Discussion: Discord roles, and "with great power comes ..."

Arisia org chart, to try and pre-match extant members With the "login API" and a few other things in progress, it was time to set up and assign a few more of the many server roles that we'd need.  Some of those are merely advisory -- flags to set someone's name to a certain color in the user list, or add little bits of status display to the "badge" equivalent shown by clicking on a user.  Other roles can grant access or certain powers.  In a way they can map to the ribbons that we stick to our physical badges, particularly for the convention leadership -- chairs, division heads, various staff subsets -- much of which is already laid out in our year-to-year runing Org Chart.  But naturally, not everyone volunteering for a con makes it into this.

my run roles As more people came into the server I either knew who they were and what their division was, or I could try to go look it up, and would often just quietly set their additional role status before they even realized it was missing.  But Discord names frequently doesn't match their real or con names -- one reason to try and tie them together in the online database.  In some cases people would just ask for role-tags, same as they had become used to asking for ribbons on registering for the real cons.  In the early stages we could make a pretty safe assumption that they were staff, especially in the big influx bump after the announcements on Slack, but there were some requests that needed a bit of sanity-check.

One headscratcher was the Safety and IRT people, who I didn't have any list of, and several of them came in under slightly weird names and started asking "Can I get the Safety role" without any kind of introduction.


Jodie's complaints about stacking optics Then there was this big flap about how the user column on the right should appear.  Roles can be "hoisted", which means split out separately toward the top of the column, and the basic starting idea was to put important roles like Con-chair and IRT up top so they could be seen and possibly found easily if needed.  Fair enough, but then the head of Safety started making noise about how he wanted *that* division on the top of the stack, yadda yadda optics equivalent-of-911 yadda.  Finally I showed them how I could effectively hoist any *GROUP* of roles together and preserve their original colors, to try and allay squabbling between Safety and IRT and Chairs and whoever else.  Why not put all of those "red roles" in one group, to make it easy? Well, that was shot down too; I gave up and let them-all sort it out.  None of it mattered anyway, because all of these roles were always findable with the "@group" pinging function and their own public channels.

implication of giving 'helpdesk' too much power Then there was the problem of privilege; one major headache was that the Helpdesk was getting numerous complaints about badgenames that didn't get through the integration right and needed manual re-setting.  Mostly for included pronouns, which didn't pass through the gateway intact.  It was not the right solution to give the *self-settable* Helpdesk role the power to muck with other peoples' nicknames, which would have opened up undue elevation of privilege to way too many people.  So an additional "power" role only given to certain helpdesk folks at appropriate times was needed, which was not the same as the role that could alert people on that duty shift via the "@helpdesk" flag.  See, these things can be really subtle.

The "self-settable" business is described in the "time clock" rathole.


jumped in front of the bus I left others to sort out the Helpdesk mess too, as the more I tried to apply hard logic the less logical it became, but eventually everyone seemed happy with the arrangements and who was going to manage them.  A distinctly "layer 8" problem.  I was still helping crank people in to begin with, and reassured folks that I was still okay helping with that ... and was using several resources at my disposal to try and figure out who people were.

rgb went to town on the helpdesk stuff The audit log clearly showed the fallout afterward.  The "S/I" role was my "combine it" demo, summarily shitcanned; the "on hold" was a whole 'nother can of worms that I'll get to in the "muting problem" rathole.

_H*   210129