Classic Gaming [Discord Server] - MiSTer Community

[KevinDL]

I know the server has been mentioned on these forums before by various users, just figured it was time I do so myself in a dedicated topic.
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Classic Gaming is a Discord server that houses to our knowledge the largest public MiSTer community on the platform (MiSTer is a rather big deal on SmokeMonsters private server as well). Below you will see our invite link to the server, feel free to share it with anyone you like.

https://discord.gg/UDu5ztY

The MiSTer group is quite active. You will find a wide variety of subjects related to the MiSTer project being discussed and developers collaborating on new / existing features.
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Is Sorg on the server?

No. Not yet. We hope one day he will join and partake... but until that day comes we simply wish him the best.
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Sorg if you read this your fans and fellow developers would love to have you around. I understand Discord can be a distraction... just need to ignore it when work needs doing. You might find it useful to add instant interaction to those that follow your project to your work-flow.

Bottom line is the server will do everything we can to support the MiSTer project.

[Sorgelig]

Thanks for invitation. Unfortunately i have no time to be in online chat. So i prefer offline chats like forum. In the forum everyone can read posts any time without asking again

[Newsdee]

I like the server and the IRC vibe it has, but is there a way to prevent the app from scrolling to latest messages?
It would be much easier for me to follow if I could continue where I left off...

[JamesF]

Sorge, if you can, please pin this thread so people can find the discord server link.
This is indeed the largest MiSTer discord server and the majority of help questions are answered there before nagging you on the forum.

[Sorgelig]

Sorge, if you can, please pin this thread so people can find the discord server link.

I prefer if someone will make a FAQ in this forum and answer a popular questions than direct users somewhere else.
I know people today don't like to read. They like to open the page and shoot the questions right away. That's why online chats are popular today. But it doesn't mean it's useful for FAQ purpose.

[kitrinx]

Sorge, if you can, please pin this thread so people can find the discord server link.

I prefer if someone will make a FAQ in this forum and answer a popular questions than direct users somewhere else.
I know people today don't like to read. They like to open the page and shoot the questions right away. That's why online chats are popular today. But it doesn't mean it's useful for FAQ purpose.

Every form of media has its advantages and disadvantages. The persistence of information on forums, if it's not buried in a 50 page long mega-thread, is indeed one of its strong points. The ability for users to get help, developers to collaborate, and people to speak casually about how they feel about features is actually better in live chat. There are also pinned messages there that link to the wiki, files, commonly asked questions, hardware peripherals and sellers, and other things of use to MiSTer enthusiasts. Users help each other all day in the help channel. It is definitely a bit distracting if you are coding, but it's not worthless. There's a lot of valuable feedback and ideas to be had there.

Regardless, it does not hurt to have more than one tool in your toolbox. Maybe sneak in anonymously and check it out, then judge.

[Sorgelig]

Every form of media has its advantages and disadvantages. The persistence of information on forums, if it's not buried in a 50 page long mega-thread, is indeed one of its strong points. The ability for users to get help, developers to collaborate, and people to speak casually about how they feel about features is actually better in live chat. There are also pinned messages there that link to the wiki, files, commonly asked questions, hardware peripherals and sellers, and other things of use to MiSTer enthusiasts. Users help each other all day in the help channel. It is definitely a bit distracting if you are coding, but it's not worthless. There's a lot of valuable feedback and ideas to be had there.
Regardless, it does not hurt to have more than one tool in your toolbox. Maybe sneak in anonymously and check it out, then judge.

I have many years of IRC experience. Believe me I know what is it.
If there are so much willing to help the users then why i don't see much activity on Wiki? Your argument about "buried in a 50 pages thread" doesn't work for Wiki. It's more about hype than help. I cannot be everywhere. Live chat is a big distracting point for me. I'm already old for online life. Prefer to do something than hanging on chats.

P.S.: it's also possible to make a FAQ thread here and reserve several first posts. Then add answer little by little. Everything is possible when you a willing to do.
Live chat is ok for people chatting about when they have nothing to do. But it's definitely not the place to manage the project.

[kitrinx]

I have many years of IRC experience. Believe me I know what is it.
If there are so much willing to help the users then why i don't see much activity on Wiki? Your argument about "buried in a 50 pages thread" doesn't work for Wiki. It's more about hype than help. I cannot be everywhere. Live chat is a big distracting point for me. I'm already old for online life. Prefer to do something than hanging on chats.

It's not that I haven't tried to encourage people to edit the wiki, they just seem scared to do so for some reason. I understand, you get a lot of work done every day. Not worth disrupting that.

[Sorgelig]

So, as you see discord only distracting the people from gathering and making the info in one STATIC place.
Someone post file, another one downloaded it and then everyone forgot it.

50ppl will come to ask the same question - another one will answer the same question 50 times instead to write it on the wiki.

You don't know how many valuable info lost forever from such IRC/discord channels. I'm not talking about MiSTer but about some old lost projects.. Forums save more info, live chats save nothing! Only web pages sometimes can be recovered from web archives.

[warham]

In the future will it be possible to open and or edit the wiki easily from mister ?
Seems like a nice way to drive traffic to the wiki and encourage them to contribute.

[onaryc29]

i did not know that the wiki can be edited without any kind of registration it should be on the wiki.

Is it ok if i add in the "Core configuration string" a paragraph which describes the prefix options for enabling/disabling osd menu entry? (it will not be complete but could help)

[BitsNStuff]

Just wanted to pop in and say hello to everybody as I'm a moderator on the Classic Gaming server.

To a certain extent I agree that the wiki is in some ways the end goal in terms of information on the project but I say that as somebody who is well aware that many people will just never want to spend time reading the wiki to find information, it's a shame but that's often just the way that people are much of the time.

I do think that the ideal situation is to use both the wiki and the Discord server and have them feeding off each other as happens at the moment. One of the advantages/disadvantages that I see with the Classic Gaming server is that things move so quickly on there and there are times that changes are in discussion with devs and users long before they ever show up on here or are implemented on GitHub.

It's very much like a load of MiSTer fan and developers just being together and discussing the project and their experiences with it and people are very passionate about it so I do really think that having a community like that where there's constant discussion really is invaluable but that doesn't in any way diminish the importance of the wiki.

Both a are a work in progress and at their most valuable when they feed into each other as a two way process.

I know a lot of the devs/users are already members of the server so see the importance already, of course, as KevinDL has already said we're of course very happy to see other community members pay us a visit too. It doesn't replace here or the wiki and it doesn't want or attempt to.

It's a server with free membership and there's no advertising or sponsorship involved and the reason it's run is because people really care about amazing projects like this and want to benefit from it and also feed back into the MiSTer community as much as possible so that others also benefit as much as possible. Hopefully we'll see some more of you lot on there at some point.

[Lightwave]

many people will just never want to spend time reading the wiki to find information, it's a shame but that's often just the way that people are much of the time.

I would suggest that MiSTer is the wrong project for anyone not patient enough to read about setup and configuration. Maybe someday MisTer will reach the ease of a plug 'n play Classic/Mini console, but for now you really need to be willing to spend some time learning/tinkering .

[olin]

I've never used Discord before, so I thought to give it a try and read a bit what people are discussing about MiSTer, but unfortunately it does not seem to work for me. What I did:
- I clicked on the link
- chose my username
- cancelled the email nagging popup
- read the intro channel asking me to "You must assign yourself a role to gain access to the rest of the server…", "By using the corresponding reaction(s) [:analogue_wh: :logo_snes: :MiSter: :retroarch: :desktop:] you assign yourself the role required to view / send messages in each of those individual categories"

This is the point where I can not pass through: how do I "use the corresponding reaction" ? I clicked several times on the icons and names of the channels and nothing happened. I tried to google it, and found "Hover over a message and click the Add a reaction icon". But If I hover over over the MiSTer icon I can see just a label with the name of the channel ":MiSter:" and when I move my mouse to click on it the label disappears. There is no (obvious to me) Add reaction icon as mentioned in the googled advice.

Is there a Wiki about how to use Discord? (sorry, could not help myself, but seriously is there ?). I tried to click on the message "Learn about Discord at your own pace by exploring the floating quest indicators.", but nothing happened - no help or text that would give me some basics how to use Discord. I tried to click on different icons, but nothing happened. How do I even distinguish the "quest indicators" form the rest of the UI in order to learn about Discord? I guess Discord is just not for me...

[BitsNStuff]

I've never used Discord before, so I thought to give it a try and read a bit what people are discussing about MiSTer, but unfortunately it does not seem to work for me. What I did:
- I clicked on the link
- chose my username
- cancelled the email nagging popup
- read the intro channel asking me to "You must assign yourself a role to gain access to the rest of the server…", "By using the corresponding reaction(s) [:analogue_wh: :logo_snes: :MiSter: :retroarch: :desktop:] you assign yourself the role required to view / send messages in each of those individual categories"

This is the point where I can not pass through: how do I "use the corresponding reaction" ? I clicked several times on the icons and names of the channels and nothing happened. I tried to google it, and found "Hover over a message and click the Add a reaction icon". But If I hover over over the MiSTer icon I can see just a label with the name of the channel ":MiSter:" and when I move my mouse to click on it the label disappears. There is no (obvious to me) Add reaction icon as mentioned in the googled advice.

Is there a Wiki about how to use Discord? (sorry, could not help myself, but seriously is there ?). I tried to click on the message "Learn about Discord at your own pace by exploring the floating quest indicators.", but nothing happened - no help or text that would give me some basics how to use Discord. I tried to click on different icons, but nothing happened. How do I even distinguish the "quest indicators" form the rest of the UI in order to learn about Discord? I guess Discord is just not for me...

Hi olin,

I'm pretty new to Discord myself and like anything else it can seem far more complicated than it really is at first.

Were you using the browser version of Discord or one of the desktop or mobile apps? The learn about Discord part is obviously a part of Discord itself rather than anything to do with out server so it sounds like you may have something blocking whatever it would normally show you when you clicked on that section, that may well be what's causing the issue when trying to assign yourself a role also.

All it takes to assign a role would be to select these icons here, you select the one I've shown if you want to have access to everything or whichever of the others if you only want to access some areas. These can be changed at any point.

[olin]

Were you using the browser version of Discord or one of the desktop or mobile apps?

Thank you for your info. I used web browser (Firefox, 67.0.2 (64-bit)) to open the link posted on the first message of this thread. When hovering mouse pointer over the MiSTer icon (as indicated on your image) the shape of the mouse cursor changed to 'disabled' and clicking did not do anything (at least anything visible on the UI). So I guess the option was not available. See the attached image - sorry for the poor photo quality I used my phone to capture the mouse cursor.

Edit: all of the little icons on the same row do the same: all show the disabled cursor sign.

Edit2: I tried few more times, this time the web app crashed, please see the second image.

[KevinDL]

Were you using the browser version of Discord or one of the desktop or mobile apps?

Thank you for your info. I used web browser (Firefox, 67.0.2 (64-bit)) to open the link posted on the first message of this thread. When hovering mouse pointer over the MiSTer icon (as indicated on your image) the shape of the mouse cursor changed to 'disabled' and clicking did not do anything (at least anything visible on the UI). So I guess the option was not available. See the attached image - sorry for the poor photo quality I used my phone to capture the mouse cursor.

Edit: all of the little icons on the same row do the same: all show the disabled cursor sign.

Edit2: I tried few more times, this time the web app crashed, please see the second image.

Clearly the process is a work-in-progress. I've just updated the read-me channel and the joining process to make it as simple as it could possibly be. My only guess as to your continued problem is that you haven't registered your Discord username with an email address. I also added a ask-for-help channel. If I see you in there I can manually assign you what you need.

[JamesF]

You have to register an account on Discord with an email.
Only then you can click the reaction icons and join the server.

[digitron]

I agree with Sorgelig, I really like the forum format here. Just like Shmups System11, not everything needs to fall under the typical subreddit/discord combo that so many try to do these days. In-fact, having a single repository is the most efficient means of documentation opposed to info-sprawl.

A Wiki (already on GitHub) with the forum format is perfect for me.

However, if you're bored and just want to chat in Discord, no one can stop you either so just do it and chat away, lol.

[MartinW]

On the subject of editing the Wiki:

It's not that I haven't tried to encourage people to edit the wiki, they just seem scared to do so for some reason.

People will be afraid of editing the wiki and putting something up there that is not correct. There are not that many people that know categorically was is and isn't correct, so sadly, the number of people that can really edit the wiki will be similar. Unless changes to the Wiki are subject to review / verification / approval? I don't know I've not edited one before

PS: For what it's worth I read the Wiki in great detail both when investigating the purchase of a DE10 for MiSTer and after for the setup. And I still do go back to it whenever I look at something I've not looked at before. But I also look at the various repos too to verify (as best I can) options and settings and stuff so maybe I am not such a typical user.

[Sorgelig]

Wiki shouldn't be edit by random user, but by experienced one. If you are familiar with MiSTer, then usually you know the matter and pretty much able to improve the Wiki.