Introducing Forums and More

Jul 31, 2023

Hey everyone! We have an exciting update today, with some big features. First off:

Forums!

We've seen many of you ask about forum support (thanks for your feedback!) and we are proud to finally release the initial version! Your server's forum channels will now automatically display in the widget.

For this release, we support viewing active forum posts and sending messages in them. We aren't done - we have improvements planned, including creating forum posts inside the widget. Stay tuned for updates! Tell us what features you would like in our server.

Thread Browser

Our work on forum channels builds on our work for adding the thread browser for text and announcement channels, which we are also releasing today! Channels with active threads will now have a threads button in the header, which shows a list of the threads and allows opening them.

We have also fixed some bugs and made some improvements to our thread support. We first released support for threads a year ago, when we implemented opening threads from their messages.

You may have seen forums and the thread browser in testing during the past few months! Our Emerald instance gets early access to new features like these.

Discord Emerald Subscriptions

To anyone interested in getting WidgetBot Emerald, we have an update for you: you can now upgrade a server to Emerald right inside Discord!

We have a lot of info about this, so we've made a separate blog post that goes in-depth into this new subscription system!

New Bot Commands

We have added /readonly and /singlechannel for easily configuring these subscription features! Previously these features could only be configured using the interactive /setup command or deprecated text commands.

Headings

Finally, we have also added support for markdown headings in messages! This reflects Discord's recent markdown update. List support will come in the future, and we will release masked link support once Discord rolls it out to all servers.

That's all for now! Thanks to all of our users, and especially our subscribers! We hope this update makes WidgetBot even more useful for you.

Advaith

WidgetBot frontend and bot developer