Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in Discord and COVID-19

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in Discord and COVID-19
Everyone,

As Steve mentioned in his post, STF is a community. Some people in the community seek support for what they’re going through by talking to other people going through similar things. Other people in the community would vastly prefer to not do that, and instead find that our community is useful as an escape from whatever it is that is going on in their “real lives.” Regardless of your particular preference is, we want to do whatever we can to help everyone stay sane and feel like they can still be a part of the club.

In order to do that, we have created a new channel in Discord for discussing the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is rather creatively called #covid-19. This channel operates like #after-dark, in that it is an opt-in only experience. Access to the #covid-19 channel must be requested from the LCARS bot by typing “!covid” on the #starbase channel. If you don’t do this, then the channel’s contents will remain hidden from you.

Since we’ve created this space for discussing this incredibly stressful topic, we’re also going to institute a new rule on the Discord server, which is that discussion of the pandemic is not permitted outside of the #covid-19 channel. Operators have been instructed to direct people who want to talk about it to the new channel for that purpose, explicitly so that everyone else who would prefer not to don’t have to read it.

We hope this is an adequate compromise between the people who want to talk about this and the people who really rather would not. If you have any questions about this, you can direct them to TECH or an Operator.

Joe

Just an update to the original post: the command to join the #covid-19 channel has been changed to “!covid-19”, as the bot vendor has added a “!covid” command to the bot that relays statistics about the virus globally and by country or state.

• Please use the “!covid-19” command to join the #covid-19 channel.
• Please do not use the “!covid” command outside of the #covid-19 channel.
• Please continue to not discuss the pandemic outside of the #covid-19 channel.

Thank you,
Joe

This is another update regarding Discord and how we talk about COVID-19 on it. The Operators were recently discussing how Discord is being moderated at the present time, and during that discussion it was decided that we are going to slightly relax the limitation on the discussion of COVID-19 in the main channel. Now, if you just want to talk and/or complain somewhat freely about how your life in particular is being affected by things that are going on, you can feel feel free to do that in the public channel.

We’ve decided to do start allowing this because, we’ve noticed that there are times where people just want to complain a little bit about their day as part of normal chit chat, in a way that, really isn’t a problem, and wasn’t quite the kind of thing we were trying to prevent by setting up a new channel. Plus, I think we’re all dealing with this now, so… it’s not like we can hide from that anymore even if we wanted to.

The #covid-19 channel will still exist, and will be for people who wish to have “deep discussion” of the pandemic. Like, talking about what public policy ought to be or news articles or that kind of thing. If you still want to talk about that (and a bunch of you do), we kindly ask you keep that in #covid-19 and still refrain from talking about that in #public.

If that makes sense, great. If it doesn’t, feel free to ask an operator about whatever your specific question is.

Thanks,
Joe