An Open Letter to the Developers of Discord

SAVE OFFLINE

An Open Letter to the Developers of Discord    To the Developers of Discord and the community:    This is a collaborative communication from the moderation team of Discord Testers and Discord  Feedback, prompted by a series of ongoing internal discussions, and the events of April 9th. We had  previously released a version of this as an internal memo, however we felt it important this be  communicated with all those affected. These are issues that have existed for a long time, which  have only escalated with the recent change in leadership.     In order to be as concise and simple as possible, we have broken this down into two key points: a  lack of leadership, and a lack of server maintenance & improvements.   

1) Lack of Leadership    The change in leadership of DTesters and DFeedback, which occurred back in February, led to the  moderation team being left mostly on our own to maintain the servers and community. We  understand this is new territory for everyone who has assumed responsibility, but we went from  having a single full-time employee responsible for everything, who we could contact practically all  hours for anything, to multiple employees responsible for different areas who are not readily  available and do not provide assistance in a timely manner.     Through no fault of the staff we have immediate contact with, none of them are devoted entirely to  this area and have a number of other responsibilities that take their time, and often they don’t have  the information to guide us. There isn’t a single person we or the community can turn to for  questions, suggestions, or complaints which has exacerbated the tension in the community and  contributed to us feeling as though we have been left to fend for ourselves. This feeling is only  increased when we turn to staff for help and guidance and are told to use our best judgment from  what we’ve seen in the past.     As the servers continue to grow, so do the number of questions. Between the transfer of leadership  and some recent decisions, both in terms of moderation and day-to-day operations, there has been  a growing sense of unease and dissatisfaction in the community. Understandably, this caused a  large influx of questions around these topics. While we do our best to answer these questions as  we’ve done in the past, many of these questions simply cannot be handled by us as volunteer  moderators. If someone disagrees with our actions, they need a leader they can turn to, who is in  charge and has the knowledge and authority to field their concerns and assure them that they will  be heard, that their concerns do not fall on deaf ears, that they will not be ignored.    This lack of clear leadership has meant we have had to make more decisions on the day to day  operations of the servers. Frequently when we bring up concerns internally, we’re met with delays  because their team has to have a discussion first, or are simply told that they defer to our judgment.  While this level of trust is appreciated, it also causes problems. When we bring issues up it’s 

because we doubt our judgment and are looking for guidance that should be found in the people  who are supposed to be running the show.     We often have to ask about issues multiple times to even be acknowledged which leads to issues  slipping through the cracks, slow response times, and moderators having to make decisions far  outside the scope of what should be our responsibility. Volunteer moderators should not be  responsible for making large scale decisions such as what should or shouldn’t be accepted into the  Trellos. This process should at the very least be collaborative between us and devs, whereas it  currently feels like dropping a message in a bottle and hoping maybe someone would respond.    We need full-time resources similar to what we once had: at least one person whose sole  responsibility is taking care of DTesters and DFeedback, to keep things running smoothly, to be on  top of issues as they happen, and to know what is going on, with who, and why.    While we understand most people only work office hours, DTesters does not stop when the  developers go home. We are a global community, when developers go home, many of us are only  beginning our day. People have questions, actions are taken, and bugs are reported 24/7. While  most are understanding about timezone related delays, there are some issues that simply cannot  wait until devs get out of bed or the weekend is over.   

2) Lack of Server Maintenance & Improvements    DTesters has grown from a small server into a large behemoth of a reporting engine. Over the years  there have been growing pains and quirks along the way, issues that popped up, things that did not  run smoothly. While we did what we could to fix them, most of these fixes were meant to be  temporary solutions until a proper solution could be put in place. The trouble is that those real fixes  never came. Those temporary fixes became permanent. At the time that was okay, but now they  haunt us: new bug hunters are unsure about procedures because they can’t be found anywhere,  and when they ask are told that is just how it is.    There is no instance in which these issues are more profound than BugBot - the heart and soul of  DTesters. Every single bug passes through this bot as it is how all reports are submitted and  tracked. The development of this bot was halted 2 years ago. We were promised a shiny new bot,  BugBotV2, which would be in-house and developed by the Discord engineers. Two years later the  sad reality is that no such bot was ever completed despite the campaigns for it over these years.    Instead we are left with BugBotV1 which is barely holding it together at this point. A perfect  example was when we initiated an upgrade of the VPS hosting all official bots. The VPS was  seriously outdated and running an OS that was no longer supported. Unfortunately once the  upgrade was complete, we found that we had underestimated just how old the core of the bot is. It  took several hours of downgrading libraries further and further until a version could be found that  allowed a version of BugBot and the other bots to all run at the same time.   

These frustrations led the moderation team to begin work on a new BugBot V2. This would be of  our own making and incorporate many of the needed changes. It would be open source so that the  community could contribute, improve things as they need improving, fix bugs we encounter, etc.  This is what the DTesters community was founded on. The leadership transition upended this as  well as we’re hearing talk of internal development again, despite the empty promises of the past  and the hours we spent over the past five months working to restructure BugBot.    This isn’t just a major concern of the moderation team, but the community as a whole. It was hyped  up for months, they were given sneak peeks and what was being worked on, they felt their  feedback being heard, and there was even a closed alpha test group with a fully working first  version of the bot. To have that snatched away when we felt so close to a tangible solution is  heartbreaking. It is broken trust that only furthers the loss of confidence in what this community has  stood for over the years.    Over the past 30 days, the bots stats are as follows:  ● 1750 reports have been actioned (checked for being reproducible by bug hunters)  ● 488 approved bugs where send off to trello for the engineers  ● 1218 bugs where denied (invalid for some reason, either already known, missing info to  reliably reproduce, etc.)  DTesters still does what it was founded to do: find bugs, report them, and act as the first filter  between the world and devs to ensure the reports they get are actually valuable to them. BugBot is  worryingly showing signs of decay, randomly not responding, random spikes in latency, and other  behaviors we don’t know the root cause of. If BugBot goes down for any reason, the entire server  has to be locked because the activity is too large to attempt by hand. We fear for the day the bot  just dies, that something will break, no one will know why, and no one will be able to get it up and  running again.    If BugBot dies, it is extraordinarily likely that we would need to shut down DTesters for months  before reports can be accepted again.   

3) In Summary    Over time, we as the moderation team have been taking on more responsibilities, ones that  volunteers shouldn’t be responsible for, because we love the community and we want it to  succeed. But we can only do so much and adding additional people to the team, even if those  people were Discord staff, would not help with the current leadership structure. It would only server  to fragment communication further. We need a clear person in charge. We need someone who has  the power to make decisions, who listens to the community, and who enables the community to  grow and thrive. We currently have some employees who care and do what they can, but it is not  enough. Behind these people exists nameless upper management who do not appear to listen, and  do not want to give this community the resources it needs to be sustained and continue being a  vital resource for the company.   

This has led to a tremendous amount of stress and burnout of the entire moderation team. We are  volunteers. We do not receive any payment or incentives for our work, but we are expected to put in  as much effort as a full-time job. In the past this has led to people adjusting their sleeping schedule,  or worrying so much about thing exploding that their real life obligations suffered. These struggles  have been so severe in affecting our mental, emotional, and physical well-being that the community  has taken notice.     We are told that we should take time off and work less, that we should take care of ourselves, but  there is a feeling that if we don’t act to maintain the server, that all of our hard work and the  community we have grown and loved will vanish without us keeping it together. We have reached  our breaking point. For our own health and wellbeing we have to take a break from moderating  these servers, and we call on others to take a break from the chaos and stress these servers have  been. We know this may lead to chaos, but we have tried countless times to handle this internally  only to be left out to dry. We are exhausted. We are burnt out. We are done. We feel that we had no  other option than to write an open letter, to make sure the people who can make the changes we  need hear our message and take action.    This break does not mean we are gone forever - we care too much about these communities and  what we helped build. We’ve seen how amazing, how wholesome, and how supportive this  community can be with proper backing. We will gladly take up our posts again, help make the  necessary changes, and introduce the changes to the server, but not until real change is in the  works.    The time for empty words and broken promises has passed. We have heard them too many times  to count only to be let down again. We need real change in order to transform DTesters and  DFeedback into what we know they can be: amazing places where friends are made, where friends  come together, and where friends can enjoy helping improve Discord once again. Actions speak  much louder than words, and that is what the communities need now.    Best Regards,  The Moderation Team