Mumble: https://www.mumble.info/
Popular, detailed website (not by me) with information about the issues with Discord: https://usemumble.neocities.org
Many users outside of the World of Warcraft community have moved to Mumble as an alternative platform, that is completely free, libre and open source. It is privacy respective, has excellent voice quality, and many features and plugins.
Discord is extremely privacy invasive (even with a throwaway account), Discord does extreme censorship, has overall poor quality servers that go down or robot often, is very resource intensive (which affects users with older computers), and a handful of other issues. There also have been cases where Discord cooperates fully with governments, which can hurt people in third world countries with very strict governments. This thread is not meant to be a circlej about privacy, but if you really wish to understand privacy a little better, I encourage starting with this video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjspu7QV7O0
I’m not saying that you need to delete Discord (you can if you wish), but I at least ask to provide users the option for using Mumble instead (even if it’s one of the many random public servers). Or at minimum use Mumble for voice comms (like for raids and group events and stuff), so you don’t need to alienate players.
I’d like to point out, I know Ventrillo and Teamspeak are commonly mentioned alongside Mumble, Mumble has not only come a long way and has had MANY features added, but also Ventrillo and Teamspeak are both not privacy respective. Also sorry if this is considered off-topic, feel free to move it. But this was relating to World of Warcraft, and targeted at community’s and guilds and stuff. So I figured it’s best here.
If you want to link stuff, even without the proper trust rank you can just put a ` on each side and it’ll appear like this.
www.google.com
You only need trust for the hyperlink itself like this, it’s annoying that there is no option to automatically not hyperlink people without level 3 can post links to website without having to know the quirk of formatting.
That being said, I’m curious on this. Personally I find Discord pretty convenient, much moreso than I remember Mumble being.
I am aware you can use codeblocks, I just wasn’t sure if that was allowed and didn’t want to get in trouble for “circumventing hyperlink block” or something.
I will edit the links into my original post though. Thank you!
No. This is not an ad, there is nothing to advertise realistically and no I am not being paid. It’s completely free, open source, anybody can view and submit code to the project.
I’m new to WoW and notice many guilds and communities using Discord, and it is frustrating because Discord has privacy issues, and forcing users onto Discord just to raid isn’t fun
(This is more to spread awareness)
Not sure it’s advertisement but for people concerned about privacy, things like discord being a standard are annoying. At least with discord you can run it in browser and lock that down as much as you can.
Thank you for being understanding, however you are still forced to create a Discord account.
Also Discord hits people randomly with forced phone number verification (meaning you are forced to give up your phone number to them as well).
If they had it their way everyone would use the WoW integrated voice chat system.
These third party voice platforms do naturally handle mass users much better than Blizzards integrated system. They have ACL permissions and better voice quality, etc.
I think Blizzard really just doesn’t care, they added what they did for small groups but they will never win out against any of the third party platforms such as Mumble or Discord.
Discord is just a very popular 3rd party product that everyone uses outside of the game.
I honestly don’t understand why we can’t just use a privacy respective platform though instead of forcing everyone onto Discord. We have alternatives. Use them?
But I pay a monthly fee for our server. How do you use mumble free of charge?
You have options.
You can rent a server from someone else (of course they are in control of the server, and can log anything they wish, although debatable better than forcing users to make an account and using Discord, at least Mumble can be used “anonymously” because it requires no accounts).
Use a public server. There are many servers that are public, many are listed right in Mumble’s directory. These are just people who host and list them in the directory.
There are also many who host publicly and just don’t list it on Mumble’s directories. I know there are a handful of librehosters who have them, and communities around some popular places it’s just a matter of finding them.
If you have experience, you can setup the server on a home server, or right on your computer (which means connecting to your network, which is a security concern). Also if your computer/server/network goes down, nobody can reach it. You also most likely have a dynamic IP meaning you will need to setup DynamicDNS and buy a domain for ~$10 a year.
Another option if you have experience is setting it up on a VPS (~$2.50/month – then you don’t need people connecting to your network, and has much higher up-times. This is most likely what the people you rent from are doing, the difference is you have more control). You will also need to purchase a domain (~$10 a year) if you want a nice domain my-wow-mumble.com otherwise they will just use the static IP your VPS provides 127.0.0.1:port)
The latter two are more complicated, but if you know what you’re doing you can have it setup in less than 30min. It does give you more control. I doubt you have the level of experience, but just figured I’d mention them in case anyone wanted to learn and just so they’re known.
So your options entail renting from someone, which doesn’t meet the free criteria, or exposing your own hardware to possible intrusions to do it yourself, and all this on public and unregulated servers…and this seemed like a good sales pitch to you?
