How We Improved Community Feedback With Autocode and Discord

Feedback is important to any community wanting to improve. You want to make changes that are impactful for the people in your community. Feedback should be acknowledged and your community should feel heard. Here’s how we improved our community feedback system to support over 40,000 Discord members.

At Autocode, we saw growing pains in our community Discord server due to hundreds of active users every day. Our most popular channels (particularly the feedback and bug report channels) were noisy. Lots of messages constantly coming in, replies to messages from days ago with little to no context, and repeated duplicate reports with no good way to track or resolve them. The worst part was hearing from community members that they felt unheard when they took the time to voice their concerns. It was clear that what we had wasn’t working.

Discord’s robust features provide community managers the freedom to run things how we like. Discord’s API also means we can build whatever else we need. When this bottleneck problem in our feedback system cropped up, we imagined what a solution could look like and used Autocode to make that solution a reality.

The first problem: lots of messages and no way to track them. We decided not to make the feedback process too formal and keep it conversational. Giving us feedback or reporting bugs should be just as easy as leaving a message in a text channel (as it was before). We opted to use Discord’s built in context menu message interaction. Staff can select specific messages to send into a dedicated channel for conversation and tracking. Autocode’s Discord API integration made setting this up quick and easy: a single event trigger copies the original message and creates the newly tracked message in less than 100 lines of code. As a bonus, our method could be used on any message in the server. Now good feedback can be tracked from any message anywhere.

Our second issue: acknowledging the people giving us valuable feedback. The goal is to make sure when good feedback comes up, we’re able to track it and alert the person that we saw it. Our solution has two parts: the feedback system tags the user in the new conversation, and our message reply bot alerts the user in the original channel with a link to the newly tracked conversation. This gives us two opportunities to show we’ve seen the feedback to the user and the rest of the server. It also opens up opportunities for others to join in on the conversation, which has led to fewer duplicate requests and reports.

With a dedicated place to track feedback and reports, these discussion threads opened one more opportunity to improve our system. We can now alert the community when feedback and bug reports are resolved. Staff can click a button on the thread to mark a tracked report as resolved. Whereas before we only announced big changes, updates, and bug fixes, Autocode now has a way to alert the community about little changes too (as well as save the community conversation that led to it).

How the Autocode community server handles feedback is a major improvement for both our team and the community. Autocode empowers Discord community managers to make the improvements they need and get results immediately. If you want to replicate this system for your community, get started with our technical guide and companion example app and launch it today. We use Autocode to improve our Discord community. You can too.