The future of MNFurs.org, Forums and Discord

Hello all!

This is still very much still “in discovery” but we wanted to start the communication and transparency with our org about changes we’ll be making in 2024 to the MNFurs.org website, and Discord. Technology is always changing, and always adapting, that wont ever change, its just how things work. With that being said, there’s some aging technology and infrastructure with Minnesota Furs that will be getting attention and love this year.

At a high level, these changes involve:

1. Overhauling, reskinning and cleaning up the MNFurs.org website
2. Cleaning up and sun-setting upwards 80% of the forums
3. Adding MNFurs.org and Discord account integration & cross-linking

There’s a lot of reasons for making these decisions and let me gloss over the reasons at a high level. Also I want to clarify none of these changes will be made overnight. This all will be done in stages over the course of 2024.

The Website

MNFurs.org is sometimes for a majority of our community, the first impression of the organization. Because of this, its important that people find the information that they need when they land on the website for the first time… or for the 500^th time. We’ll be cleaning up a lot of the pages on the website, the navigation, and the forums. We want to make the relevant, current information easier to access, and we want it to be conditional based on your session. If you’re a guest to the website, more of the “What is MNFurs” will be front and center. If you’re logged in, you’re likely a returning user and upcoming events will be more of the focus. We have a lot of other exciting ideas for the website after it is revised, but we’re keeping that roadmap private for now until we understand the scope and the effort involved for the various different “new features”.

The Forums

The metrics behind the forums show a downwards trend of utilization by the community and its been neglected when it comes to organization and cleanliness. With that, the forums will be mostly archived. There is a lot of history on the forums and we want to preserve that. Also we understand that sometimes the forums will be more accessible to others than the alternatives (like discord). So the plan will be to archive a majority of the forums posts, categories and threads. Since the RSVP system for the website relies on the forums for RSVP’ing for events and discussion, that’ll remain. We’re still in talks if we’ll have a general forum left open for general discussion, but the management of several categories will be going away.

Discord Integration

We wont be forcing people onto Discord, especially if people don’t want to use that platform. But we’ll be making changes for existing users of Discord and the official MNFurs discord server. At the time of writing this post, the MNFurs discord user-base is sitting at a total of 1,221 users. Thats a lot of people. Moderating a community of that size takes a considerable amount of effort by our [lovely] team of volunteer moderators, and sometimes they’re faced with abuse of alt accounts, [discord] ban evasions, and other issues that plague the server with it being a “publicly accessible” platform. In 2024, we’ll be adding integration with MNFurs.org that’ll require users of the discord to link their discord account with a MNFurs.org account for “Full Feature Usage”.

In Summary

We’re looking forward to the new offerings and new beginnings for the website, platforms and org. We cant do this alone so if you’re interested in helping make this change, please reach out! You can email volunteers@mnfurs.org to express an interest. We’re looking for:

• Web Designers (UI, Wireframing, CSS, etc)
• Web Developers (React, PHP & WordPress technologies)
• Discord Moderators
• Discord Bot Maintainers

Though, Hazarding a guess in the interest of helping understand the stages for this. We believe the timeline would look something like this:

FAQ

We’re sure there’s going to be a lot of questions. We’re still exploring everything, but what we do know and what we think will be asked, will be outlined here. More details will come.

When will this all begin?

Light work, planning and outlining is starting now. This is mostly just understanding the vision and objectives of the efforts. The actual work will begin sometime shortly after April 2024.

How will I be able to access archived forum posts?

We’re still planning this out, but the forums after being sunset will have an easy and clear path to review the (read-only) posts that had been archived.

If I don’t want to link my Discord account, Will I be kicked?

Not all all. But your access to channels may be limited. Discord users that don’t want to associate their Discord accounts to MNFurs.org will be given limited access. We don’t know what this limited access will look like, but it’ll likely reserve a lot of the “interest subgroups”, mature role channels, and flagship channels for “Verified Accounts”. This’ll leave a general channel of sorts for “Limited accounts”. This is all subject to change.

When it changes, how long will I have to link my account before channels will be limited?

We’ll likely give a generous grace-period for people to link their accounts before we start enforcing verified accounts to access all the channels of the discord. It’ll likely be within the range of 3-6 months.

I want to help!

Awesome! We cant do it alone! Please email volunteers@mnfurs.org. All individuals must be 18 years of age or older to volunteer.