It’s been a long time coming, but today I completely revitalized our official Discord server! I wanted to have this done months ago - but much as it does for y’all, life happens to everyone. I knew that explaining the changes was going to be just too much for Discord to handle.
Ain’t nobody gonna wanna read all that there…
So here I am with a forum post about the changes that have been made to the Discord server. But that’s not all this is for - I’d also love to know what changes you’d like here on the Discourse forums! Changes to this forum are next up in line for my priorities; while I have a list of things that I want to change and things I noted when I was first hired on, I’m sure you have more thoughts.
Okay, for the Discord details. 
The biggest changes you will note are going to be:
- The Lobby has been transformed into Community.
- Support channels are now forums instead of text.
- The Developer category is role-gated.
- We have new rules.
- The Jedis and Padawans are now Crows (and other role-related changes).
- An onboarding experience for the server.
Lobby Becomes Community
We may have been brought together as a community because of Home Assistant, but that’s not our only passion! We’re a vibrant community filled with people who love memes, are their family’s personal chef, spend every chance they can digging in their garden, or binging the latest popular show. The single off-topic channel did not cut it for me, so now the Community category has multiple off-topic channels.
Want to show off your latest dashboard, DIY hardware, or template you created? Y’all have the shameless-self-promo channel for that. Interested in talking about All Things LLMs instead of just what’s integrated into HA? The machine-learning channel will be your new home. Just looking for a place to talk with others? The off-topic channel is now the-water-cooler.
There are a few other topic-specific channels there, and we’ve introduced a Community Stage! We plan on hosting something similar to “office hours” on the stage, so keep an eye out for when I share more details on that.
From 1:Many to 1:1 Support
Discord is great for many things when it comes to chat, but support in a server of tens of thousands members (let alone over 100,000) can be overwhelming or simply useless in a text channel. Sometimes you post and your issue is so niche that an expert may not be online at the time. Next thing you know, someone else has an issue that can be solved at that time and your message is lost. Most people will mark a channel as read, so this can cause some people’s issues to get lost in the chatter.
To solve this, all of the support channels have been converted into forum channels with the original text channels archived for historical content. When I did this, I removed the App and Related Tech categories and merged them into their own respective channels under Support. There are so many benefits to this.
- People have their own space to post their issue, similar to here on the Discourse forums, but also get that live chat experience.
- Tags will help people find issues they want to help with easier - and help others find issues that are already solved.
- You can post your code or images without feeling like you’re spamming a channel.
- Your post doesn’t get lost in a flurry of conversations by others.
This has worked really well in the Developer category for a month or so now, so I have faith this will be a much improved experience for everyone.
You may also notice that the general Support channel has been archived. If people are having trouble finding the right channel to post in, they will want to use the open thread in the find-a-channel channel.
Developers go private
One of the biggest pain points that the developer channels experienced was non-devs coming in to ask them for help. These channels are intended to be a place where all contributors to Home Assistant can talk and sort out issues. What happened was newer community members would find their way past the Support section to our Developer section and ask for help from those devs.
To address this, I’ve put the devs section behind a role that people need to self-select in the new Channels & Roles channel in the server. I spent yesterday adding some people who are already active to that section, and people who are Members or Integration Owners should inherently already have access. New community members will see this option when they join through the new onboarding process I set up.
Clear, more concise rules
The rules drafted many moons ago weren’t exactly concise in what is and isn’t allowed, which left some flexibility in how things were managed. I’ve updated those rules to be very clear in how we expect our community members to behave. Please review them - we will assume you have in order to participate in the server.
And yes, these will be similarly reflected in rules here on the forums.
Time for a murder…
…of Crows! The story goes that @joostlek went full Anakin and wiped out the Jedis and Padawans from the server. Unfortunate… Anyway! They’ve been merged together and we now have a single group of community leaders on our Discord server. Moving forward, those who are recognized as positive influences and experienced helpers in our community are now a Crow.
This may be a little weird to those of you on the forums exclusively. What even is this group??? Well, you can think of them as the equivalent of the Regulars here on the forums except that there isn’t an automated way of promoting these people. There are some Regulars who are also a Crow!
Why “Crows”? If you have talked to me for more than a few messages, you learn quite rapidly that I am Gothic Snow White and have been forming bonds with my neighborhood crows. Crows (and others in the corvidae family) are incredibly smart problem solvers, so it seems fitting to have those who help solve problems in Discord be part of my Crow family.
Will this change in the future? Who knows! It might! But for now, it stays. 
There are other role changes! There is now a Nabu Casa Employee role, identifying those of us who work for Nabu Casa. Mods are now Yellow instead of Green. And I removed several outdated or superfluous roles. In doing so, this means that the ability to embed links has been turned on by channel rather than roles!
Onboarding new members
The last thing I want to talk about here is an onboarding experience. When new members join, they will be asked what their Home Assistant role is - from new users to experienced developers, there are choices for you! For those of you already a member, you can see what those customization questions are in the new Channels & Roles channel - this is also how you add the new Developer role if you want access to that category.
This is something that will likely be tuned over time to get it where it needs to be. Feedback is always welcomed, just remember to be constructive.
What’s missing
There are some things I really wanted to do before I rolled all these changes out that I did not have the capacity to finish yet. So these are still coming down the line.
- Role icons - custom from our graphic designer!
- Bot changes - update some of its commands and utilize features related to community like role selection and ModMail.
That’s about it! Like I said, this would have been way too much to post on Discord. I know that change can be scary, and this change was not a small one, but my goals should make this fairly painless (except to those I actively interrupted today while locking channels down - sorry).
Now to go truly unlock the server…
