Handmade Network»Blog

[News] Discord community showcase integration

We are excited to announce a new integration with the network's Discord server! On our home page you'll see a new Community Showcase section - this new feature shows off the latest work shared in the server's #project-showcase channel, where community members share what they're working on. The showcase is an especially vibrant and special part of the community, and we're excited to bring some of that energy to the website.

To share your own work, all you need to do is link your Discord and Handmade Network accounts. There's only a couple steps:
  1. Link your Discord account via the Discord tab in your profile settings. (If you haven't joined our Discord yet - do that!)
  2. Ensure that "Automatically capture everything I post in #project-showcase" is checked, and save your profile settings.

In addition, if you have previous work shared in #project-showcase, you can click "Create snippets from all of my #project-showcase posts" to automatically share all your past work. We highly recommend this option, since many of you have been sharing amazing work for years, and that work deserves to be shown off!

Once your account is linked, you'll see your showcase posts highlighted on our home page and on your user profile. In the future, we plan to show these snippets in even more places across the site.

This update is just one small step toward a new vision for the Handmade Network website. We want to see the website become a hub of activity, bridging the many channels where our community lives and works. We will always have forums, and we'll always have projects, but we want to make sure great work is being highlighted no matter where it happens. Expect more integrations in the future, and more features designed to show off our amazing community.

(Finally, some technical details for those curious. When designing this integration, we wanted to respect people's privacy and make sure no one shares more content than they meant to. To that end, this integration is disabled by default for users who had previously linked a Discord account, but active by default for everyone else. We also never save the contents of any Discord message unless the author of that message has a linked Discord account.)

If you have any feedback or ideas about the Discord integration or the community showcase, feel free to reach out to us either here on the forums or in #network-meta on Discord, where we're likely more responsive.
Raytio,
Cant link my profile I get an Oauth error.
Abner Coimbre,
We want to see the website become a hub of activity, bridging the many channels where our community lives and works.


This is a big deal!
Asaf Gartner,
godratio
Cant link my profile I get an Oauth error.

It should work now. Discord somehow forgot our redirect URI.
Neo Ar,
As an IRC-only community member I highly appreciate this integration as I've been missing out on all the cool stuff getting posted in #project-showcase beyond what Ryan highlights in his news posts. Now we just need a #project-showcase on IRC and/or on the site so that people outside of Discord can contribute to the showcase... rather than only being able to see what the Discord users post :)
Simon Anciaux, Edited by Simon Anciaux on
neo_ar
As an IRC-only community member I highly appreciate this integration as I've been missing out on all the cool stuff getting posted in #project-showcase beyond what Ryan highlights in his news posts.


Same here.

I never use the home page as I'm using the RSS feed or going directly to the /feed page so a dedicated RSS feed for the showcase could be useful.

Maybe it's me but I don't understand how the "scrolling row" UI makes sens (it's not as bad as what Netflix does but comparing something to Netflix UI is a pretty low standard :-) ). Could it have its dedicated page (keep the last x items on the front page, but have a link to a dedicated page), display it on a grid (like google image...), or better, as a vertical list with bigger preview, permalink, paging... ?

When I click on a video the default size makes any text in the video impossible to read (due to no filtering) and if it's a gif there is no way to go full screen to see it better.
Ben Visness,
We're planning to make a standalone showcase page soon. The horizontal layout was simply because we wanted to add the showcase to the home page without it taking over the whole layout and pushing forum posts (and important links) below the fold. I'll see what it will take to make a feed for showcase materials, although we may need to discuss how such a feed would fit into the other designs we're working on.

I'll keep tweaking the appearance of dialogs too - I see it doesn't take advantage of large screens very well right now.
Abner Coimbre,
Now we just need a #project-showcase on IRC and/or on the site so that people outside of Discord can contribute to the showcase... rather than only being able to see what the Discord users post :)


I want to second the idea of site users contributing back to the showcase. Could be a long-term goal? I can imagine a user response to an original Discord showcase post. Like "I was inspired by Krixano's latest screenshot and I'm doing something similar, take a look!"

I'm already deriving great joy from the showcase. I see users I've never seen before and would like to talk to someday. Maybe even for future conference participation, etc.
Ben Visness,
For sure. You'll see we use the term "snippet" instead of "Discord message", and that's because Discord messages are just the first type of snippet source we've added. If you look at user profiles now, you can easily imagine how a similar format could work for tweets, YouTube videos, GitHub releases, whatever.

We'll add more features and UI to the website over the coming months, but for now the Discord integration gives us a stream of content into the system, and shows us how people want to use it.
Raytio,
I would also like to make a recommendation that we should be able to directly share the content on twitter / facebook.
With a click or two.
Simon Anciaux,
When we click an item and it zooms in, could we have arrow to go directly to the next and previous item ?
Ben Visness,
mrmixer
When we click an item and it zooms in, could we have arrow to go directly to the next and previous item ?


Yep, I'd like to build that in soon. Currently working on a standalone showcase page and an RSS feed for you to follow (both nearly done, hopefully launching this weekend). Once we have that online, it should be pretty quick to slot in some quick navigation.
Ben Visness,
We now have a standalone showcase page, and an RSS feed! The windows have also been made to be much bigger where possible. Thanks for the feedback, and we'll continue to iterate on things.
Simon Anciaux,
Thanks