Off-Topic Forums

There's clearly a need/desire from players, given the number of 'Roll20 chat only' corrections from the hard-working Moderator team. I would like to suggest bringing back a forum or better yet, branched sub-forums per game system for folks to discuss individual games, not specific to Roll20. It's understandable that the maintenance costs in both a monetary and effort perspective make hosting the forum on Roll20 unattractive. Perhaps instead of hosting natively on Roll20, explore partnerships or other business relationships to provide Roll20 users a consolidated place to go to talk about games that aren't specific to Roll20.

You can effectively do this already (and many people have) by creating a campaign with an open join link and posting it in LFG or elsewhere. Anyone interested in the chat topic of the campaign can join, and the GMs are moderators for it.

I was thinking along the lines of a plain regular forum that's easily accessible and available to new and old members alike. Creating a campaign seems to be a stop-gap solution and negates the benefits of the official moderator contributions. I would imagine the join link for such a campaign forum would be burried over time or clutter the LFG system.

Probably starting a wiki page listing off topic discussion campaigns would alleviate the lost link/LFG clutter. I'm not sure I understand your point about the official moderator contributions?

I'm someone who started a campaign for a community to talk about implementing AD&D 2E on Roll20 (it's called Roll2E and is found in the LFG if you go hunting). I agree with The Aaron that it's a method that effectively works, but I agree with Mark that it comes with a lot of drawbacks in being somewhat less open, less accessible, and somewhat less features than most forums. I think that Roll20 devs have said they didn't want the Off Topic forum anymore and at that time they started recommending Reddit, which has sections of Reddit/RPG and Reddit/Roll20app. Where Mark mentioned exploring outside relations to host such discussion, I feel like we've already been pointed to Reddit as the proposed host. Myself, I'd prefer a forum style too, rather than a Campaign (which I have) or Reddit (which I tried). I don't know if Roll20 itself will ever go that path again. Maybe. +1 to the idea when I get another vote. In the meantime I also wonder, isn't there another web forum where we could coalesce? Perhaps there is an existing RPG forum, that has perhaps a Virtual Tabletop sub-forum, which could then have a Roll20 sub-forum, which could then have threads for whartever games & campaigns & topics people wanted to discuss. Maybe something that could be lobbied within one of the existing larger RPG forums, like, you know, EN World, or forum.rpg.net or another one (?). Just an idea.

Google groups are another possibility.

From the Roll20 Community Code of Conduct : The Roll20 Forums exist to discuss topics directly related to the use of the Roll20 program. Anything that more fittingly could be discussed on another website SHOULD be discussed there. This stance is firm.  I will close this thread to release the votes.