We have begun the process of migrating our community from Slack to Discord. While we have almost twenty thousand people in our Telegram group, Discord is now the place to join if you’re interested in getting more involved with our project, whether that’s helping with #translations or joining our #design or #engineering channels.

Over the last few months, we’ve used Slack as our central meeting place for our core team to collaborate with our extended community and growing group of contributors. Slack has been invaluable for coordinating efforts with those in our community who wanted to get more involved, including the amazing volunteers who translated our website into 17 different languages and the dozens of developers who have jumped in with questions and asked for feedback on their pull requests. We plan to maintain the same level of openness and transparency that we had with Slack, except now on the Discord platform.

We made the decision to switch from Slack due to their lack of moderation features, spam filtering, complete message histories, unlimited file sharing, and sane security defaults. To be fair, Slack was designed for paid, corporate teams instead of large groups of questionable strangers from the internet. However, Slack’s lack of security and moderation tools has become a serious issue for us. We published a security alert earlier this month about user email addresses being leaked and this event raised our awareness of additional security dangers surrounding Slack. For example, there is no way to disable the slackbot which has been used by scammers to trigger credible looking phishing messages claiming we’ve been hacked, changed our domain, or opened our token sale (None of which is true, by the way). Unfortunately, securing Slack would have been a never-ending game of whack-a-mole making it a poor fit for communities like ours.

Discord, on the other hand, was specifically built for large online communities. Its intended audience is gamers, but many large communities have switched from Slack to Discord, including other blockchain projects like Sia. Discord allows an unlimited number of users, unlimited file uploads, unlimited message histories, more granular permissions, as well as great moderation and spam filtering features. Our team has been using Discord for the past week and we’re excited to welcome the rest of the Origin Protocol community to join us!

We will preserve Slack for now to ensure a smooth migration, but we will be shutting down Slack entirely on March 1st. The easily shareable link for our Discord group is https://www.originprotocol.com/discord.

We can’t wait to welcome everyone to our new community!

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