Discord mimics Reddit with new forum feature

On Wednesday, Discord announced a new feature called “Forum Channels”that allows for more organized and asynchronous discussions on servers.

The intent of forum channels seems to be to make it easier to continue certain conversations for extended periods of time without worrying that a topic change or other simultaneous conversation will bury the topic in the annals of chat log history.

This feature will be most useful on large servers where multiple simultaneous open conversations can make it difficult to track. Often, members of these servers may simply turn off channels because they become congested, or they may lose the plot in conversations they are interested in when they leave for a few minutes.

The word “forum”evokes internet forums from the 90s and 2000s (and in some places still today, such as right here at Ars), but this feature seems to draw as much, if not more, inspiration from Reddit, platforms that are largely derived from those classic forums.

However, Discord forum channels do not have an explicit up/down voting mechanism, although in theory server moderators could contribute something remotely similar via emotes.

Starting today, the new forums feature is gradually rolling out to all servers that have community features enabled. It was previously announced and tested back in February, but at the time it was only available on a select few large servers.

Discord has been a bit in tears lately with the introduction of new features. The platform introduced chats tied to specific voice channels – another step to help focus conversations and keep the main channels from clogging – and also released support for voice chat on Xbox game consoles.