A subreddit would make a great substitute for a forum, assuming that forum has only one board. This forum has many, many boards.
Take Brawl for example. You've got announcement posts, round posts, voting posts, and then you also need a dedicated thread for each team to work with. Multiply that by Trials, War, competitions, every other pvp event, and literally every other board on the forum
Then there's the fact that reddit doesn't allow you to have any user identity beyond your username and your flair - we have profile pictures, staff ranks, post counts, awards, all that stuff gets wiped away
And then you've got reddit markdown vs bbcode - biggest difference here being that reddit natively doesn't allow images in posts, which would break a good many things. And then you've got users who use RES, which would mean that they *do* see images, but only on an inline-block level so the whole image formatting thing just goes to dirt
And then you've got that reddit only has two permission tiers: moderator and non-moderator. Regular users have no control over anything and mods have complete authority. And there's no way to post outside of the main flow of the subreddit ie no secret planning for events or newsletters or anything
And then the more "important" stuff just gets chucked into that main flow as well and lost in a day. How do newsletters, staff hiring threads, forum game signups etc expect to have any visibility beyond a day if there's a throng of new posts above them competing for your attention? What would we do when we need more than 2 sticky posts?
And then there's no notifications or anything, sure you can get reddit PMs but you won't get notified by email if you receive one. What if someone needs your attention for something? Hell, how do you know if someone's replied to a thread that you've posted in? sure, there's /r/whatever/comments, but that's like scrolling through a list of every comment made when it's so much easier to go to /unread and see a list of all the threads that have been posted in since the last time you visited.
And then there's all the old posts. What happens to the old site when we move? What happens to the hundreds, possibly thousands of card design ideas? Do they get deleted, do we bring them with us? Will the first 805688 posts on the subreddit (number of posts on forum at time of this message) just be duplicates of old threads by a bot? Do we just have the old site as a backup database? If so, why even move in the first place?
What about the more wiki-like stuff? The whole subforum on cards, with a board for each element, with a thread for each card? Do they just get thrown into the unending list of posts as well? How would you ever know when someone has asked a question about a card without religiously trawling /comments?
And then at the end of the day - and this argument is a bit extreme - but we'd always be living in the shadow of the reddit admins, who have been known to just flat-out ban subreddits when it reflects poorly on them (though that's never happen to us). And then you've got users being flagged as bots - for example, someone who's making a lot of very similar posts to update a Mafia each round - and they get shadowbanned, and their posts can't be seen by anyone but they don't even know because no one can contact them to tell them about it and they can't ask anyone for help because no one can see their messages. And our own admins (moderators, now) wouldn't be able to do anything about it
In summary: what benefits?
I'm honestly curious to know what benefits you see from moving to a subreddit (other than it being free). If you really do have valid reasons, or more ideas, council is currently trying to make improvements to its Communications Manager role so if you have things to suggest about that we'd love to hear them so we can get a hiring thread back up for that and have more than one applicant
You're right about discord, though, elements chat has -unofficially- for the most part moved to discord, I don't know whether or not you're already on it but the link is here
https://discord.gg/qAmfB8T, I expect a more official transition will be happening at some point soon
tm
