For years people have asked freeCodeCamp to create a Discord chat. Well today, I'm excited to announce that we did it. We now have an official Discord chat room server.

Before you join, please give me 2 minutes to explain our goals with this new chat room, the rules, and what you can expect there.

I ran a Twitter poll, and of the 1,218 people who responded, 71% said they would hang out in our Discord and chat there.

Right now, millions of developers around the world are staying home to help slow the spread of the pandemic. And now we can hang out together in chat and keep each other company.

As you may know, freeCodeCamp already has a forum. Millions of people use it each month.

If you ask a programming question there – or ask for feedback on one of your projects – you can usually get a response in about an hour.

The forum will continue to be the best place to talk productively about programming.

But we also wanted to create a place where people in the community could hang out and chat more casually.

In the past we've used HipChat and Slack. And we're still using Gitter.im as a chat tool to coordinate open source contributions to our codebase.

Discord is really on the next level, though. Over the past few years, Discord has proven itself to be a fast, flexible, robust chat room tool.

Our friends at Reactiflux have more than 80,000 people on their server, so we know that Discord can scale to suit a big community like freeCodeCamp.

We're starting out with just a few chat rooms.

Over time, you can share ideas for new rooms, and we can gradually roll those out. This way we can get a critical mass of discussion in a few key rooms, without expanding too fast and creating "ghost towns" within the server.

Here are the 3 main things you should know before you join the official freeCodeCamp Discord:

  1. Everybody must follow the same strictly-enforced code of conduct that we use on the forum.
  2. The best place to ask for programming help will still be the freeCodeCamp forum. Forums are better-structured for getting programming help, because they're threaded and easier to search. (Fun fact: for every one person who asks a question on the forum, 100+ other people have that same question and are able to discover the thread through Google, so they don't have to re-ask the question.)
  3. The developer community is global. People in every country on Earth use freeCodeCamp. (Yes – even North Korea.) Please keep the discussion in English for now, even if that isn't your native language. You can share ideas for improvements and integrations in the #meta-discord channel.

OK – if you read all that, you are now officially cleared to join freeCodeCamp's Discord chat room.

You can join it here.

Be sure to introduce yourself in our #Introductions channel. Tell us anything about yourself you feel comfortable sharing:

  • what city you're in
  • what projects you're working on
  • and what you're planning to do once we have all gotten vaccinated for this terrible disease, and we're all able to go outside again.

I'm looking forward to chatting with you all.

I hope you and your families stay safe during the pandemic.

And, as always, happy coding.