By Marc Küster
13 Stars is all about uniting the different European Schools. The new European Schools Discord server has the same objective. I asked the current lead of this project, David Fernández-Sanguino, how it came to be:
How did you get the idea to start a Discord server for all European schools? Why did you want to start this server?
I didn’t come up with this idea. I got kind of slotted into the project. The idea emerged during a CoSup meeting and the student president of my school told me about it as she knew that I would be interested. The idea of the server is to make a friendly place for all secondary and alumni of all the European Schools.
I think starting such a server is not necessarily trivial. Is this your first server or have you organised servers before? Also, have you created this server alone or with friends, for example?
I have created and managed some other servers in the past. They were mostly for projects I have worked on in the past or creating communities to teach people how to code. I’m still running and managing a lot of them.
Likewise, did you face any obstacles or problems in the process? And now that it is running, how are you able to organise it?
Setting up the server was straightforward, like any other server. We have some bots for auto-moderation which helps us manage the server when there are a lot of active people, as well as some helpful mod bots to manage strikes, mutes and allow us to make staff notes on members.
The first thing to do after joining the server is to authenticate yourself. This isn’t the first server I joined. No authentication method has been as secure as this one. How did you come up with this method?
We had the idea of making sure that the members that joined were part of one of the 13 European Schools. Since we all have a school Office account, using that to verify seemed the best way to go. It has turned out to be really useful as we both prevented raids and kept non-students out of the server.
The server has grown to over a thousand members and is still growing quickly. Did you expect this, how did you react to it and how do you feel about all the feedback from the students from all the different European schools you got?
We did expect a lot of members to join, but it was still amazing to experience it. We gained 200 members on the first day and 500 members on the second. It was amazing! We are really thankful for all the suggestions we have received, and we will continue to improve the server and implement new ideas.
Is there anything you are most proud of?
Most probably the verification bot. Most people can’t see it, but it’s built-in an extendable way and it’s fully documented to allow the admins in the future to modify it or fix bugs with ease. It also has a whole admin panel to manage both the bot and the back-end which turned out nicely.
Do you have any specific plans, such as adding more games and self-assigned roles, or goals for the future of the server?
We keep an eye out for suggestions and implement them when we think it could be a good addition or if a lot of people request it. We also have a lot of events planned, such as movie night, which we just announced what movie we will be watching, chosen by the community; game nights, which we are still planning; and much more!
Why should one join this server? What would you tell someone considering joining?
We have an amazing time talking in voice channels with other members and have very interesting conversations with them. If you want to meet people from other European Schools or want to meet other people from your school, this server is the best place for you.
You can join this server and become a part of it, via this invite link: https://discord.13stars.eu/
Image by @Timeo.dvrs
