is being operated has several benefits a wiki does not offer.

[qmish]

functionally are actually are worse solutions

Often, yes (except stuff like "autofit any display" which is must have in modern web design).

doesn't respond to any of the genuine questions

Like those "anti bot introduction" bollocks

wiki

Wiki:Talk system is pain in !@#$ to use, agree.