DevTalk MOTD

The DevTalk MOTD, or Message of the Day, is a combination of an automatically submitted generation of the DevTalk community's guidelines, joining information, previous day's most active channel activity, the most active user and their message count, and a randomized-queue of useful resources and Discord links. The DevTalk MOTD is posted daily at 2AM Eastern time in DevTalk's Welcome channel.

Contents & Sources

Guidelines

The Guidelines are the rules of the DevTalk Discord community. This section of the MOTD is largely static, but is rebuilt daily from a table containing the guidelines. When guidelines for the community need to be updated, the table entries are edited by a moderator and then either the MOTD is regenerated to show the new guideline, or the guidelines are automatically updated in the early following AM.

Activity

Each time a message is sent in a channel, Plum increments numbers associated with that user and channel. At the time the MOTD is posted, Plum totals the message number from all channels and users, combines them, finds the user and channel with the largest number of messages, then adds them into the MOTD. At that point, the record of activity is deleted and then a new collection begins. No activity, user or channel, is kept long term and the previous day's information is always deleted at 2 AM.

Resources

The daily posted resources are pulled at random from a collection of community submitted links and resources. Using Plum, community members can submit resources using the quotes system to the 'resource' collection. When the MOTD is generated, a random entry off of the resource list is selected and posted along with the rest of the MOTD. In addition, if the selected resource contains a URL, it is extracted and stored separately for Lemon to use in generating a Twitter message containing the same resource later in the day.

Community Links

The daily posted community link for DevTalk are generated much the same way the guidelines are and are mostly static. The community links for other communities are collected from the quotes system much the same way the resources are, except that a queue is built from the total list of community links. Plum maintains a queue of Discord links to post to the MOTD, and each day she takes from the top of the queue to post, then deletes the top entry, letting the next one in the queue come to the top. This process repeats until the queue is empty, at which point she pulls all of the links into the queue, randomizes their location in it, then begins the process again. The queue system was set up to make sure that each submitted link would eventually make its way on the MOTD at some point before another was posted twice.

History

The DevTalk MOTD was built to circulate buried Resources and Discord lists. Due to the nature of Discord and other chat applications, older messages, meaning older resources and order Discord links, were far less likely to be seen than new ones. By adding them to a random, rotating message, it increases the likelihood that these resources and links would not go unnoticed, minimizing the need to resubmit links and resources repeatedly.

The current iteration of the MOTD has interface and art created by Saden, who also created DevTalk's current logo.