Starboard

**This article describes real server events.**

Starboard is a Discord bot. Its main functionality is to serve as an alternative to pinning messages to Discord channels, where if a message gets 4 star emoji reactions (the number being configurable by the server administrators), it gets reposted to a special #starboard channel within the Discord server.

Over the course of the server's history, several different Starboard bots were used as hosts would discontinue it and pick it up again.

## Introduction to Freddit

Starboard was added to the first Discord server on 31 July 2018, replacing the pizza delivery bot that was used by the server right before that (the pizza delivery bot allowed different servers to interact with each other via roleplayed pizza deliveries). The first message to ever be starred was sent by crafterman4 through the Minecraft server in 2016. It was picked to test the Starboard's functionality.

## Star Terminology

As Starboard became an essential part of the server's day-to-day business and its culture in general, some terms were jokingly coined for various actions related to starring messages, some of which were used unironically by server members.

* **Starring** - the act of reacting with to a message.
* **Unstarring** - the act of removing the reaction to a message.
* **Starwhoring** - the act of asking for or begging for stars.
* **Starbaiting** - the act of doing something tifu-like (exagerated stories or asking/saying something dumb while pretending youre ignorant to it) with the intent of getting stars.
* **Starballing** - the act of leaving a message at 3 stars.
* **Starratiod** - when your message gets more than .
* **Stargaping** - when you post WIP versions of your message so you get more stars each turn.
* **Starcucked** - when you get to starboard but then people unstar it.
* **Starwhining** - when you complain you didn't get enough stars.
* **Starsuzakichanning** - when you don't let people enjoy starboard and say we take it too seriously. Mind your own beeswax!
* **Starkeeping** - when you start gatekeeping what should be on starboard.
* **Starzkrieging** - the act of trying to collapse the star economy.
* **Starspamming** - the act of starring a lot of posts in a row.
* **Stardynning** - the act of removing the stars of other people from a post or removing a post altogether from starboard.
* **Starfascist** - those who shame people who aren't on the first page of starboard.
* **Starsocialist** - those who shame people who are on the first page of starboard.

The server used to have a custom emoji specifically to represent starbaiting, depicting a star being pulled up by a fishing rod. This became a point of controversy within the server, as some users complained that it felt belittling to have their messages receive the emoji as a reaction. Adding a starbait reaction to someone else's message was also a common tactic to prevent that message from becoming starred in the first place.

## PE board

The PE emote was often used as a reaction to messages on the server that didn't sit well with most members. As such, it was decided to jokingly create #peboard as antithesis to #starboard, where #starboard would highlight the great and funny messages on the server, while #peboard would be used to highlight the more shocking and depraved parts of the server. It was added to the Discord server on 9 May 2020.

## T.B.C. Starfarms

Another functionality of Starboard was the global leaderboard, where each server having the bot was ranked according to the total amount of stars every single message had received in that specific server.

On 15 October 2020, various members saw this as an opportunity to advertise the server by purposefully spamming the Starboard in order to reach a front page of the leaderboard. A new category was created on the Discord server, where multiple channels were made for anyone who wanted to participate in the operation. The regular starboard channel was temporarily suspended, and the minimum amount of stars required to reach Starboard was set to 3. To facilitate the mission, Orb created a Discord bot script which would run on three different Discord accounts (usually referred to as selfbots) which would give any message posted in these channels the required stars to reach starboard instantaneously.

When the operation began, the Freddit Discord server was at the 47th ranking on the 5th page of the global leaderboard with 7,227 stars. The effectiveness of the starfarms immediately showed as Freddit began to climb the ranks, eventually surpassing the official Discord server of the /r/Turkey subreddit.

The farms were short-lived however, as people began to notice that farmed stars weren't being registered by the bot anymore. After testing several hypotheses, the conclusion came that the server had been blacklisted from the global leaderboard. At that point in time, the server had reached the 29th ranking on the 3rd page with a total of 11,591 stars.

Since this occurred on the first Discord server, the blacklist technically no longer applies to Freddit.

1. ↑ The #news message announcing the creation of #starboard (Note: Requires access to the old archived Freddit Discord server)
2. ↑ The message in #news announcing Freddit's surpassing of the /r/Turkey Discord server (Note: requires access to the old archived Freddit Discord server)