INFOGRAPHIC Melissa Olivares
Japanese Language and Culture club secretary Crystal Doan was one of the main writers of the petition in response to ASBL’S new Discord policy. The club uses the app extensively for discussions and announcements.
By Josh Lee, Staff Writer
Leaders of the Chinese Culture club, French club, Japanese Language and Culture club and Spanish club organized a petition on Nov. 22 to keep their servers and suggested several solutions to resolve the problems of server security against Discord raiders and inappropriate behavior in response to new Discord server policies.
“The first policies were a big issue, especially for clubs that had active servers,” French Club president senior Caren Chua said. “For us in particular, the Foreign Language Clubs’ Discord server runs on bots that give students roles for certain clubs, and we put in a lot of hard work just to get the server up and running. I know other clubs who have been using Discord even before COVID-19, so I knew that removing the server entirely would’ve erased a lot of their culture as well.”
ASBL released their initial Discord server policy on Nov. 19, in response to a raid in one of the club servers. Upon investigation of the incident, the campus committee discovered that there were few security measures in place, with no way for advisers to monitor the club. ABSL informed clubs as per the policy that they had two weeks to have their advisers remake their servers according to a designed template or migrate to the ASB Discord server in order to create greater adviser involvement in the servers.
“After discussing with the activities director, Mr. Kidd, we realized that we had to have someone take responsibility, or else the district would probably shut down Discord for everyone,” campus commissioner junior Thomas Woo said. “We started to get worried that other clubs would have this problem, so we put the new security measures in place to fix that.”
On Nov. 22, club representatives shared the petition on Instagram stories and Discord, eventually reaching 138 signatures. Club leaders also drafted a series of substitute solutions for increasing server security without having to remake the Discord servers from scratch. Despite suggesting the increase of adviser responsibility in club Discord servers, club leaders were against increasing the amount of adviser moderation.
“If the advisers were there, they would be somewhat of a figurehead because it would
the club president managing the entire server,” Japanese Language and Culture club secretary junior Crystal Doan said. “The likelihood of them managing or moderating any of the server at all is extremely slim since they don’t really have any experience with it.”
ASBL released a new set of policies on Dec. 3 allowing clubs to keep their servers under the condition that the adviser is present for Discord club meetings and accepts responsibility for any incidents that occur. The details of these conditions were discussed in a meeting on Dec. 11, which clarified that advisers do not need to assume a major role in managing servers, only in taking accountability.
“The initial conditions were more secure and it was definitely easier to monitor too, but we understand where the clubs are coming from,” club commissioner senior Janelle Ho said. “We wanted to make sure that we took their concerns into consideration, so we decided to implement this new rule, which will hopefully make it easier for them to transition but still provides some more security. It’s a better compromise between the two parties.”