NEW Feature: COLORS! (Mod Tools Magic)

Nelly
Discord Blog
Published in
4 min readOct 6, 2015

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Yes Colors

For a while now we’ve consistently heard from the community you need more moderation features in Discord. A little history lesson here: we launched our Alpha in Mid-May and we had no idea large game communities would support Discord the way they have. It made us happy. It made us cry. It made us a little scared. Thanks to Stan, our expert server magician, the scared part went away quickly.

So what to build? Colors. All the colors of the rainbow (almost) so you can easily identify who has what role in your server. If you don’t know much about roles and permissions read more here.

Once you’ve set everything up, you can start picking colors.

“That’s it!?”

This is serious shizz people. Is an admin pink or red? Perhaps green? Or my favorite: Discord Blurple.

Ok, ok, let’s get serious…there’s actually a lot more going on here…

Who’s pretty in Pink?

We (mostly Jason the CEO/Codemaster) built this so it’s easy to determine Roles visually. So yeah, Roles can have an optionally assigned color. When a color is assigned to a Role/User, their username will change (to that color) in chat and on the channel’s member list. If a user is SOOO important that they have multiple roles, we’ll choose the color from the highest priority one. This is great for showing off admins, mods, or server owners in a really obvious way directly in the chat window. So set up looks like this:

And Presto Magico!:

Even more awesome sauce is the option to separate out users by Roles on the channel member list sorted in the order you specify. No more asking ‘who are the mods!?” — now it’s just plain obvious. And of course, since you’ll inevitably be tweaking this setup, Roles can be drag ‘n drop re-ordered to determine which has priority at the top of your member list.

The New Kicks on the Block

Can you tell I’m a fan of the 80s? If not, read my other posts. Do you know which famous movie star came from TNKOTB? Yes? Gold Star.

So our original kick/ban set-up just wasn’t cutting it and we poured over a lot of feedback to land on the new kick/ban permission heuristic initiative (Dev speak). So here’s the TL;DR version: If you can kick, you can’t be kicked and if you can ban you can’t be banned. Users with the Manage Roles permissions can kick or ban users with kick/ban but they can’t kick/ban each other. The Server Owner has super powers and can kick/ban everyone.

It’s also a whole lot easer to kick/ban your trolling members than it was before. You no longer have to search that long list of members for the right name. You can just click on their avatar or username to see their user pop-out info. And the user pop-out info window will stay open even if they keep spamming! (that one is for you, fire).

For you mobile users out there, don’t worry we haven’t forgotten about you. Remember, our first product was a tablet MOBA so we still love mobile…its just a pain to develop on. You’ll see much of this show up on iOS at release and slowly moving to parity for both iOS and Android over time.

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