The Clan Discord is centrally managed by the Moderators team and the Clan Council. The maintenance and policies of the Discord are done keeping in mind the following main points:
- The Discord is a service primarily maintained for Clan Quest's members. We welcome guests to join us and be social with us, but maintain the right to withhold certain features from guests.
- Maintenance of the Discord must scale with the number of guilds, since the way Discord is set up does not allow for easy decentralization.
- Clan Quest is one community, and we prefer to maintain a level of uniformity across guilds, while also providing room for individual Guild Councils to adopt their space according to their needs.
- The Discord must be a safe and secure space for everyone.
- The policies must enable moderators to make objective decisions based on the policy, to avoid discussions on a case-by-case basis.
These points have all been considered when establishing the policies as outlined below. Any suggestions or feedback should be directed directly to the Clan Council and/or moderator team.
Guest access
Access to the Discord is generally very open. However, there are a few restrictions that we have put on guests:
- Guests do not have access to the channels under the Bots category.
- Guests do not have access to the Studio voice chat, which is used during live streams.
- Guests do not have rights to stream their screen to any of our Voice channels.
Motivation
Part of the reason for restricting guest access to the resources as outlined above is moderation and security. Especially voice channels are harder to moderate. However, the primary reason to choose these restrictions is because we made the choice of primarily maintaining the Discord for our members. Becoming a member comes with privileges and access, and the ones outlined above are part of those.
Guild-specific channels & roles
By default, guilds get access to one text channel and one voice channel upon creation (additionally, they also receive administrative channels for their councils). These will always be consistently named. Guilds also get access to a guild-specific opt-in mentionable role with a method for members to join said role, that allows sending pings to those who choose to be notified.
To accommodate the different needs across guilds, especially those who grow beyond their initial few members, guilds are granted one additional channel and three additional roles upon hitting 50 members, and one additional channel and three additional roles for each 100 members, up to a maximum of four additional channels (six in total with their initial two) and nine additional roles (ten in total with their initial one).
For each of the additional channels, the Guild Council has the choice to choose either a text or a voice channel, and is free to choose its purpose and name, as long as the names follow the prefix naming scheme used across the entire Discord. For each of the additional roles, the Guild Council can likewise freely choose its name and purpose, including the emoji that is used in the post to assign roles, and is required to use the guild's prefix in the name, unless there is no reasonable circumstance under which the role name can be confused with something from a different domain.
Guild Councils must clearly state their intentions for these channel, which they can do by either tagging the Clan Council and/or the moderator team or by posting in the Forums. There is no limitation to the number of changes a council can make, but Guild Councils are requested to batch their requests and limit the number of times changes need to be made.
The Discord moderation team maintains the right to archive channels or remove roles if they are deemed inactive. This will always be done after providing at least 24 hours notice to the relevant Guild Council.
Guild Councils may choose to not use their alotted channels and roles, but they can always opt to use them at a later time. Role and channel allocations cannot be transferred between guilds.
Motivation
The Discord moderation team got clear feedback that a single text channel and a single voice channel was insufficient - especially for larger guilds. At the same time, the moderation team felt the need to limit the number of channels and roles that a guild can contain, both to limit the overhead in maintaining the Discord server, as well as keeping some level of uniformity across guilds. The policy above attempts to balance all these interests in a way that allows for objective decision-making, which ensures that Guild Councils have predictable bounds within which they have freedom to customize their space according to the guild's needs.
The chosen limits and numbers are subject to change, as this new policy is still under evaluation from the server moderation team.