Discord Consolidation

Discord Consolidation!May 31, 2024

We’ve got some big announcements to make about three Rec Room Discord servers. Ink Inc, Rec Room Studio, and Creative Club.

TL;DR:

In the next few weeks, we’ll begin merging the Ink Inc, Rec Room Studio, and Creative Club Discord servers into the Creator Hub Discord server.

The Creative Club server will become the Creator Hub server.

Consolidating servers will streamline moderation, bot maintenance, feedback gathering, announcements, creator programs, and interaction between creators and devs.

Let us know your thoughts, feedback, and questions in the ⁠discord-merger-forum and ⁠discord-merger-chat channels in the current Creative Club discord. Please read the entire announcement first and the FAQ!

WHAT is happening:We’re going to merge the three Rec Room creator servers into one server. Ink Inc and RRStudio (RRS) will merge into the Creative Club Discord, and that server will be renamed and reorganized into the Creator Hub Discord. This will become the new hub for all Rec Room creator announcements, discussion, and programs on Discord. The Ink Inc and RRS servers will have many of their active channels, bots, roles, forums, and other functions moved over into the Creator Hub Discord.

WHY is it happening: We maintain a lot of different Discords. By my last count there were around 15 different RR Discords being maintained and moderated by RR teams. Some of these are private (for early access programs and similar things) and some are public. Having this many servers leads to confusion internally at Rec Room and externally with the creator community. There’s also a lot of work involved with moderating the servers, maintaining bots, ensuring we’ve gathered feedback from creators on a given topic across all servers, etc.Having our largest creator focused programs (economy, RRS, Rooms 2.0, classes, workshops, and all other creator programs) in one place will allow us to better serve the creator community. Rec Room devs who are currently spread out across these three servers will now be in one place. Our goal is to increase the number of interactions between creators and devs, increase the amount of feedback gathering and Q&A time we’re spending in Discord, and cut down on the number of communication and feedback issues associated with maintaining multiple creator programs across multiple servers.

WHEN is it happening:In the next week or two we’ll start preparing the Creative Club (soon to be Creator Hub server) for an influx of creators and new channels. You’ll see new channels appear and existing channels be reorganized in the new Creator Hub server. If you only have certain roles selected in your ‘Channels and Roles’ section of the server, I’d recommend toggling all of these on or checking in with these settings as we reorganize channels and the ‘view channels’ roles.To prevent confusion on which channels are the ‘real’ channels we won’t allow posting in any Ink Inc or RRS channels you may see appear in the Creative Club Discord until we’re ready to move the Ink Inc and RRS programs into the Creator Hub server. We’ll make more announcements as work progresses but our target for freezing the Ink Inc and RRS channels from new posts and moving everyone over fully into the Creator Hub Discord is mid to late June. After we’ve moved everyone into the Creator Hub Discord and frozen the old channels in Ink Inc and RRS, we’ll keep those servers up for a number of months or potentially the remainder of the year if we find there are things we can’t easily migrate that creators are still using there. Ideally we can get everything useful moved over but we want to leave those servers up but frozen from new posts so that people can link back to them or reference any useful posts that we weren’t able to migrate.

WHERE can I give feedback: We created a ⁠discord-merger-forum channel and a ⁠discord-merger-chat channel in the Creative Club Discord. The channels are under the ‘CREATIVE CHANNELS’ section. If you don’t see this section be sure to check your ‘Channels & Roles’ settings. Please post any major concerns or feedback you have into the forum so that other creators and RR devs can see common themes and reply to them all in one place over the course of the next few weeks rather than having to scroll through 80 pages of chat. For general chatter feel free to use the chat channel. Devs will focus on replying to the forum posts first rather than the chat if it’s moving too quickly so that creators who aren’t on at that moment, and who don’t want to scroll through a long chat, can find answers to their questions.

FAQ:

Will the RRS channels maintain their RRS full access vs RRS limited access separation? Yes, the RRS channels will stay how they are currently configured. We’ve migrated the rec.net RRS role assignment system over to the Creator Hub Discord. Once we’re ready to move everyone over and we freeze all RRS server channels we’ll direct everyone in the RRS Discord back to rec.net to click the ‘join Discord’ link again. This will give you the proper RRS role assignment again but this time for the same channels moved into the Creator Hub server. I’m a mod in Ink Inc or RRS, do I keep my mod role? Yes! Someone should reach out or have reached out already about migrating mods into the Creator Hub Discord. Will all of my Ink Inc or RRS roles migrate into the Creator Hub Discord? Roles that have a meaningful impact on channel access like RRS full access or mods will be moved over. Roles that were given out in the past like ‘Gribbly’s best fwiend - paintball tournament winner 2017’ won’t be moved over. When will the Creative Club Discord be renamed to the Creator Hub Discord? Very soon! Probably a few days after this announcement. We also made a new logo :) Does the Creative Club to Creator Hub name change impact any other Creative Club stuff? Not yet. We’re focusing just on updating the Discord server for now. Why are servers merging into Creator Hub Discord and not some other Discord? We felt it would be too overwhelming to merge all of these programs into the primary RR official Discord and navigation could become a nightmare with that many channels added to all of those that already exist there. We also want a central place to interact with creators, run public and private access creator programs, and gather creator feedback. We felt it was best to keep the RR official Discord as the place for players and some amount of creative discussion, but we wanted to have a server that was the hub of the creator community where the most interested and dedicated RR creators spend their time and can interact with devs working on the creative tools.The Creative Club Discord has the largest number of creator members, has the most complicated roles structure (would have been very difficult to migrate into Ink Inc or RRS), and already had the largest number of operating creator programs. If there are things you felt the Ink Inc or RRS Discords were doing better than the Creative Club Discord please let us know what those were in the feedback channels we set up! We’re very open to making changes to the soon to be called Creator Hub server to make it better for everyone and carry over the parts of the other servers that were working well.We think there is a perception that the Creative Club server is just for classes and workshops and creator announcements and not much else. We’re going to change that with this name change and this merger. All of the economy devs and all of the RRS devs will be making the move into the new Creator Hub server. They will be interacting with creators in their channels and across other channels. This will become the best place to get in touch with RR devs if you’re a creator. We will be posting creator early access and feedback opportunities into the Creator Hub server. There will be a renewed sense of activity and community in this server once everything is merged in and we’ll make any changes we need to make to better organize the channels and get all of our creator programs operating in one place.We expect Ink Inc and RRS might have been doing some things better than other Rec Room Discord servers. Let us know what those things were in the feedback channels so that we’re sure to move those things over or replicate those bits of the server culture! And if you’re a Discord wizard and have bot / plugin recommendations, or if you can point us to non RR Discord servers that you think are especially well organized or well run, please post those in the forum channel for us to take a look at! Over time we're confident we’ll get the Creator Hub Discord into much better shape than any of these three servers were on their own.