How do I use Discord?

What does Discord Do?

Discord allows people to meet and share audio (and video) and text ‘channels’ about something they are interested in. It’s frequently used for gaming; but it’s used for all sorts of things. In our case it’s virtual gliding using the amazing Condor 2 software. It’s quite similar to Skype and Zoom, but has lots of other handy features.

You can use Discord on a mobile device, but for our purposes it’s best used on the PC that you run Condor on.

What do I need to know to use it?

Not so much actually. You just need to get the hang of it.

On the very left of the page you may have a number of ‘servers’ that you belong to. If you have just started it's likely you will see only one - the DSGC server.

If you select the DSGC server (by clicking on its circular icon), on the left of the page you see a list of headings and, below these, a series of ‘channels’.

A channel may be a text channel where you can chat, similar to WhatsApp, or audio channel, similar to Skype. These types are prefixed with a # symbol, or a little speaker symbol as shown below.

Some text channels provide information (like this one), and aren’t intended for chat.

The things you are going to use most often are the ‘general chat’ text channel and “Flying Comms” - the general audio channel.

Click on the general chat channel and it will become highlighted. You can then see the previous conversation and join in with anything relevant you want to say.

For Flying Comms, when you click on the channel you will join the audio feed. If there’s someone else there already you can both hear them and speak with them. There can be many users online - in which case they all can hear you, and you can hear all of them. This is great when flying online together.

When an audio channel is open you also have the option to share screens. If you share your screen all the users in the channel can see it. It’s also possible to stream such a screen to the outside world.

The list of users on the server shows on the right hand side of the page, with their (online/sleeping/offline) status.

At the very top left is your own Discord space (above any other servers you are a member of). From here you can ‘add friends’ - if you do so you can open text and audio channels individually (and privately) with them.

House rules

Obvious really. Please respect other users.

Please - no abuse or offensive language or images in text or audio.

Other stuff

If you have both Condor and Discord audio on the same PC, you may need to adjust the general sound level in Condor in order to hear communications properly.

You can adjust it in Condor settings:

A Master volume of around 50% may work for you.

You can find out more about Discord here:

If you don’t already know, you can learn what a ‘bot’ is there.