Planned changes to the TCG ONE Discord

1

Hello!
For a while now, the staff and I have been discussing some thoughts that I proposed (since September 3rd) and we’ve come to a consensus regarding them as of a couple weeks ago. The only thing that put the plans on hold to move forward have been a lack of permissions for me to put the changes through. axpendix has went through and fixed this issue, so we’re now onto the first step of this plan: telling you all about it!

I was asked by a member in the Discord to make these changes known before putting them in, as I weirdly didn’t think of that. Anyway, by doing this, I hope for any members to voice their opinions, critiques, etc. so we can address them before putting any of these through.

These changes won’t be put through until 1 week from today, October 22nd. Once all concerns are cleared by then, I will begin putting all the changes below (the list will change as I modify based on thoughts from you, the community, so check the edit history of this thread to see what is changing on it).

Anyway, here is the list of all the things I plan to do. (Click on an item in the list below to see more details!)

#1: Add a proper set of rules

A long-time concern of some members was our lack of rules. While we’ve barely ever gotten criticism for harsh punishment or anything as such, we do want to make it transparent what exactly we moderate based on. This may be self-explanatory for most people, but the rules are quite simple, and there aren’t going to be any crazy or unexpected rules. Here is the list:

Rule #1: Be mindful and respectful of other users.
Actions such as witch-hunting, promoting/discussing racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and/or ableist behavior, harassing others, brigading, flamebaiting, and being toxic to other users are not allowed. This includes usernames, nicknames, playing statuses, profile pictures, along with any other possible methods in Discord itself. Under no circumstances should you impersonate any other user on the server. Additionally, please refrain from posting images or emotes that flash rapidly in bright colors without proper warnings. Please also refrain from speaking on sensitive topics unless they pertain to the server in some way (please message a moderator if you are concerned that your message may be breaking this rule). Finally, please do not breach other users’ privacy and post private information, doxes, or anything similar in the server.

Rule #2: No NSFW/NSFL content of any kind.
This includes, but is not limited to: images, videos, links, discussions, and profiles. That includes nudity, sexual content, censored sexual imagery, sexual touching, gore, and animal cruelty. Skimpy clothing (bikinis, underwear, etc) may be considered NSFW unless it is official art relating to Pokemon, or artwork based on it that does not err toward being sexual. If a post is deemed inappropriate for the server and breaches Discord’s Terms of Service, it will be removed and you will likely be banned.

Rule #3: No spamming of any kind.
Emoji or image spam, repeating the same or similar text over and over, repeating unnecessary bot commands, long messages which are irrelevant to the conversation; anything that disrupts normal conversation is not allowed. Unsolicited direct message spam is also not allowed.

Rule #4: Staff have the final say on rules and moderation.
Should a staff member ask you to stop doing something or move a conversation to another channel, please follow accordingly. We are not doing this to single you out or disrupt your conversation, and we mean this politely. Please refer to channel topics for what is acceptable in each channel. You may discuss the reasoning for moderation action to a staff member via PM, but please avoid discussion in the server if it can be helped. Only mention staff roles if a user is breaking the rules. Include a reason or summary of what happened in your message. Blocking staff members is not prohibited, but if a staff member you have blocked is attempting to moderate your behavior, you cannot claim ignorance if you continue and become subject to further staff actions.

#2: Reorganize, change, and reorient almost all channels/categories

As this section says, we want to overhaul/move channels around. Not much more to say. Below indicates the proposed new channel/category structures.
(bold indicates new channels, bold/italics indicates moved/changed channels)

  • Important Info (We would be deleting #giveaways due to its inactivity and no plans to resurge it from us. Any future giveaways will likely be in announcements if any)

    • welgome (We want to redo all of welgome to add the rules and just generally update its info that is missing)
    • faq (While initially proposed as its own channel and thought to be put together with welgome, I’m specifically against this being merged with welgome as this should be constantly updated to fit new information and questions)
    • announcements

  • Events

    • tournaments (Rename #tournament to tournaments and restrict it so only those with the organizer/mod/dev/admin role can speak in it)
    • tourney-talk *(For discussion about tournaments and to talk during tournaments, so that communication can be kept in one spot)

  • TCG Discussion (this would be the main chat category)

    • ptcg-news (Could be a potential channel we stick on top as news for the PTCG? Essentially parroting info from pokebeach/other sources. I’m not very firm or hugely interested in this idea unless you guys think we should do it, I would be interested to bring a community member to post things for this. This could also be up in Important Info in regards to the category this is in)
    • ptcg-discussion (This would be the new main channel. I will move the current meta channel to this and add a new channel in its place called modern-meta as proposed by starg09)
    • retro
    • unlimited

  • General Discussion

    • welgome-newcomers (Change general from the channel that currently welcomes new members of the server to this because general is clogged with messages of just welcomes. A lot of the time there isnt much discussion in here)
    • general (We would archive the current offtopic channel [this archive may or may not be public, not decided yet] and just put the current general in its place, with better moderation. offtopic has a lot of spam and is not well moderated. That isn’t anybody’s fault in particular, I think we just tend to leave it on mute and ignore what happens in it. We may disable image uploads if it becomes problematic)
    • art (Reorient this to be more open-ended with art probably)
    • memes (Offtopic is just this at this point. I’m not against people joking around and stuff, but offtopic isn’t really “offtopic”, it’s this)

  • Pokémod (While there isn’t anything wrong with having Pokémod in other sections, I brought the idea of a separate category to ZF_Goku and he seemed to like this idea. This way he can have a section of the server he can moderate and manage himself and add to as much as he likes. It helps keep his stuff together)

    • pokémod-news (I feel this would be good to let people know of any current progressions in Pokémod, for JappaWakka and ZF_Goku to share their works)
    • pokémod
    • pokémod-dev (I brought up this idea to ZF_Goku to have a dev channel for this so we can handle development in a separate channel as this project is massive, so a public dev channel for Pokémod feels good to have)

  • Development

    • dev
    • bugreports
#3: Add bots to the server

This particular part of the server overhaul will likely not be done by the time #1 and #2 are done, so discussion for this will continue as long as necessary.

We are not firm at all on any thoughts for a bot, but this was an idea we were discussing a while ago before all these overhauls, and a bot would be very helpful. We are well aware of the interest in a bot that shows cards, and we will look into this as well. Please link any good bots you know of! (I know some of you voiced interest in a particular one, I genuinely don’t remember it)

A big thing we’re looking to have is a self-hosted bot for ourselves to use that we can fully control, so I volunteered to host a bot. The issue is figuring out what software is good for this. I am currently between NadekoBot (suggested by starg09) and Red (suggested by me, I have used this before). We’re specifically just looking for moderation uses, so if you have any suggestions, please let us know!

I also want to add a bot for reaction roles so I don’t have to worry about pinging everyone unnecessarily! I’ve used Carl on other servers and I feel like adding this is a good way to add some nice engagement features that it provides. Any thoughts for other bots, let us know!

I hope this clears up everything about these changes we discussed. If you have any questions, concerns, etc. please reply letting me know! You may also message me on Discord at BNFP#9601 (my name is scoot404 in the member list if you just want to get a hold of me) if you would prefer to speak to me directly.

Thank you for reading!

EDIT 1: Moved tourney-talk/tournaments into an Events category as proposed by starg09
EDIT 2: Redacted image upload restrictions for general as proposed by TheAquaPiplup

2

For the tournaments channel, I think it shouldn’t be restricted in terms of who is allowed to speak in it. We haven’t had any issues with the current tournament channel and I think restricting who is allowed to talk in it is detrimental to those who want to start/gauge interests for potential tournaments who don’t currently have the “organizer” role.

3

I don’t really think the PTCG-news channel is required either. Most people who are on this server have other sources they get their PTCG info from and adding this channel would make more clutter to the channel list.

4

I heard that offtopic will be deleted and a new meme channel will be made. If that will happen, why not just rename it?

5

The reason why is because there is a lot of foul history in the channel, and a lot of inappropriate posts and memes. It may appear extreme, but the staff are fully in agreement about getting rid of this channel from public view. We may leave the archive public but it is not something I’m particularly interested in.

That is a fair opinion. As I said, I’m not hugely interested but I proposed the idea to the staff and they seemed to share some interest in it. If it doesn’t appear to be anything interesting for the community, we’ll scrap it.

This is a fair concern, but my current issue with the tournaments channel is that I personally would prefer if it were just tournament listings. The tourney-talk channel is meant to take the place of actual tournament discussions. We’re not trying to control whether or not someone’s community tournament can or can’t show up, if anything we just want to increase visibility for these. The issue though is that a lot of off-topic conversation takes place in that channel inadvertently and we want to make that channel cleaner and easier to read through.

The idea would be to sift through tournaments by having them sent to an organizer or a staff member. We aren’t looking to specifically restrict it to organizers, I apologize if it appeared that way.

6

For your response to my message, thats fair i guess. Id say maybe archive it

7

I disagree with turning images off in #general as many people have sent non meme images in it and most people will probably take note of the meme channel and post their images in there. I also think #offtopic should be a public archive. Would users be able to send messages in #welgome-newcomers? I don’t necessarily agree with #ptcg-news but I wouldn’t mind if it was there. Would Rule #3 mean warns if :PogChamp: or any other emote is used and then others use it in response or would it depend on the moderator to make that judgement? I personally am opposed to bots on this server however it seems that they will be added regardless of my argument. The card bot people wanted was Card Buddy https://top.gg/bot/642081991071891469 . what reaction roles would Carl-bot give?

8
  1. I’ll leave images on for the initial run of general, and if it becomes problematic, we’ll turn them off. I’ll edit my post soon to reflect this change.
  2. I’m somewhat opposed to making offtopic a public archive but I will consider it.
  3. Yes, users can send messages in welgome-newcomers.
  4. ptcg-news may or may not be a thing, unsure still.
  5. It would depend on the moderator to make the judgement for rule #3 in regards to emotes. My only real issue is people spamming copypastas, not people posting PogChamp a few times in succession.
  6. Bots will be added to help deal with moderation. I don’t plan to do anything aggressive, probably have it hit for use of slurs automatically and maybe for some fun stuffs.
  7. I’ll look into Card Buddy and see if I’m interested in it. It will probably be used if I don’t see any better alternatives.
  8. Carl-bot would be used to give reaction roles for Tournaments (so you can ping people for upcoming Tournaments as an organizer or staff), TCGONE updates, and maybe some other updates I can think of (Discord updates may be another one? Unsure on this still).
9

As a “longtime” server member, one of the reasons I like it is because it’s so laidback. I take issue with rule 3 because #offtopic has always been a place to talk nonsense and release stress. Besides, spamming of any sort has never been a problem at all, and even when it has, it’s just people having fun when the server is inactive. Truly productive and informative discussion has been had on the server in spite of us making the occasional weird meme or posting a copypasta, which is proof that spamming of fun stuff has little to no impact on the server, so I don’t see spamming as a bad thing, much less a serious offence.

I disagree with limiting #tournaments to certain roles, as it is and can be a great place to talk about results and help solve any problems participants may have with Challonge. It just seems easier for someone to discuss a tourney problem on the tournaments channel rather than directly pm the organisers, don’t you agree? Splitting them into 2 channels seems like more work, in my opinion. Tourney signup links could just be pinned and deleted to make things even easier.

Great idea with the news channel, I’ve seen a server do it with a bot posting the latest articles from PokeBeach and we could replicate that. The server should be open to discussion, too, instead of locked so that we can discuss said articles much easier

I fail to see how #offtopic as a server shouldn’t stay, as from my experience with the discord, moderation has been pretty lax, and discussion on here has been slightly mature in nature. Very rarely is something hateful or offensive posted, and even if it is, we all collectively slam it and ping the mods for its removal. The problem I see is not users being toxic, because we all get along pretty well. It’s the lack of proper moderation when trolls enter the server and spam, which is most likely what you’re referring to when you refer to the server as “toxic”. That is the time the moderators are needed most, when someone spams super offensive messages and usernames, and the actions of mods to ignore/mute the channel will only leave such messages up for longer, which is exactly what the trolls want. If one wants to moderate a server, they have to be aware of its actions as well as quickly get rid of attention seeking trolls.

The image ban is very ignorant, considering tourney results, decklists, scans of new cards, screenshots of TCG ONE games, any other image that isn’t art or a meme are all examples of how a picture causes productive discussion in the server. As I’ve said before, almost never has a user abused this image sharing privilege, and even then, it’s a troll who will be banned by the mods ( we return to the issue of quickly banning these trolls by the mods ). It just feels too excessive of a reaction on a relatively friendly server.

10

“Off-Topic” gives off the wrong impression. It tends to make people either believe the rules don’t apply, or that they can push the rules as much as possible. It’s mostly just a name change, possibly with a bit more moderation to keep the stuff we don’t want coming up sticking around. People who use the offtopic channel as it was intended shouldn’t notice any difference when it is being called general.

That’s why it will have a sister channel called “tourney-talk” which is for all the talk that normally happens in the tournaments channel currently. We’re just trying to make it easier to see what tournaments are upcoming/ongoing without having to scroll through a channel full of discussion about the tournaments.

So long as it isn’t abused then it will remain I believe. Even still, all of those things you mentioned would actually belong in ptcg-discussion IMO. I don’t see why you would post that in a general channel when a specific one for that content exists.

11

I’ll respond to 4 points that flagrama didn’t elaborate on, @vinthegallade (although not saying he didn’t elaborate enough if he did, just going into further detail)

  1. Rule #3 is in place not to punish spam, but to just establish that we don’t exactly condone it. While I understand your reasoning, it’s not an effective way to “relieve stress” as you described. The memes channel will be there for all the funnies and jokes that you are already used to. We simply want to wash our hands of some of the nitty gritty stuff that is in there in the past.
    And while I do understand you guys tend to report stuff, there is a lot of things I’ve seen posted that I’ve just quietly deleted because it’s inappropriate for the server that I have seen specifically in that channel. Particularly, memes/videos/etc. that regard to but not specifically, gross things and things that are not really PG-13. I’d show examples of these, but I’ve deleted almost all of these without taking screenshots. My bad on that part, but we really don’t want to keep letting crass memes and such go by when it just looks ugly and bad for our community (and like I said before in my preface, I’m not specifically naming or singling out people for these types of things; in fact, I’ve never specifically banned anyone other than Atmoblack Espurr, Samsung (although his name was different, forget what it was), and Sableye from the Discord for this type of thing, I typically just delete the inappropriate things).
  2. I’m restricting tournaments to specifically just show tournaments because it just looks difficult to find the last tournament. Yes, we could just pin the tournament and such, but I don’t want to make people assume that they have to check pins every time. I’ve used Discord for 5 years and my first thought is to not check the pins if I am looking for a thing like that. It just makes it cleaner. And as @flagrama explained, tourney-talk is specifically for the type of chatter to reach out to TOs or speak during events that you are thinking of.
  3. The image ban has already been redacted as an idea, as I agreed with what @TheAquaPiplup mentioned in posts earlier (scroll above to see that discussion).
  4. Offtopic seems fine to you, a user who browses the server regularly and expects the type of things in there, but honestly, there is a lot of things in there that really are just flat out inappropriate or shouldn’t be posted (to name some examples I’ve seen just in posts from yesterday: a bait video based on a furry porn video, the entire Bee Movie (which while I don’t honestly care, it is technically illegal to post in here), sexually implicative posts regarding Thanos, some post about “sexism being solved”. While those were all specifically posted by one person and are all now deleted, it’s just plainly not belonging. I get that the chat is usually fine, as I scrolled a week back and really only saw one post that was worth deleting, but the fact that this is all here to begin with likely means there’s way more history in the back of things like this being posted. We simply just want to wash our hands clean of it and make a new channel with a different name in its place.
    Remember: Offtopic is essentially general in purpose, but offtopic is treated as a memes channel. The new general will be for discussions and other things, and memes is just memes and other funnies. Back to my first point, I don’t plan to honestly hugely moderate spam in this memes channel. I just don’t really want it to be marked as a discussion channel is all when there’s no reason it couldn’t just be a general channel. I apologize if it seems kind of nitpicky, but the staff have all unanimously agreed on this move. I’m still welcome to hear your thoughts if you have any more, but I don’t feel indulged to leave it as is.
12

I don’t think you understand the definition of the term offtopic, it’s just a channel where you discuss anything not related to pokemon and post memes as well. If the mods had bothered looking though the channel’s activity of late, they’d find a pretty lengthy discussion on the history of card art and design as well as the comparisons between the ptcg and yugioh, which are the kinds of things that make the case for offtopic to stay. I doubt anyone would see an offtopic channel in a server and think the typical rules in that server wouldn’t apply to that one channel ( my experience with other #offtopic channels in different servers speaking). If general’s for anything pokemon related, offtopic should be for anything non-pokemon related, following that logic. Separating the memes from non-pokemon discussion seems unnecessary and purely aesthetic in nature.

I concede the point on the 2nd tourney server, since it’s honestly not that big a deal and won’t bring much harm.

As for the images, I’m glad that they’ll remain available for posting, but there will be times when posting an image in ptcg discussion just won’t be the appropriate thing. What about VGC stuff? News? As I said, there can and will be media that is related to pokemon but can’t be categorised as art or the tcg, so it naturally should then go to #general for discussion.

14

In 20 years of participating in various online communities, and 10 years of moderating them, that is usually what an off-topic channel/forum/etc devolves into in my experience. You’d think people wouldn’t make assumptions like that, but they do. Even the moderators end up lax in their management of a channel with that name. Again, it’s mainly just a name change from off-topic to general to keep that issue from continuing to crop up. It keeps it clear that the channel has all the same rules as the rest of the server, and still lets you post 99% of what you posted in off-topic.

15

Yes, I did see in the last week that there was discussion about about card arts and history. Like I said in my post, I didn’t say the entirety of the channel is bad. I just said that there was a lot of foul things that I had to delete, which nobody had acknowledged or brought up to me until I checked. This isn’t about what’s recently happened, it’s just about what’s happened in the past and cleaning up the foulness of the content that’s in the history of the channel. I’m unsure why this point has been dodged by everybody who is defending this channel. To conclude this point though, yes, the separation of these channels is literally a purely aesthetic thing, because it just looks kind of ugly to lump everything into one thing when it’s wholly unnecessary.

Also, no: general is not for anything Pokemon-related. It is currently, but going forward, I want it to take offtopic’s place and turn the meta channel into the “anything Pokemon-related” channel (while renaming it to ptcg-discussion). The channels are named too plainly for the average user to quickly assume what it does.

Any art that people want to post goes in the art channel, simply. VGC would go in general then, yes. Any news would go in the potential ptcg-news channel that is potentially on the table.

16

I guess I should list my gripes and agreements with these proposed changes being a long time member of the TCG ONE Discord server the first of which is that you didn’t ping anything I.E. @player @here @.everyone so you wont even get the whole community responding
Section 1
#1: Rule #1
On paper this rule looks good however in implementation I don’t believe that this rule would do much as users would more than likely continue to do what they would normally do regardless of the rule changes and once the mods start to crack down on the rulebreakers there may be a divide regarding the community’s opinion of the moderators.
#2: Rule #2
I have to strongly agree with this rule as in most cases as nsfw things like shouldn’t be on the server.
#3: Rule #3
Now what exactly constitutes “spamming” and can you give any examples that have transpired in the server outside of #offtopic.
#4: Rule #4
I disagree with this rule as while the mods don’t intend to disrupt the conversation they inadvertently do and I personally believe that harmless activity should take priority over the discussions being in the correct channels.
Overall
I think the rule changes are good in some spots bad in others. One case I would have to completely disagree with the rules is if people are banned for what they say off site and for what they’ve said in the past even then they have no way to appeal the ban hell there’s no way to even appeal what is deleted.
Section 2
#5: #giveaways
While I don’t think any channel should be deleted outright it’s completely understandable why the mod team would delete the channel as the bot has only ever been used for one giveaway.
#6: #welgome
If the server is going to be restructured I think that remaking the channel is in order.
#7: #faq
Couldn’t you just link to the faq thread that is already made on the forums in #welgome?
#8: #tournaments and #tourney-talk
is there even a need to separate the channels if people have such a hard time finding the tournaments wouldn’t it be a better idea to post the tournament announcements in #announcements.
#9: #ptcg-news
Important news is usually posted by users so I see no need for this channel as it would only clunk up the server more.
#10: #ptcg-discussion
From what I can tell this would be the same channel as meta just renamed? or would this be a completely new channel. If it means #meta is deleted then I would have to disagree with this change.
#11: #offtopic and #memes
Now I saw later in the thread that you say most people doge the fact that #offtopic has a bad history. Is it hard to say that the entire server has a bad history as prior to #offtopic’s creation the server still existed while #offtopic has had many negative things happen in it it so have other chats and it shouldn’t be singled out as “the cause of all evil” on the server or something to that effect. If the change is only a name change then there should be no reason to archive it speaking of archiving it. The archive should be public as regardless of #offtopic’s history it still has a place in the server’s history and there shouldn’t be yet another deleted or in this case hidden channel.
Section 3
#12: Bots
Bots would clog up the server and make the need for a #bots channel now I think this would mean even more bots would be added more than likely without ever thinking about consulting the community as well as the fact that there would probably be many useless bots.
Another thing is I’m under the impression that you’re not doing this for the betterment of the community but to please the mods and devs as only now are you going to the community for help, hell you weren’t even going to ask the community had ennaku not stepped up and questioned what these supposed changes were.
Another gripe I have is that is somewhat related to this is that the Mod leading all this you Scoot404 have publicly admitted to having most of the channels muted other mods/devs have said this as well however I find it particularly egregious that you the person who wants to change the server has channels muted and don’t try to take the easy way out by being lazy and make a bot do all the work by moderating for you. And if you think that me, I am the only outlier the only person who disagrees with some of the changes you’d be mistaken as there are others who also disagree however they refuse to speak up due to the repercussions that would take place if they speak out. Overall I have to disagree with most of these proposed changes.

17

I’ll respond to your thoughts here. It is the day of making changes, but I’ll give it until later today.

I didn’t ping anybody as most users in our Discord do not currently engage with the Discord, so pinging our entire userbase only for <5% of them to respond anyway would be pointless and a nuisance, would it not? There are 2,000+ members and only about 10-20 engage with the server actively.

Anyway:
Section 1

  1. I’m really doubtful there will be a divide. We’ve never had issues with our users, and we haven’t had any issues with toxicity outside of members we’ve already taken care of. This rule merely exists to take care of any future issues. There isn’t any current outlasting issue like this.
  2. Good to know we agree here.
  3. The only real thing I’d say is the emoji spams that follow in chains after messages. They’re never terribly obnoxious, to the point of “disrupting conversation” as this rule is here to control against, but #offtopic is currently the only channel that has a serious issue here.
  4. I mostly agree, although since you didn’t address what this rule is standing for as a whole, I’m assuming that this is the only thing you disagreed with. I don’t honestly ever get on people’s cases for posting in the wrong channel, mainly because as you said, it’s essentially harmless. 9 times out of 10 people are posting in the correct channels anyway. I think the only channels I’ve ever asked to move conversation from were #tournament. I can’t speak for the rest of the staff, but don’t worry about this too much. This rule won’t be enforced any harder than it already is currently.
  5. (Section 2) There is no reason to keep it, yes. axpendix was a bit hesitant as he wanted to revive the channel, but we currently don’t have any good ideas as to how to revitalize this channel.
  6. Agreed.
  7. Yes, but there is really no harm in copypasting it. In fact, I’d probably rather maintain it on the Discord since that’s kind of easier to take care of, and it’s more visible to everyone anyway rather than just clicking a link to see it. The main point is increasing its visibility.
  8. I agree, but it’s not like we have too many channels to begin with. There is no reason we can’t just easily separate them apart.
  9. It’s not really clunky to begin with like your sentence implies. It’s looking like we won’t be adding this channel anyway since the community seems mostly disinterested.
  10. It’s just a rename.
  11. Sigh. Okay, you are technically correct. But, there is a grave issue. Most channels don’t exhibit the types of things that offtopic has. There is a great deal of shitposting that gets by, and lots of inappropriate postings. There are flat out “doxes” (?) in the past of the channel that are related to a user (they could very well be jokes, don’t take my word 100% on this), and there is a great deal of messages in there that are spam. I’m not really for making this archive public, as there is no real reason for it to be. What reason would the public be interested in viewing a channel with a lot of shitposting history and such? There is nothing for the server to gain from doing that. I don’t blame users for wanting to keep this channel, but functionally, I don’t see any honest reason to keep it. Nobody has provided me with a good reason other than “it’s not as bad as you think” or “there’s a lot of past messages in it”. I’m not really convinced there’s any good reason other than people want to keep having a place to shitpost in. I don’t get it. That’s all that #memes is going to be and people are still apprehensive and worried about this. We’re not renaming it because the past messages are just ugly. As we said, the staff appear to be the only ones unanimously agreeing that this change we are doing is fine. Anyway, I’ll just conclude that I don’t really have too much else to say regarding this topic. I don’t understand the continued defenses of this channel as all we’re doing is essentially just making a new channel in its place for what it does. To put it clearly, #general is just going to be what #offtopic should be, and #offtopic’s memes and shitposts will go to #memes. That’s all this is.
  12. In my opinion, bots would just make our jobs easier. There’s a lot of unnecessary things that can be dealt with easily by an automated bot. I’m not around on this server 24/7, and nobody really is. I can’t always catch the next person joining just to troll. Not to mention, bots are something the community has genuinely asked for (i.e. Card Buddy).

Now, to address your last two points: I’ll try to go over everything you said.

To be frank, nobody can gain the interests of everyone to their side. The way I see things currently, the Discord is mostly unmoderated and is very messy. I’ll go into this in the 2nd point, but yes. This is my fault. My main thought here was that we’re just restructuring this Discord to work in a way that is more transparent and easier to understand. In all honesty though, the only real things the community seem to be against in this thread are just me separating offtopic into different channels and maybe one extra point. I was planning to commit these changes as honestly, there isn’t much difference. Offtopic is a pretty big deal for me to get rid of, I’ll admit that, but it’s not really going away. I’m separating it into two channels. At the end of the day, the staff had already all unanimously agreed together on the changes I’d proposed. That’s all I was looking at. I wasn’t doing changes that were so drastic it’d divide this entire community. They’re pretty small, even looking at it right now. You are blowing this into bigger proportions as if I was about to do something wrong, only stopped by enakku. The only thing I did wrong was not having the foresight otherwise to ask the community about these things, and I did. I decided against forcing these changes because enakku did bring it up, and it was because like I said: it didn’t seem like a big deal to me, and it was the same for the staff as well. I still don’t really think it is, but I didn’t see any reason to not give the community the courtesy to know what we were doing after he brought up his concerns. I apologize for my lack of initial courtesy, but I really didn’t, and still don’t feel like there are any significant changes worth noting. Frankly, things should just run like usual. I’m not interrupting anything anybody normally does as nothing is being deleted. Remember, like I said, #offtopic is just being separated to #general since that is all it is as a discussion channel, and #memes as that is how it tends to be. Then it will be archived.

To address your second point, I am hugely conflicted with almost everything you have said here. This isn’t some lazy way out for me to take care of things. I have most channels muted not because I don’t care for this server or that I am lazy, but because I don’t engage with this community as much anymore. You may find that conflicting and a bad thing, but frankly, almost all of the staff are not active anymore. Our developers are solely developers, and the fact that they moderate is only because they have permissions to, since axpendix prefers it like that. I’ve been considering asking the staff if we want to bring along more moderators, so I’ll address this pretty soon since your concern isn’t invalid.

As far as I’m aware, you appear to be the only one who is mostly disagreeing with what these plans are. I honestly don’t see any thing controversial outside of splitting offtopic and archiving the original. I feel like people have been misunderstanding what the point of this all is as well. For example, these rules are already practically being enforced. What I mean is, they’re going to be enforced just as much as they are now. We’re lax for a reason. This isn’t to hammer down on the community. In regards to the channels, you didn’t seem to bring up anything with any serious apprehension other than a potential #bots channel for commands, #ptcg-news which I’ve already mentioned will likely not be made, and #offtopic being archived. Outside of this, you appear to be under the impression that bots will ruin this server. Dude, to be quite honest, I literally just want it to filter slurs/excessive spam, play music, and post cards in chat. Maybe some reaction roles. You are making it seem like it’s a way bigger deal than it really is.

What bothers me most though is that you also believe I would punish someone because they’d speak out to the extent that you did. No, in fact, I wouldn’t. The fact that you have made a post as long and big as you did shows that you care about this community, and you just want what’s best for it. You voiced your opinion thoroughly, even with as much as I disagree on some points. There is no reason to punish a person for a thing like that, ever. I feel as if you are a regular user posting on an alt (as we don’t have anyone on the Discord named user1 to my knowledge) because you think I would’ve done something. After all, you appear to have a comprehensive amount of knowledge about this situation. Regardless of whether I’m wrong or right, you don’t need to list your name. I’m just surprised at your perspective and viewpoints on this, as I feel like they’re fairly exaggerated.

tl;dr: You’re blowing this way out of proportion, and assuming a lot of negative things from me. Just because I’m not engaging the most doesn’t mean this was just something that was randomly brought up. We discussed this in the staff chat for a pretty good amount of time. I’m just here to make the thread letting people know what’s coming of it. I do appreciate enakku for bringing his concerns to light as they are what made me make this thread, but honestly, and I mean this wholeheartedly: 95% of the changes in here would’ve probably just not done much to this server anyway, had I instead forced the changes and not made this thread. The only real talk I’d imagine would be about #offtopic.

If you are a regular user and you do browse the Discord like I am presuming to be, please DM me privately. I want to gauge your thoughts and figure out your reasoning in a conversation, not just like this. Tomorrow afternoon I will probably be putting these changes through, but I’d still like to know where your apprehension is coming from. Thank you for your response.

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#1: So you’re making changes despite no changes being needed as the users who posed a problem are now banned and others like them more than likely won’t prop up?
#3: So there are no prominent examples you can give outside of #offtopic? Even then when axpendix made the channel he said “Welcome to the new offtopic channel! You can talk about anything here, but please be thoughtful and respectful to others.” I fail to see why this rule is even needed if its not a problem outside of #offtopic.
#4: I regrettably brushed over the power this rule gives moderators in my original post however after rereading it seems that this rule gives the moderators the ability to do whatever they want with little to no repercussions. An argument regarding the role that moderators should have has happened in the server prior to you ever joining it.
#5: Now this changes my opinion regarding the removal of #giveaways as if the server owner wants to keep a channel its his right to do so regardless of what the moderators and staff members think.
#11: It does not matter if you get why people want off topic to be a public archive or not it matters that it is being said and by multiple people at that.
#12: While it’s true the community has asked for Card Buddy we actually have a card bot on the server already that being said it’s down at the moment as axpendix has not restarted the bot’s server in quite a while, now that being said for what reason would we even have a need for a music bot, you Scoot404 could just use MusicBee the music application that I see you using on a regular basis even then this is a server for a bootleg PTCGO for what reason would we even have a need for a music bot. As it stands moderators don’t do much and a moderation bot would make them do even less to the point where moderators will be in name only and they will not moderate even then we’re probably at that point already.
Yes the Discord is heavily unmoderated that is true however who exactly says the discord is messy? And why do they perceive it to be that way?
I believe one of the reasons you nor any of the staff members feel these changes to be significant is because you are not really active in the community.
“almost all of the staff are not active anymore.” Now this is an outright lie as I see AggroFrag on the website often and Heropon Riki is also quite active in the community that being said none of the other staff members are active in the community but of the 5 staff members that aren’t active in the community I would wager to guess that 3 of them also have most of the channels muted as they care not for the community 2 of which were never active at really any point in said community and why exactly would we need more mods and what would they do as I see it there is no need for more mods.
If the rules are already being enforced why should there even be a need to state them if anything it’ll bring in the potential of mini modding
“I literally just want it to filter slurs/excessive spam”
so you don’t want to fulfill your role as moderator by moderating and want to make a bot do your job instead?
We don’t need a music bot as I’ve said in one of the statements above however ill concede regarding card bots.
While you say you won’t punish me because I’m speaking out you can’t account for the manner that the other staff members could react in a unexpected manner.
You may feel like my viewpoints are “exaggerated” and that I’m “blowing this out of proportion” because I feel like these changes are unneeded and quite frankly they are howeverI believe that the community should have a strong voice. Are all these changes really for the sake of the community or are they because 1 or 2 trolls showed up and now you’re in panic mode to lessen the damage.
" 95% of the changes in here would’ve probably just not done much to this server anyway, had I instead forced the changes and not made this thread." If you had done this wouldn’t you be robbing the community of a voice?
I joined the discord server so if you want to have a comprehensive discussion contact the discord account @user1#9575.

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If anyone experiences this, please do reach out to one of the staff via DM either on the Discord, or here on the forums. We generally do not take action without confirming with other staff members first, so this should never be an issue, but if it ever does happen I can assure you that we are always willing to review the actions preformed to see if everything was handled in an appropriate manner.

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1 - Once again, you seem to be seeing incorrectly what these changes are for. It’s restructuring the server. The rules were already being enforced as is, just this time there will be written rules for us to reference. All of these things were already frowned on.
3 - ^^^^ As I said above, this rule is already enforced. I’m just writing it so people can see it.
4 - …Once again. I really don’t think this will be an issue. I have never banned or punished users in quiet. I always post in chat who I just banned. I think the only thing I do in quiet is delete inappropriate memes in offtopic or where ever I may see them. Staff are always this way on the server. This rule merely exists to close out the argument at the end of the day if they really feel like it’s not up for debate (which most of the time, it isn’t).
5 - Uhh… but he budged? Because he said he doesn’t really know what he can do with it after we tried to think of ideas.
11 - Right, but you appear to again be ignoring why this is being done. Archiving a channel with an ugly past has no use to the public. I don’t get what is beneficial about having a public archive of it. If the people who are interested want to see it, I’ve already said that I can make a role for them to view it.
12 - Wow. That’s a very crazy response. a) There is no reason to not substitute the not-working bot when there is demand for it. b) I. I can’t even believe what you just said about MusicBee to be honest. It’s literally a music player. snRt. The only reason it was a thought was because there are some users who are in the VC a lot. I don’t imagine they’d care about music or not. c) This is flat out untrue. Don’t just assume that staff would suddenly turn away and let the bots handle it. Most likely the opposite. d) All of the staff say that it is messy. That is why we are restructuring. This is also why we planned to do it quietly initially and just put these changes through, because as the community has responded: most of them are harmless and change nothing currently.

Now, to respond again:

You haven’t demonstrated any reason why these changes are significant. These rules are already all being enforced, the channels are getting moved around a bit, we’re archiving a channel (the most significant thing worth noting), and adding bots later down the line.

On the note of AggroFrag and Heropon Riki; Riki just joined our Discord again, he is active though now, I agree. The devs tend to not go outside of the dev channel though, axpendix is very, very busy almost all the time, and other than that, DKQuagmire only interacts with the Discord sometimes. I honestly don’t really know about AggroFrag; they used to be very active with the Discord but from what I can tell, they haven’t chatted here in a while. Or if they do, it seems to be rare.

I am really doubtful about mini modding. Even then, it’s not like I really care if people start doing that. I’d probably only get on someone’s case if they were flat out harassing people about rules.

No. Just no. Terrible assumption.

We don’t, but should a bot that I’ve already proposed to add have music functions, I’m not against them, and the users who regular our VC can gauge if they want to have it or not. I’ll probably add it for a bit just to see if it’s something they want to keep when push comes to shove.

You are forgetting 1 key thing. This was all discussed in the staff channel as of September 3rd, and we concluded at the start of October. Discussion was started up again since axpendix gave me permissions to put these changes through. We’re not in panic mode, and we have never viewed that the community shouldn’t have a voice in these matters. If I thought this, I wouldn’t have made this thread.

I. Guess? I don’t really know. That seems grasping at straws. I still would’ve been very open to feedback after we’d done the changes that I pushed, so I don’t really believe so. Nothing is permanent or set in stone, and you are very worried that it is.

Nonetheless, changes are set to go in soon. I will be open to discuss with you on Discord whenever you are around. Let me know your thoughts in conversation. Thank you.

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Now that I think about it, I don’t agree with the offtopic thing at all. Yes, there was toxicity. I know because I was one of the most toxic members, starting that whole era of toxicity and whatnot, but here’s the thing. There was no nsfw gore or whatever. So let’s just saying somebody does scroll/search to that point in offtopic, it really doesnt hurt. Toxicity only hurts the people its directed to and maybe their friends, aka not [insert person here] who’s scrolling/searching. Either way, there wasn’t like, an insane amount of toxicity (that isnt just obvious playfulness) located in the offtopic channel. Less cases make it not as bad and making it so you can maybe actually use your moderator position in a positive way for once and delete them. Also, offtopic wasn’t the only one with toxicity. General had a lot as well, much more, in fact. Picking offtopic to delete and not general or a combination of both doesn’t really make sense with your logic. I don’t support deleting channels at all, but I’m just saying. Anyway, those are just some thoughts I had. My opinion probably doesn’t matter since I’m banned, but whatever.