Command Permissions follow-up

[typpo]

Hi everyone,

Earlier this week, we rolled out the long-awaited Command Permissions v2. If you’re active in Discord Developers, you’ve seen the iteration of permissions over the course of several months, from wireframes and tech proposals to betas and sneak peeks. (If you’re not, the first you heard about this new feature may have been Wednesday’s announcement.)

We’ve been working with many of you over those several months to make a great new system for managing slash commands. We landed on something we’re proud of: a system that gives moderators the power to configure their servers how best works for them, and also gives developers peace of mind when you make new commands or migrate for the first time.

The new permissions system is inherently a breaking change, because it is an inversion of control from the previous command permissions system. Before, developers were entirely in control of permission setups, much like text commands. Now, that control lies in the hands of server moderators. There is no API version bump that can protect against that change; both cannot be supported simultaneously. For changes like this, there needs to be an ample amount of heads up and communication to those using the current system, which we failed to provide.

Here’s what we’ll be doing moving forward:

• We’ll continue investing in the new permissions system, and fix the bugs that were reported to us in the past few days—thank you to all who did so

• We’ll do an internal postmortem on this launch to understand why this release did not get properly audited as a breaking change requiring communication. We’ll also review our internal runbooks for breaking changes to ensure that things are properly communicated when raised

• Moving forward, that communication will happen here in our API docs as well as the Discord Developers server. We recognize that not all developers are present in DDevs, but we hope you’ll consider joining—discord.gg/discord-developers. Our announcement channels are the place to follow for API updates, product announcements, and community events!

• We’ll take another look at our public roadmaps. Right now, they’re useful for understanding what kinds of projects we’re thinking about, but not for understanding timing or near-ness

• We’ll also take another look at how we are running feature betas. The most surefire way to be prepared for changes is to be able to experience them ahead of time.

Thank you again for all the great thoughts and suggestions to our new Command Permissions system (over the past months as well as yesterday). We appreciate it and will share more updates here on the above.