Kotbo 3 min read
Discord announcements: write news and broadcast it as RSS
A server’s announcements get lost in the flow: a pinned message, an #announcements channel nobody scrolls back through. Discord lets you post, but not sort by section, keep a draft, or offer a feed to follow elsewhere. In Kotbo, the News page of the dashboard lets you write, categorize, broadcast to the right channel and publish an RSS feed your members follow from their reader
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What structured news is for
An announcement read at the right time spares staff ten questions
- Patch notes, recruitment announcements and staff news no longer get mixed up
- A draft gets reread before publishing, instead of being written live in Discord
- Members who rarely open Discord follow the server through RSS
- Older announcements stay readable, sorted by category
What Discord offers without a bot
Discord has announcement channels other servers can follow, and pinned messages. But nothing to write in advance, sort by category, edit in Markdown with a preview, or offer an RSS feed to your audience
Writing and publishing news with Kotbo
Everything is set on dash.kotbo.fr, in the News page
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Create the article
A title, an optional short summary, and the content in Markdown with a live preview. You can add an image URL
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Categorize it
Announcement, Blog, Patch note, Staff or Update, plus an optional subcategory (API, Web, Europe…)
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Choose how it goes to Discord
Either the full message with a public page, or a summary with a button to the page. This choice applies on immediate publication or when a draft is published
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Publish or keep as a draft
Publishing immediately makes the article public and sends the notification. Otherwise it stays a draft
One section, one channel
The configuration section pairs a category, or a subcategory, with a Discord channel. Each section works like a newspaper’s
Broadcast channel
The section’s announcements are posted there. You can have one channel for patch notes and another for staff announcements
Dedicated RSS feed
Each section has its own public feed, which your audience can follow separately
Feed index
A table lists each section with its broadcast channel and its feed
Forum view
Articles are grouped by category then subcategory, like a forum
The public RSS feed
The feed is generated from published articles. Your members, or anyone, can subscribe with Feedly, Inoreader or any other RSS reader. Copy its link from the dashboard. A draft never shows up in the feed
Writing a good announcement
A useful announcement reads in ten seconds
- Put the key information in the title: “Maintenance Saturday at 9 pm” rather than “Important announcement”
- Use the short summary for the quick version, and the body for the details
- One category per type of message: members choose what they follow
- Reread the draft in the preview before publishing, especially links and mentions