OK, I’m DMing a group of kids at church and I’m looking for a message board type of interface to communicate between meetings. I thought of Facebook, but at least half of them likely don’t have an account. Same with most other social media suggestions.
Any thoughts, I’m a fish out of water on this.
Why can’t you use an app like GroupMe? It’s pretty much just a texting app, but they don’t have to exchange phone numbers. You’re the admin and can add people to the group when you want to. You can also have different groups, like the kids+adults, just the adults, etc. We use it for work and it works well to disseminate information. But, it does not allow for threads as far as I know. Just one continuous stream of message…
How about Discord? That seems to be popular with the younger types, even though it’s mostly used by/for gamers.
Yep, my son and his friends use Discord. Not just for gaming related chat either.
Discord is used on all of the Fandom/Wikia wikis.
Google+ maybe?
So Discord looks like a fancy IRC. Are the messages persistent so even if you aren’t logged in you can see what’s going on?
GroupMe sounds like one of those apps parents are getting warned about all the time. Social media is more of a devil than role playing games at church now. And I would like to have threads.
Thanks for the input, I’ll try Discord and see where I can get with it. It seems like it can be locked down enough to do what I want to do with it. And if I ever get a Minecraft server going again I can open it up for that too.
Might consider Slack, too.
Google Hangouts could work, but has less management features. And less overall features, I guess, too.
I was going to suggest Slack as well. I don’t use it, but it might make sense. I’ve considered it for a few projects.
A friend of mine, his dm runs individual quests for players in discord. It looks almost like a late 90’s bbs game.
@Woodman I’d look at Slack before Discord. Slack is for grownups who have work to do. Discord has features aimed more at a gamer audience.
Amusing, those ‘grownup’ features are why I was considering Slack as a way to ‘supplement’ a tabletop RPG: If I ever got a chance to run the mammoth Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign I was saying I’d want a tool like Slack as an adjunct for the players to give them a space to plan in, save the notes/maps/other artifacts, etc. Even assuming tabletop, as the BtMoM adventure is mammoth and the players don’t even get on the boat until a few chapters in.
Unrelated plea for help. Figure maybe we can make this our unofficial official idk wtf I’m doing halp thread of random questions. 
So yesterday I crawled into bed, watched TV on my Roku, read on my Kindle, surfed on my phone, went to sleep. This morning I woke up and turned on my Roku-powered tv so I could watch the news with my coffee and nothing. Not connected. Doesn’t even see my router. Kindle is fine. Phone is fine. Kids devices fine. My laptop not fine. DD17 laptop fine. Start the restart game. First just the rokus bc none of them connect so thought maybe it was some update they did and it messed it up. Nope. Then did the modem then router restart followed by restarting the rokus and my laptop (bc I have stuff to do). Nope. Then factory reset the rokus bc I like self-punishment. Nope. Got one to actually connect but so slow it took over five hours to set up.
So, I call my ISP just to be sure. They are good on their end. They can see my modem and it’s fine. They can see my router and don’t see any problems between the modem and router but it’s not their router so they can’t do much. Ok that’s fine.
Checked all connections. All cables are good. Switched to a different port/plug thingy in case it was going bad. Moved the router. Nothing. Absolutely no improvement at any point. Cell phone gets 30mbps on the wireless. My laptop gets 0.2 if it’ll connect at all.
So, wtf? I’ve exhausted all my technical knowledge and even learned some and exhausted that. All I want to do is listen to Pandora while cleaning the house and then watch Game of Thrones while I do paperwork and print out a couple of return labels. But no. I can’t bc I cannot get anything to see anything else. 
It’s a Linksys WRT1900ACS which they still sell but this one is a few years old. The app says it’s UTD on firmware but since I cannot connect with my laptop I can’t log in through a web browser to see if there are other setting or issues I can see on the browser that I can’t see on the app.
HALP!! 
Have you tried connecting your laptop to the router via an ethernet cable? That might at least allow you to log in to view settings and update the firmware if needed.
That is today’s project. I just ran out of time for that yesterday, since I have to research and learn each step of the process once one doesn’t work. I’m also wondering if a factory reset of the router might be the next step if being hard wired in doesn’t give me any insight. We have a desktop in there that I think is connected so it should be painless.
What I’m really hoping is that it was some glitch in the system and miraculously today it’ll work just fine. I have a bunch of stuff I really want to (need to) get done today and some involves use of the internet so I just want this fixed. I just don’t understand why three pieces of equipment are being treated this way when everything else is fine.
Ugh. I’d rather be at work fixing that diaphragmatic hernia that’s waiting for me than dealing with this. 
Connected through my desktop. Can’t see anything weird. As much as I hate yo do it I’m thinking the next step would be a factory reset? The firmware is up to date. There’s no blocks or anything on any devices or channels. Just three things it won’t let on at all. After the youngest goes to school and I have all my important stuff over the internet done I’ll try the factory reset I guess. The only thing that “changed” in the time between when things worked and when they didn’t is there was a big bang that woke me up. I never figured out what it was but my desktop was locked up and my printer claims it was shit down improperly, and both of those are in the room with the router. So my next thought process is some sort of electrical event caused it to be jacked up.
I don’t want to have to buy a new router. I just had a minor procedure and had to replace the brakes/rotors/calipers on my Durango. My savings account it taking a hit this month and I’d like to stem the flow… 
Good suggestion is some (not all) wireless routers allow you to save the config before doing the factory reset. it’s usually a text file-ish thing that you can look through for details if you need to. Or just restore it and see if the issue is still fixed.
Electrical issues are definitely possible. Wireless routers seem to often fail in way that make them ‘unreliable.’
Is it possible you’ve got an IP config issue? Improper shutdown of hardware could have left something sharing an IP?
Guys anything is possible at this point. Remember I have zero technical skills whatsoever. I wouldn’t know how to check an IP configuration. I did see the button for backing up your settings before doing a factory reset. But I really don’t know how to do much of anything that isn’t explicitly detailed for me with step-by-step instructions.
I can however stumble my way through pretty much any surgery you throw at me. And I can usually figure out most of your Internal Medicine problems based on one or two pieces of information. So at least I have that going for me
I have renewed and refreshed everything I know how to do. So I went and bought a new router. The one that I have is a few years old and the kids have been complaining anyway. If that doesn’t work then I’ll probably just cry.
If the old router is still in place, I would pull up the DHCP Clients list and kill the lease on anything that is acting up. On the Linksys I used to use, if I remember correctly, there was a radio button (circle/dot) you could use to select one, and a remove button at the bottom; another style interface had a remove button for each line. (I can’t remember exactly what the button was called - remove, delete, terminate lease…)