Choice of Discord platform

JuliaCon 2020
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It really stinks that discord was chosen as the official discussion platform for juliacon. It leaves me completely unable to participate. They flagged my account immediately upon registration (before I even had a chance to read or post a message), which requires me to provide a phone number to even use the service. Given their privacy policy, I am completely unwilling to give them my phone number.

My understanding from reading elsewhere is that this is a common experience for people to be unable to signup without providing a phone number, so in effect the choice of discord excludes anyone who either doesn’t have a phone or is unwilling to divulge their phone-number to a company with an invasive privacy policy.

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While it’s not very active as of now, feel free to join Zulip. There’s a juliacon stream where you could casually chat about everything you want. :slight_smile:

https://julialang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/248238-juliacon

Other than that, I understand your gripes with Discord’s policies but it’s a very popular tool for communication and people do like and use it a lot.

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it’s actually very reasonable imo. I check it almost everyday

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Note that Adam is already active on Zulip :wink:

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I mean, sure, I do that as well. My comment was aiming at the relatively low activity in comparison to e.g. Slack.

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. We will keep this in mind when we re-visit how to best facilitate conversation next year. The reality is there’s no perfect platform that will work for everyone so hopefully the Zulip or Slack workspaces help in the interim.

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requires me to provide a phone number to even use the service

I wonder if you can accomplish this with a burner phone or service such as https://voice.google.com/u/0/signup for cheap or free.

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