Community Update - June 2020

Hey, we're almost at the end of June, and I'd like to give you a community update. This is personally something I've wanted to do for a while now, so this is hopefully the first of many.

Out with the old (bots), in with the new!

As you might have noticed, in the past couple of days, we've made some changes to our server bots.

After 5 months of service, we have decided to say goodbye to Angela's Hawkbot. Angela hadn't worked on the bot for months, and there wasn't really much the bot did for the server, so together, we decided that it was best to let them go. We have also removed the Giveaways bot and the giveaways channel. We came to this decision because nobody has really used this bot and channel since March. The Giveaways bot and channel might be brought back during or after the Jingle Jam when people have more of a reason to give stuff away.

Two new bots have been added to our server. BirthdayBot has already been used a lot, but for those who need a refresher: You can add your birthday to BirthdayBot with the bb.set (date) [timezone] command. Once set, BirthdayBot will announce your birthday to the server.

The other new bot we've added is Statbot. We tried using this bot before when the server was much smaller, and it wasn't as useful as we hoped. We want to use Statbot to track server statistics, so we might get some insight into what makes our server tick. And obviously, we'll share some fun stats with you from time to time.

Changes to the suggestion box

We're also changing how we handle suggestions for the server. Before, when you'd post an idea to #suggestion-box, we would have to sift through all the suggestions to find what we're looking for. This wasn't efficient because we didn't have a clear overview of all the ideas. That's why I have set up a Trello board that will collect all suggestions made, which has been made possible using Zapier (not a sponsor). With this, we want to improve our transparency regarding any server decisions made, because anyone can follow the progress of a suggestion through the Trello board. (We're also starting over with the suggestion box, so all the old suggestions have been deleted.)

And last but not least, some starboard stats! (It's really not that exciting but I thought it'd be fun either way.)

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading our very first community update. We're going to make more of these in the future, hopefully with some more exciting server news.

But for now, stay safe and have a good one :)