Welcome!

Welcome to the Busy Beavers server! We hope you’ll have a good time here!

Everyone on the Busy Beavers server should have the Beavers role and a class year role (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 Grad Student, Recent Alum, or Non-Student). Your class year role should be assigned to you within 15 minutes of your joining; if you are missing it or it is incorrect, please send a private message to a mod so we can fix it.

“Beaver” status gives you access to our server - otherwise, you’ll just be stuck at the #front-door! Our automatic verification system is currently broken (working with IS&T), so please send an email to busybeavers@mit.edu with your Discord username (including the four digit number at the end) and we will add you manually.

Accessing Ranked Channels

Once you’ve gotten the Beaver role, you will be able to see a variety of community channels including #general-hangout, #memes, #gaming, etc. However, to prevent the server from getting too cluttered, you have to opt in to see many of these. Opting in gives you a “rank” on our server. These four main categories are living group, location, course, and miscellaneous.

To join a rank, and therefore gain access to the corresponding text channels, go to the #bot-commands channel and type ?rank . A full list of ranks can be found at the end of this document, but a few are highlighted here: ?rank course-6, ?rank baker-house and ?rank sf-bay-area. If you want to quit a rank, type the same command again (e.g. ?rank course-6). If you want to see all of the channels from a specific group, use the commands ?rank all-locations, ?rank all-courses and ?rank all-living-groups. To highlight some of the miscellaneous ranks, ?rank weeb gives access to our anime discussion channel, ?rank news gives access to our current events/politics channel, and ?rank covid gives access to our COVID-19 discussion channel (which features a bot that posts updates every hour).

Please do all rank assignment commands in the #bot-commands channel to avoid spamming other channels.

Adding Roles

In addition to ranks that give access to specific channels, there are certain ranks that can help classify yourself to other people. Currently the only such rank we have is the “game-night”. This rank gives you the game-night role, which will be pinged when game nights are announced and when they are starting. Game nights are also announced in #event-announcements, but this is just a way to consistently get reminders and give real-time feedback!

Other Discord Basics

If you’re new to Discord, we recommend you check out this quick guide . Additionally, here are a few other things that are useful, but not necessarily intuitive for using Discord. If you have suggestions for other things that should be in this section, let a mod know!

Nicknames: You can set your nickname for just this server (rather than Discord-wide) either by typing /nick and sending it. This can be sent in any channel because the response message can only be seen by you, so it doesn’t clutter other channels up, but you may as well use #bot-commands to do it. More in the Server Etiquette section on recommended nicknames.

Muting: If there are any channels that you are not particularly interested in and don’t want to get notifications from, but aren’t behind a rank, you can simply mute them.

Do this by right clicking on the channel name and then clicking Mute Channel. You will still be able to see the channel, so you can click on it to check in whenever you like, but you won’t see when there are unread messages from it. You can also set whether or not you get notifications for any given channel in this menu.

Markdown: Discord allows you to make your text bold, italic, etc. Here are the most common ones used:

If you would like, for example, a * to be displayed rather making your text bold, or whatever, put a \ (escape) before the character (e.g. \*not bold\* = *not bold*)

Pinned Messages: If a message in a channel is particularly important or may need to be referenced in the future, mods have the ability to “pin” that message. If you would like a message pinned, let a mod know! To see all messages pinned in a channel, click the pin button at the top of the channel.

Bots

Rythm: Rythm bot plays music in the #playlist voice channel. This allows users to hang out and listen to music together. The list of commands to use Rythm bot can be found here. Any of these commands should be preceded by r! for our server so the bot knows which messages to pay attention to.

Apollo: Apollo helps us organize events and gather RSVPs. Only mods are able to create events using Apollo, so let us know if you have an event you want us to input! If you see an Apollo event and wish to RSVP, just use the emoji reaction indicated by the invite to do so. Apollo invitations only show up in #event-announcements.

Dyno: Dyno helps maintain what roles/ranks everyone has. Descriptions of how to use Dyno to join various ranks is in the above section called “Accessing Ranked Channels.” Dyno also has some fun commands which can be seen here.

Server Etiquette

Pinging: To ping someone, type @ followed by their username or nickname. You can also ping individual roles/ranks like @course-10 or @Midwest. Many people don’t like to be pinged. A few rules of thumb include: if someone is actively involved in a conversation, they will see your message without being pinged; ping roles sparingly because it means pinging a lot of people at once. Never ping @everyone.

Nicknames: Since the point of this server is to meet people we go to school with irl, we strongly encourage users to use their real name as their nickname. We also ask that you put your pronouns in parentheses after your name (e.g. John Doe (he/him)). Nicknames can be set by sending /nick in any channel. We also encourage you to put relevant information in your nickname such as what floor/wing you live on, what year you are, etc.

Channel Overviews

List of Current ranks

Here are a list of all the ranks you can join.