The new feature in Discord resembles Internet forums with a sprinkle of Reddit.

On Discord, the dream of the 1990s is still alive.

 

On Wednesday, Discord unveiled a brand-new function dubbed “Forum Channels” to enable more structured and asynchronous conversations within servers.

 

The goal of Forum Channels appears to be to make it simpler for some talks to go on for extended periods of time without having to worry about a topic change or another conversation taking over and burying the conversation in the annals of chat log history.

 

Large servers, where it can be challenging to keep up with several, concurrent, open-ended chats, will benefit the most from the feature. Members of these servers frequently muffle channels because they become too distracting or lose track of important talks when they take a little break.

 

For each topic, server moderators can establish particular permissions and rules in order to moderate discussion and maintain focus.

The term “forum” conjures up images of Internet discussion boards from the 1990s and 2000s (and even current ones in some places, such here at Ars), but the feature appears to be just as much (if not more) influenced by Reddit, a website that in many ways developed from the traditional forums.

 

Despite this, Discord’s Forum Channels lack a clear upvoting/downvoting system. However, in principle, server moderators might implement a rudimentary equivalent system using emote reactions.

 

Starting today, the new forums feature will gradually roll out to all servers with Community features enabled. It had been revealed and tested in February, but only a small number of high-end servers could access it.

 

Discord has been delivering new features at a fairly rapid clip lately. The platform also provided voice chat capability for Xbox game consoles. Both of these developments helped focus conversations and prevent main channels from becoming crowded.