Introducing the improved Cosmos Community Discord for developers
By: Lucy Meiland
Tags: Cosmos Network, Development, Blockchain, Discord, Cosmos

We want to optimize the Discord so that developers can get real value from interacting there and build a thriving community. It’s working at the moment because Daniela and the team put in outsized effort to keep everything on track. With a streamlined structure the team can spend more time learning and creating and therefore giving you more information and support!

We want to make it easier for users to:

Ask questions

Post answers

Get news

Find resources

Participate in events

Access experts

The Discord will be down all day on Sunday 5th of September 2021 to make the changes.

Spark joy!

Changing the Discord is an art not a science, so if it can be improved, we’re happy to iterate. Obviously, we’ll be tracking usefulness and frustration so always post if you think there’s ways we could make it better.

What the Discord will look like:

Firstly, its going to have a name change to the Cosmos Developer Discord, to highlight who will get the most use from it. If we want to give support to developers, we need to let them/you know where to go!

Where you can go for support:

There will be four main areas to post your questions and get answers: General Support, Build Chains, Build Frontend, and Run Infrastructure. These four channels will be available immediately when you login. You will no longer need to use the ‘show channel’ function to see all the various options for support — these new four channels are it, you don’t need more.

General Support is the General channel renamed to emphasize the support function. It’s not for price chat! It is the entry point for all Discord members to ask general questions and help Devs funnel themselves into the three developer support channels. General Support will still be the place to go to find out about bits of the ecosystem you don’t know, and lots of chat about staking and wallets. I don’t think we’re getting away from staking chat anytime soon!

There are three dedicated Dev channels, Build Chains, Build Frontend, and Run Infrastructure, and they should be self explanatory. They are to replace the General Dev channel and all of the smaller dedicated channels that had very little traffic. If you don’t know which channel to post your question in, you’re probably not ready to build and you need to be in General Support. We’ve designed these channels to be as wide as possible without being a huge, catch-all bucket that means you can’t find an answer independently. Equally, not so small that you need to know everything about Cosmos before you know where to ask the question.

We’re also introducing a bot that has a ticketing system in these channels, this should mean you will get quicker responses from the experts. We’re trialing it in September and October to see if it makes response times quicker. It should also help us understand the areas we need more information, which will help us create better tutorials and learning materials so you’re getting the answers you need.

Where you can find resources:

There are two new channels for resources: Explore the Ecosystem and Cosmos News. (Report Scams is still there, and please always use it! The team fights scams everyday.) Explore the Ecosystem has links to many of the ecosystem members’ Discords, websites, and learning resources.

Cosmos News has information on happenings in the ecosystem. For the moment, a limited number of people will be able to post in the channel. Eventually, we are hoping that the marketing teams of the various organizations use the ‘Cosmos News’ channel to keep you up to date so you don’t always have to scrape around twitter, blogs, and company websites to find out what’s happening.

There is an archive of the old channels:

Don’t worry, the previously active channels will be searchable in the ‘Archive’ Section. Here’s Discord’s guide to using Search efficiently, Discord search filters are stackable and have recent and relevant sort options. (We all forget the essentials sometimes!) You won’t lose all that valuable content in the change, don’t worry.

Information about events:

Now there are two types of event channel — Evergreen channels that are open all the time for events that happen regularly, and temporary channels that open for a specific event.

You will be able to dip into the evergreen channels during the events for updates, links and questions. Equally, if you miss an event you can catch up on what happened. We would like it to be a useful repository of information and a quick way to find things.

The temporary channels open and close based on the event. They open a significant time before the event and will contain the links and information necessary to allow you to skill up to be able to participate. During the event the channel is one of the key places for announcements and is the place for secondary events, to ask questions, and build community. During the closing stage of an event but before the channel closes, there will be clear signals for next steps, and how to get more from Cosmos.

— — —

Who is who on the Discord?

The role for the Janitors and Core Developers remains the same. With the new bot, the Janitors will be able to tag your questions to direct it to the right core developer, which should mean your questions get answered more efficiently. We are building out the moderation team to help Daniel and Meow answer questions in different timezones and help with the flood of questions they get daily. Most importantly, they will do the valuable work trying to keep the Discord as scam free as possible.

Lastly, we have a new type of member in the Discord COSMOS TEAMS. These are people who work in the various organizations that are building with Cosmos but aren’t core developers, for example marketers, event organizers and internal recruiters. Giving them a new designation will let you know they are legitimately posting about something in the ecosystem.

Let’s hope we spark joy!