Let's start this off by saying happy fourth of July everyone!
As we're coming out of pride month at least we get a single day after all of that to remember when patriotism wasn't frowned upon. The hypocrisy of companies suddenly donning red, white, and blue after displaying the rainbow for a whole month never ceases to amaze me.
As you may or may not know I implemented this blog system at the beginning of this site's creation and I thought I might as well start using it to post status updates at the very least, I'm hoping this might help foster some community engagement and maybe we'll acquire some new writers for our blog! I'm hoping we can do community spotlights, contests, or maybe something else in the future, who knows! I'll leave it up to the community to decide. Anything is better than letting it sit and gather dust, haha.
Anyways, onto the status update.
As we're coming out of pride month at least we get a single day after all of that to remember when patriotism wasn't frowned upon. The hypocrisy of companies suddenly donning red, white, and blue after displaying the rainbow for a whole month never ceases to amaze me.
As you may or may not know I implemented this blog system at the beginning of this site's creation and I thought I might as well start using it to post status updates at the very least, I'm hoping this might help foster some community engagement and maybe we'll acquire some new writers for our blog! I'm hoping we can do community spotlights, contests, or maybe something else in the future, who knows! I'll leave it up to the community to decide. Anything is better than letting it sit and gather dust, haha.
Anyways, onto the status update.
I'm always constantly trying to improve the workflow and efficiency of things behind-the-scenes and our Discord Bot is one of those things. One of the most recent changes I've made regarding the backup bot is a new ticket implementation for our Discord Server, our tickets used to rely on a bot called tickettool.xyz, users would join the server and create a ticket and then they would be manually interviewed by one of our staff, this was a very time-sensitive and time-hungry process and frankly it was pretty clunky and prone to human error, people might not be asked a specific question, they might not even get to answer a question and leave because everyone was asleep at the time.
When you submit your interview, the data is sent to a ticket channel.
My solution? A modal based interview system, upon clicking to open a ticket, you get a prompt and immediately can answer everything!
The benefits of this system are massive and the amount of time saved is as well, it simplifies the interview process for staff AND new-users and since it's running on my own code it also gives us the freedom to build upon what we have and constantly improve upon it.
The benefits of this system are massive and the amount of time saved is as well, it simplifies the interview process for staff AND new-users and since it's running on my own code it also gives us the freedom to build upon what we have and constantly improve upon it.
This is what the modal interview looks like with mobile phones.
Modals themselves come with a good set of controls that we never would've had with a manual interview, we can set text-minimums and maximums and we can set placeholder text for each question to make the specifics of the answer we want more obvious. It also looks good on mobile devices.
But apart from using modals, since it was my own code, the features I was able to add make this even better, ticket transcripts contain the actual image-data so even if Discord were to remove the images from their CDN, the ticket files contain their own copy, if Discord server deletion occurs the ticket system helps there as well, it has it's own global ticket ID, so old users can literally just reference their old ticket ID and we can ask them security questions regarding their previous interview to verify them.
But apart from using modals, since it was my own code, the features I was able to add make this even better, ticket transcripts contain the actual image-data so even if Discord were to remove the images from their CDN, the ticket files contain their own copy, if Discord server deletion occurs the ticket system helps there as well, it has it's own global ticket ID, so old users can literally just reference their old ticket ID and we can ask them security questions regarding their previous interview to verify them.
These are what the warnings look like.
The interview system can be re-embedded into our restored server with basically four commands, whereas the tickettool bot required logging into a webui to set it up and their feature-set was obviously much worse than what I was able to do with my own code, plus they wanted you paying money monthly for it as well if I had wanted to use their subpar implementations.
One of the last things I added was a personalized Direct Message that the user receives upon acceptance, it references the rules channel directly along with their global ticket ID and a link to this website, each user also receives warnings for taking too long to complete their questions or to create a ticket which prevents users from loitering while unverified for too long.
I hope you enjoyed reading, this concludes our inaugural update! We're looking for blog writers, programmers and authors for our community and document.. apply here! You can also engage anytime in our discussions regarding Fun Facts on our Discord, Matrix, or even our Forums! Let us know your thoughts.
One of the last things I added was a personalized Direct Message that the user receives upon acceptance, it references the rules channel directly along with their global ticket ID and a link to this website, each user also receives warnings for taking too long to complete their questions or to create a ticket which prevents users from loitering while unverified for too long.
I hope you enjoyed reading, this concludes our inaugural update! We're looking for blog writers, programmers and authors for our community and document.. apply here! You can also engage anytime in our discussions regarding Fun Facts on our Discord, Matrix, or even our Forums! Let us know your thoughts.
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The verification process is tough, man! Can you guys make it easier?