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Gail declared it time to put everybody through the Discord-ID match-up and badge-name process whether they were already on the server or not, and in theory it would be a "surgical strike" with simply removing the "Arisian" basic role and having people restore it for themselves by completing the ID match. I had my crash-test alternate Discord user ready to be a guinea pig, and Gail said to set it up as if it was already in as an established Zoom host or something -- roled up with Staff and Tech-staff, but then with the Arisia role removed. |
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This state of affairs created a rather bizarre view of the server, with
some channel groups still left visible because of the "staff" or "tech"
roles still assigned, but inability to post messages into them.
A new arrival would basically see nothing except one or two channels,
by design, because at this point the generic "@everyone" role had NO
inherent permissions at all.
Everyone needed "Arisian" for basic read/post access to the main channel
groups, and visibility into staff areas was gated by the other roles.
We referred to this limbo state as "wonkytown", because it was. |
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So now I needed to run my test-dummy through the Reg process. Gail created an account and I sent it through the Convention Master bit, which seemed to work fine and let me set an easily distinguishable fake badge name. |
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Then I tried to log into the online server, which hit a couple of hiccups while databases got synced and a couple of remaining buglets got fixed. Once in, and this is the part everyone needed to be instructed on, I went to the "profile" page and entered my base Discord ID into a box. Finding that ID is a little confusing, especially to someone unfamiliar with Discord, and we had to coach quite a few people through the process. |
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As Gail said, there wasn't any visible feedback on the site yet.
But behind the curtain, as her bot took the information and squirted the
magic JSON blob into Discord to give the magic "Arisian" role back, on
my Discord window the whole normal channel layout suddenly appeared.
Successful escape from Wonkytown!
Even worth inlining an emoji into a message. Or is that an emojum? |
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Once into the site for real, I could see various parts of it including the
pointer page to the social spaces -- some of the general Discord channels
we expected would be gathering points, and where links would show up to
the "con suite" Zoom meetings that would run each day.
Great graphic for the page, too, whoever came up with that. But no time to rest quite yet... |
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I extracted what that transaction had looked like in the "arrivals" logging
channel and showed Gail.
With DynoBot's activity logging sending selected events here, it was really
useful to have that audit log for what was going on -- including all the
successful re-roles and badge-name assignments as people came in.
YAGPDB doesn't really have anything like this, so again, we select the best
tool for a given job.
If problems came up, this would be the place to come and search back for
where anything went south.
Gail was now semi-despairing at the prospect of having to field all the pre-authorizations for our people stuck in Wonkytown and whoever else might show up in the course of the day, and I pointed out "hey, you *can* delegate such things y'know" -- in other words, offering to be the contact point for getting everyone back in and freeing her to keep on coding. I was basically just sitting here on Discord anyway, and could handily offload that from her and work on that in parallel with other stuff I was doing. |
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She set me up with a magic page at the convention site and appropriate admin-bits to manage it, and from here I could add people to an "early list" by their Arisia registration names. The trick was getting everyone to tell me those, and that was the human part of the process. |
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Because the Discord-ID mapping process was still a little confusing, we
set up a special always-visible staff-helpdesk type of channel so that
people could still ask questions.
I sent a screenshot of what my client had looked like in the limbo
state, so that Gail could work it into a nice document to distribute
out to people.
All of this had happened at a rapid pace and felt somewhat frantic, but at the same time I was really enjoying the nuance of how we were communicating in a staccato but expressive text style and getting it done. |
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I ran another real person, who was on the "remote" team and knew what she was doing anyway, but going slowly just to make sure I had the process right. From her point of view, it seemed fairly seamless and magical, which was great news. |
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Besides some of the bot-logging, which I'll say doesn't 100% catch every change on a server, Discord's own administrative audit log showed all of Gail's massive de-Arisian-ing of existing users and the bot starting to restore them. |
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So the transition to the new entry system was a success, and now it was just a question of cranking more people through it. Up to this point over 40 people had come in through the backup gateway and clicked the padlock, but the hope was that we wouldn't need it anymore. As fun as the concept of this channel may have been, it got hidden away for the duration. |