Discord - voice and text chat

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joby_toss
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Discord - voice and text chat

#1 Post by joby_toss »

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Anyone tried this one? Any good?

https://discordapp.com/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... cord&hl=en
All-in-one voice and text chat for gamers that’s free, secure, and works on both your desktop and phone.
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tactictoe
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Re: Discord

#2 Post by tactictoe »

It is going to be hard to find one who did test it. Most of online multiplayer game MMO and the like (world of warcraft, Dragon age Inquisition, etc...) have them own dedicated chat program, voice channel and sometime more. Now they said time to replace skype? HUH??? I never used Skype when I played my favourites online multiplayer game and I guess nobody does, wrong guess?
Better to say it's a Skype in disguise dedicated to gamer.
Anyway thanks for the link, I might try this one later just to check if it is popular and the average age of people using it.

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webfork
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Re: Discord

#3 Post by webfork »

Haven't tested it but I found what looks like a reasonably even review:

[Headline should be] By For Gamers, By Gamers

License: freeware.

It looks like the main reasons to use this are to keep system resource usage low and avoid the “Freeium” status of other clients (TeamSpeak has a server charge; Skype is bloated adware). Unlike other clients I’ve been testing lately with similar capabilities, this one allows for things like chatrooms. Unlike my current favorite (qTox) it requires a server(s) and it’s not an open program (can’t get an independent code audit).

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Userfriendly
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Re: Discord

#4 Post by Userfriendly »

Safe to say that Discord is already the king of voice chat clients right now. Not just gaming but for all kinds of online communities. It's all free. I'm convinced that it's the best right now. Video chat among other things is missing but its a planned feature. https://blog.discordapp.com/upcoming-fe ... ends-list/

It's kinda portable if you use it through a web browser but it has limited functionality compared to the desktop client which can be made somewhat made portable with yaP. Lacks self updating because it needs update.exe thing which I can't figure out how to make portable with the entire thing. Found someone who made a PAF launcher for it but its not clean and has quirks.

I noticed more and more apps/installers have nuget .nupkg/update.exe packages in them. Multiple steps of extracting and going through lib/net45 folders to get to the actual program. They all look like google chrome browser based apps.

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smaragdus
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Re: Discord 0.0.296

#5 Post by smaragdus »

I cannot test Discord right because I do not know a single person who uses it. I suppose that its audio quality cannot be worse than Skype.

There are some aspects about Discord which I do not like:
- I suppose there must be a bug in Discord version 0.0.296 which prevents it from exiting- right-click on tray icon - Quit Discord - doesn't exit it, I have to kill it via a task manager.
- The user has no control whatsoever upon Discord installation- it installs where it likes (in AppData- a vicious practice introduced by Google Chrome) without asking the user.
- Update check cannot be disabled from settings.
- There is no About telling the actual version number so the user needs to rummage in AppData to get the current version.
- The Change Log page is unpleasant and it doesn't use the actual version numbers but the release dates.

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Userfriendly
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Re: Discord

#6 Post by Userfriendly »

Well you don't need to know anyone to test it. There's a lot of public servers you can join. It's mostly used for text chat ala IRC but each server has multiple channels for text and voice. Mostly game related but you can find some for anime, programming, reddit, even an online radio server that streams music via bots. You can search some public ones here: https://www.discordservers.com/ and https://discord.me/servers/

- I don't know about the tray icon one. Could be OS related. WFM.
- Yeah that's to bypass admin restrictions or UAC stuff. Let's the program silently update. With the nature of the program being dependent on centralized servers. Being outdated would probably cause it not to work well. So doing it the google chrome way seems like a necessity.
- Yeah the program starts up via update.exe "Update.exe --processStart Discord.exe". If you run Discord.exe directly then it can't update at all.

Discord is more for larger scale videogame or large community chatting much like teamspeak/mumble/ventrilo/IRC. Stuff like skype/hangouts/viber/slack/whatsapp/tox might be more tailored for private, business, or mobile environments. From what I can see, the main advantage over other clients like teamspeak and mumble is that you can easily and instantly create a chat server for free.

If you don't play online multiplayer videogames or do any online hobbyist stuff then it might be useless to you. Though I can see some neat uses for it. Like create your own server then at that point forward you can connect to it from anywhere that has a web browser.

Also smaragdus, I noticed you're having issues with some other programs your testing. There might be some other unrelated things that is not working with your configuration.

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smaragdus
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Re: Discord

#7 Post by smaragdus »

@Userfriendly
Thanks for your response and for the public Discord servers.
Also smaragdus, I noticed you're having issues with some other programs your testing. There might be some other unrelated things that is not working with your configuration.
The only program I can remember that fails to run on my system (Windows 8 x64) is RedNotebook, at least right now I can't recall other problematic programs. About Discord, I have tested versions 0.0.290, 0.0.291, 0.0.292, 0.0.293, 0.0.294, 0.0.295 and the problem with program termination via system tray icon appears for me for the first time in version 0.0.296.

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Midas
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Re: Discord

#8 Post by Midas »

FYI, Google now has its own free offer for mobile video chat: Google Duo (https://duo.google.com/). I tested it in Android, and it's pretty straightforward and light...

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webfork
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Re: Discord

#9 Post by webfork »

on a related note: http://www.curse.com has a similar effort and target audience. Probably not portable but Softpedia is listing it as freeware: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/O ... urse.shtml

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smaragdus
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Re: Discord

#10 Post by smaragdus »

@webfork
It seems that Curse (which, just like Discord, is Electron-based), offers some Premium services.

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Userfriendly
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Re: Discord

#11 Post by Userfriendly »

Curse now owned by Twitch who's owned by Amazon. Curse used to be just a site for downloading WoW addons. Now it seems like its setting up to try and compete with Discord. It's pretty bloated though since its merged with what used to be an addon manager/downloader. What's next? merge with Twitch app and Amazon app so you can stream, chat, and buy stuff all at the same time...

Makes me wonder how Discord will stay afloat if all they plan for monetization is cosmetics like themes and emotes, sound packs and some physical merchandise. Some sort of premium features monthly subscription is inevitable. Starting out free is great to gain awareness and build a big enough user base for potential customers. Just like Curse did by having pretty much the entire WoW community.

shnbwmn
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Re: Discord

#12 Post by shnbwmn »

Since Nov of last year, there has been a feature request open for portability: Portable installation option

There's also this project in early development, however there's not much details: https://github.com/jndachenhaus/discord-lite

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joby_toss
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Re: Discord

#13 Post by joby_toss »

I've just noticed that my son and his friends are using Discord, for about a month now. When I asked him why, he said he loves the fact that it shows who's talking (tooltips with avatars and such) while in game (any game). And it's also easy to use and you can create your own channel and give the link to whomever you want... But they are generation "superficial", so I don't know...

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webfork
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Re: Discord

#14 Post by webfork »

joby_toss wrote:... they are generation "superficial", so I don't know...
I'd say ease of communication and a clean interface that lets you know who you're talking to is a big deal. As the saying goes, it's easy to make it hard and hard to make it easy.

That said, good usability and features also seem to cause many to use programs that have bad core features like privacy, security, and processor efficiency. Tooltips with avatars are certainly not the sum of all features.

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Userfriendly
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Re: Discord

#15 Post by Userfriendly »

Two good portable launchers for discord. One written in Golang by crazy-max https://github.com/crazy-max/discord-portable and another by Demon.Devin with his modified PAF launcher https://github.com/demondevin/DiscordPortable

Older versions of the crazy-max launcher used symbolic link to sorta fool discord to save and read the settings in the program folder instead of User/AppData/Roaming/ (but a symlink fake folder thing remains here pointing towards the discord launcher folder). The latest version now just overrides USERPROFILE env var and it seems to work. Not sure how it works but it does. Must be a Golang thing.

Demon.Devin PAF launcher uses Junctions instead of Symlink. I still have a hard time grasping the difference between a junction and symlink....

There's also janky batch file launchers by MarioMasta64 which includes discord https://github.com/MarioMasta64/EverythingPortable

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