Hey Admins and Mods,

We're making it easier for you to run audio events in your community!

Introducing: Stage channels, a new type of channel that allow you to share a focused conversation with select speakers to an audience of listeners.
- You can set a topic on the conversation.
- Speakers are shown at the top in the UI.
- All members join as muted listeners by default. No more messing with Speak perms! 🚫
- Members can raise hand to request to speak. 👋
- You can designate "Stage moderators" who can approve/deny these requests.

In beta testing, we saw communities use Stages for voice AMAs, townhalls, reading clubs where each person talks about their book of choice, and people just singing the night away in karaoke.

Other important stuff:
- Stage channels are audio only; no video or screen share options currently.
- Up to 1,000 users are able to join Stage channels for now.
- You can run multiple Stage channels at the same time, similar to current channels.
- It is out on all platforms: iOS, Android, Desktop, and Web. If you don't see it, please update your client.
- Got more Qs? Check out: https://dis.gd/stagesfaq

Hey Admins and Mods!

You may have heard about a feature for bots currently in beta called Slash Commands! Essentially, the way users interact with bots is about to become much simpler - it's as easy as typing "/" to bring up all the commands that bot can do. Slash Commands come with features like autocomplete, validation, and error handling. No more typing up memorized commands, which means bots no longer need to read user messages!

We're excited for how this update will unlock more fun with bots, and since we know many of you are careful with where and how you manage bot permissions, we wanted to give you a special heads up on what this is and what small actions you can take today to prepare for the upcoming release.

What this means for you
- We are launching a new permission: "Use Slash Commands."
- Currently, if you've wanted to avoid bot spam in certain channels, you may have turned off read/send message permissions for bots.
- However, if those bots use Slash Commands in the future, you'll need to configure this new permission in order to keep your channels consistent with how they're set up today. Otherwise, Slash Commands may be able to get around your old permissions setups. Commands are sent directly to the bot and not through reading user messages.
- Go through your channels and decide where you do and do not want to allow Slash Commands to be used (yes #botspam, no #channel).

You can see this permission option today on desktop, and on mobile in a few days.

Thanks for all your hard work!

P.S. Attached is a lil preview of Slash Commands in action.

Hey Admins and Mods,

Today we're excited to share with you a new experiment that we'll be rolling out over the next few weeks. You'll no longer need to settle on choosing one server region that your voice channels run on for your whole server. Instead you'll be able to use a different region for each of your voice channels.

But what does this mean for you?
- Each of your voice channels will have a voice region setting. More regions means better call quality because you're not forcing one region for everyone.
- We've also added a new option called "Automatic." By default, all voice channel regions will be set to "Automatic." This means that the region will be automatically determined based on the first person to join an empty voice channel, and the region can change anytime a voice channel becomes completely empty and new person joins it.
- You still have the option to set a specific region if you want though. This option will be moving from Server Settings and is now found in each voice channel settings page.

We recommend using the default region, "Automatic", so you don't need to constantly change voice channel regions based on who is in a voice channel (Let Discord handle that!), but you're always able to make changes under Voice Channel Settings at any time.

Also — because there's a region setting for each voice channel now means that the permissions to manage this have changed. Instead of granting roles the Manage Server permission to change the server region, any roles that have the Manage Channel permission will be able to adjust the voice channel region if needed.

Like we mentioned, this experiment will be rolling out over the next few weeks, and if things look good we'll be swapping over to this system permanently. If you have specific questions around this change, you can check out the Help Center article here: https://support.discord.com/hc/articles/360060570993

Hey Admin and Mods,

Today, we are excited to release our new Rules Screening feature to all communities. We all know that joining a new community can often be overwhelming and confusing. A great way to help set new members up for success is to outline a set of rules and guidelines that describe your community’s culture and how one should behave in it.

Rules Screening gives you a simple, clean way to ensure that potential members can understand the guidelines for your community before joining, helping ensure that they can be positive additions to your community. If enabled, new members will be prompted to read your rules when they join your server, and until they agree to them and pass your verification level requirements, they will not be able to talk, react, or DM other members.

For servers that traditionally have not used gating mechanisms (e.g. bot role gate) know that enabling Rules Screening does create more friction to joining and could lead to a decrease in new member joins. However, it does offer the least friction possible for anyone who wants new members to agree to rules.

We also know communities often need more sophisticated screening methods like custom response/manual application, oAuth, and third party connections. We are hard at work building those so that we can release them to you soon as well.

As always, please provide any feedback or comments on these new features so we can help improve them moving forward!

Happy Screening & Happy Holidays.

P.S. If you grant roles to new members on join via a bot, it will bypass this feature. We recommend updating your bot to only grant roles once members pass the screening. Look for the pending flag in our developer documentation.
P.S.S If you plan to remove your bot role gate and use Screening, make sure you enable talking perms on so they can talk after passing. We've already ensured that pending members are not able to talk, dm, or react until they've accepted the rules.

Hey Admins and Mods,
- The amount of members required to join Server Discovery has been lowered to 7,000 members (from 10k). We plan to continue lowering this requirement as time goes on because small communities are great communities too! Slowly lowering the requirements over time means we can properly scale our own moderation and ensure communities in Server Discovery are safe for everyone.
- For server moderators on the go, you can now publish Announcement channel messages on mobile. Just long press a message in an Announcement channel and you'll see a publish button! If you don't see it, you may need to update your app.