 Hey, I'm Andrew. And in this episode, I'm excited to share and give you a tour of the Vojtanos community on Discord. If you aren't familiar with Discord, don't worry about it. I'll explain what it is and I'll show you how to join and get started getting the most use out of it. Hey, I'm Andrew Connell. This episode is also available as a blog post on Vojtanos.io and as a podcast on Vojtanos.show. Check out the description below the video for links to these other resources. If you're new here, subscribe so you can get notified of my future videos that are just for developers of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure related topics. Why should you join the Vojtanos community Discord server? What is it? Well, Discord is a chat application that gained popularity among gamers and has become quite popular among web developers as well. The Vojtanos community on Discord is a community of people who want to make connections, share ideas, learn and help others that are other web and cloud developers in the Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure space. You can make connections and you can make friends. Let's face it, we're better when we're all working together. Discord allows us to have meaningful and nuanced conversations about building solutions for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure. If you want to ask questions or provide your own opinions, our Discord community is perfect for you. This community is focused on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure developer topics primarily. Now, if you're looking for something or you want to pull the humble bragging card out and share what you've created, don't worry about it. We got a channel for that too. The Vojtanos community on Discord is also a fantastic place to get and provide feedback on fun and interesting ideas. Maybe you're stuck on a problem or maybe you have an approach that you want to run by some of your peers or maybe you want to organize a meetup, discuss an upcoming or a current conference, or even chat about a virtual event. This is a perfect place for it. For those of you who are familiar with Slack or Microsoft Teams, Discord's a lot like those, but I think it's a lot better. Similar to Slack and Microsoft Teams, topics are organized in channels where you can post text, images, links, and even start threaded conversations. And just like Slack and Microsoft Teams, Discord offers a web client or native clients for all the popular desktop and mobile platforms. But unlike Microsoft Teams, there's no added complexity with guest accounts and multiple tenants. It's more like Slack in that sense, where you can join multiple Discord servers, also known as guilds, and you can jump between them without having to reload the client. Now, unlike Slack, you have a single Discord account that you can join to one or more servers. There's no need for multiple Slack logins for each Slack team that you want to join. You can also get access to student exclusive channels. Developers that enrolled in my courses also get access to channels that are exclusively available to students of the course that you're signed up for. This includes channels to ask questions about specific lessons, to interact with fellow students, and much more. Maybe you've also heard about the Private Mastermind Facebook group that we have at Voitanos for some courses and some bundles. It's one of the benefits that students of a course get. These exclusive student-only channels in the Voitanos community on Discord, they're replacing the Facebook group in June of 2022. If you're familiar with Discord, you might just want to jump ahead to the part of this episode where I show you how to join the Voitanos community on Discord and quickly set up your profile. And this includes getting access to the exclusive student-only channels if you're enrolled in one of my courses. But what I want to do first is I want to give you a quick little tour of how you can use Discord. If I jump over here to my environment, you can see here that I've already got Discord up and running and I'm logged in. Now, when you log in, you're not going to see as much stuff here because I'm logged in as the moderator of the server. And so there's some additional things that I can see that you won't be able to see like some extra channels and such. And you can also see all the servers that I've already joined. Over here on the left-hand side, you can see these are all the servers that I've already joined. I've got the Voitanos server and then there's a bunch of other ones that are available to me as well. Like for Discord developers, there's one for Home Assistant. But I want to focus here on the Voitanos server that I've already joined here. So what we have over here in the left-hand side is similar to Slack and the Teams, you've got these channels that are over here on the side. And you can select any of these different channels to go jump in and see different content that's here. Now, I'm all caught up on my channels, but if I went over to another one that had some unread stuff, you'd see this bold messages here that would show you that there are some messages that I haven't caught up on yet. So and there are new messages that have been posted since I've been in here. How do I post a new message? Well, over here you can see just like in Slack and in Teams, you post your message down here at the bottom. So I can click on the plus to go upload a file, create a thread. I'll talk about threads in a minute, or I can use a slash command. So I can go post the new message by just typing in some message right down here at the bottom, and I can hit enter and the message will show right up. If I don't like my message, I can come back and I can delete it as well to delete my message. Now, there are some things that everyone will have permissions to do or not do in each one of these different channels. It really depends on what level of a member you are. We really only have a couple different breakdowns of the different members. You've got everybody, the verified member, when they come in, they can do almost everything. You can post messages, links, add reactions to post, etc. But there'll be some channels where you can't post anything. So like for example, if you go to the rules channel, I'm the only one that can post in there. The verified channel, there's only one post that's going to be there as well. Same thing with announcements, but the water cooler, everybody can post something there. We have a lot of other channels as well that we can take a look at and things that you could leverage or some things you may or may not have access to. So for example, if I scroll down here, you see that we've got a whole bunch of channels that are here for customers and students of my Mastering the SharePoint Framework course. People who are just on the free plan for this, the starter bundle, they would only see the starter bundle, but they wouldn't have access to other things like the fundamentals bundle, the ultimate bundle, or the mastermind where is the more rich access that my ultimate subscribers have access to. Same thing over here at the exam prop. So when you first come into this, here you can see what most people would have access to. So when you come in, you can see you have access to all of these channels here. You have channels here for the blog. You can see recent blog posts will be posted here. It's a great place to ask questions. Recent videos we posted to YouTube, podcast episodes, got a question or want to talk about something Microsoft 365 related or Azure related conferences and events. These two different channels here about I made this and I need this. Great places to either do some humble bragging and share something that you've built or say like, Hey, I'm looking for this. Anybody know of anybody who's built something like this? And then these channels here where we have like general and text support for my courses. This is if you're having trouble connecting your Votanos account to your Discord account. I'll come back to that in a few minutes. But if I come back over here to the water cooler, I showed you how I could post a message. Another thing that we can do is we can add a reaction to this. So say for example, I wanted to go through and add a reaction to this post right here. Well, I've got this little reaction post here where I can choose from all these different reactions and different servers can have different reactions. So some of you will have lots of stuff here. Some of you won't have much stuff listed. But here in this case, what I can do is I can choose from the different emojis, find different people. I can actually search for something here. So this one is I'm I'm unamused or this one is I'm person raising a hand. What I can do is I can just select these different icons and it'll just show up right down here at the bottom and I can unselect it or I can select it again to get it to go away. You can also respond to a specific message. So let's say here I wanted to respond to this message right here and reply directly to it. I can select this message and then I can hit reply. And what that does is that you can see I'm replying to this one message and I could type something right here, hit enter, and you can see that it has a link to what I've actually replied to. So that there's no real that there's not like this is different from threading where I just want to do a quick little response to one post. Well, what if I want to create like an entire thread here? So what I can do is I can change this message up from being a just a standard post, but it could be a thread. I can instead make it a thread. And so a threaded conversation is a little bit different here. So if I come over here and I like, let's get rid of this one. And let me create a new post for a thread. So I'm testing a thread. And what I can do is I can spin this off as a thread. So you see I have this little hashtag icon here. I can create a thread. This is a some name for the thread like that. And then I can start putting another message in here. So another another message. So here you can see that I'm starting out a thread and then it's kicked off the thread with one message in it. This is a public thread, which means that anybody can join can jump in and they can start posting messages to this thread. Some channels support private threads. And though that's when you create a thread and you can only allow other people in this channel to get access to that thread. If someone has at mentioned them in the thread so that that way it keeps people from getting all like making things all noisy. I can access the thread whenever I want by coming here select the thread. You can select it by just clicking on this one message right here or where the thread showing up in the UI. Or as you can see here where I'm in my water cooler channel, here's an active thread that I'm involved in right here. And I could jump straight through it straight to it by just selecting it and then it's in the full screen view here. Threads are generally active for a certain number of days like about a week. But after a week of inactivity or a couple of days of inactivity they're archived. And so this will go away. I can always get back to the thread from going to go finding the thread and select it. But it's not going to be showing up and make it all noisy. So in that sense or make the UI all noisy. So in that sense it's a lot more like we see in it's a lot more like what we see in like Slack instead of in teams where these threads just get bigger and bigger and bigger and they keep reshuffling themselves in the UI. That way they're nice and kind of hidden away. If you want to learn more about threads in Discord I'll provide a link to the user docs in the description under in this video here. Another thing you can do is you can create, let's go ahead and get rid of that message. Another thing you can do is you can also come in and you can create different things using slash commands. So you can start that out by just with a slash and you can see I have a whole bunch of things that are going to show up here as different threads or different messages I can say or I can add. Some things are pretty basic the ones that are built in. So here I could like send a private message to someone. So I could say I'll send a private message to someone named Mark Rackley and I'll just say hey man just testing a DM out. I hit that and that will send a private message over here to this user that I'm marked as a friend with. You can also post images so I could say like I could post a use Giffy. I can just say like a wave. Let's do this. Let's come over here to the introductions thing and let's wave back at this one so I can say Giffy wave like that. And so there we go. We got our images showing up our gifts showing up right away. We can also post links to this. We can also go ahead and upload files to it. Some of these things are all going to depend on what you have what the channel supports and doesn't support and what certain permissions are. So if you don't see something showing up of course you got a question for it that's why we have this Discord help channel I hear that you can take a look at. Now before you can do any of these things I just showed you on the Voitanos community and Discord you need to join the Voitanos Discord server. So let me show you how to go about doing this. So if you come over to the Voitanos website you'll see a section at the top that says Discord and from here I explain a lot of the stuff that's already available to you or that I've already gone over in this video. So here what I can do is I can click on the join Voitanos community on Discord. Now let me show you what's going to happen here before I actually run through this. I'm going to jump over to another tab and I'm going to go and sign in using a test account that I have to to Discord. Now this user is not a member of any server here. So you can see on the left hand side he's not a member of any servers at all. So we're going to keep an eye on this and how things change as I jump around in just a minute. So what I'm going to do is come back over here to join the Voitanos community on Discord and I'm going to click on this button. So when I click on that invite you're going to see it's going to take me over to the Discord site where I can then accept the invitation that I just clicked on. So I'm going to go ahead and say accept the invite and it's going to go ahead and it's going to add me to the Discord server. So you can see here that I've been added to the server because you can see the Voitanos server over here on the left hand side in my user experience. Now a couple of things you're also going to notice here is you see that there's really nothing listed over here in the channels that I have that are available to me. It says I must complete a few more steps before I can start talking on this server and you can see it's listed down here at the bottom as well. So I'm going to click on either one of these buttons and what I'm going to have to do is I have to read the welcome message which includes all like the terms and conditions and the rules associated for the server. So things like treat everybody with respect, no spam, no age restricted or obscene content, read the rules. If you see something that's against the rules let me know and then some other information. So I'm going to check off and say I've read the rules and I agree I'm going to click submit. What you see here is I still have nothing showing up. Now you may have seen your user experience would have popped up where this welcome would have been open or it might have been closed but you can see that little arrow there that I have to open it up. Now from this next piece is I have to verify myself. So I'm going to come over here to the verify link or the verify channel and you'll notice here there's a single message in here and it says before you can participate you must verify yourself by clicking the the thumbs up reaction. So I'm going to click on this thumbs up reaction after a few seconds is it's going to go ahead and add in the verified role to my account so that I can access the server and you see that the verify goes away and I have all these other channels that I now have access to so I can go over here to introductions I can introduce myself we can see the message that I wrote just a few minutes ago and now I'm actually in the server so now I've got every I can do everything that I just told you about that I could do a moment ago come over here to the water cooler and I can say hello let's go over here to the actually the introductions and say hello everyone I'm new here right now a couple cool things with this and things I would recommend that you end up doing when you start why don't you go ahead and change your profile name here so over here I found my name which is swamp lander alt pick my account you can see I've got a role here I've just verified I can add a note for myself or I can come over here to the edit the profile and I can either edit my profile on this discord server or across all discord servers that I'm in so if I do the discord the user profile that's what everybody would see and how they would find me across all the discord servers that I'm in but if I only want to modify this one I could just say edit the server profile and I can give myself a new name here so there's my nickname these swamp lander how's that now I said earlier that students of our courses get access to exclusive course channels now let me show you how we're going to do that so first of all you can see down here you've got one course for mastering the SharePoint framework where I've got a general chapter channel and a tech support channel and then same thing with the our exam prep for the MS 600 exam prep course so I want to go through and I want to make sure I have access to these but there's a lot more stuff that I get access to as a student so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come back over here to my the my back to the void tonos website and I've already logged in under my account on void tonos now just to be clear your void the email you use for void your void tonos website for the botanist website where you access the courses that you've enrolled in does not have to be the same email address that you use on discord they're completely disconnected it doesn't matter if you choose use the same email cool if you don't that's up to you but let me show you and get access to this stuff now one of the things I'm going to do is I'm going to I want to go through and I want to kind of move things around a little bit because I want you to see something in the background that's going to happen here so I'm going to move this browser over and what I want you to notice here is I'm going to want you to keep an eye on let me let me shrink some of these up here so that you can see what's going to happen over here on the left hand side so over here on the general chapter first of all if we look at me we can see that I'm only listed in the role called verified what I want to do is I want to connect my void tonos account to my discord account for this server so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go once I've logged into the void tonos site I've gone to my library right I did that by clicking on your library in the top I'm going to then go to my first course here so we'll go to the starter bundle and we can see here that there's a link make sure you join the void tonos community on discord so if I click on that you'll see this connect to discord section so what I need to do is I need to click on connect to discord now what that's going to do is that's going to take me over to discord and it's going to ask me to authorize the void tonos app the external application called void tonos which you can see here it's just an orange and blue bot it wants to I'm going to authorize that site to access my username my avatar my banner my email address and join servers for me so if I was not already a member of the void tonos server it would automatically add me as a member all right but I would have to go back through this process to then connect my account in void tonos over to the account that I was added on discord I'm already in I'm already a member of the servers you can see here over the left hand side so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on authorize now this is going to take a second but what's going to happen is it's going to take me back over to the void tonos website but you're going to see that I'm going to get a new role is going to be assigned to my user in discord and you're going to see some new channels show up here underneath the mastering spfx so watch this I'll click authorize and we can see that I've successfully linked my discord membership to my void tonos course and over here you can see I'm going to leave that up over here you can see that a few more channels have shown up I've got news and updates a place to ask questions about lessons in the course and I've got the starter bundle as well now if I come back over here to my course which will go back go back to the course then I can go ahead and start looking at the content in this course but let's go let's do this go one step further I've got more content or more courses that I've signed up for like the fundamentals bundle so I'm going to come over here and view this course I'm going to scroll down to the exact same I'm going to click on connect to discord I'm going to authorize the app to do that same stuff for me and what you'll see is a new channel show up for the fundamentals bundle there we go we just saw that one pop up so let's go back over we'll do that again and the last one I want to do this for is for the ultimate bundle so I'll go back to my courses come over here to ultimate and this one's the big one scroll down when I actually connect to discord on this one you're going to see that I'm going to get a lot more channels specifically that mastermind channel that we're all looking for so I'll click authorize and now you'll see the mastermind show up the ultimate bundle and office hours show up as well for a place to submit your questions for office hours those are some channels that are only available to the ultimate bundle subscribers so with that you've seen how to connect your account on or to join the voytanos community on discord and then I saw you how to connect your account as well with your discord account from your voytanos account if you got any questions and you're confused about anything how it works in discord remember that underneath the welcome channel or the welcome category we have a discord help and it's a great place for you to go in and ask questions about using the voytanos community on discord so with that I hope you enjoy it I hope to see you join the join the channel or join the discord server and I will see you over there