Exciting News Alert!

We’ve Spruced Up Our Digital Home!

We’ve launched a brand new website to better serve our community’s growing needs and interests. It’s sleek! It’s intuitive! And, most importantly, it’s waiting for you to explore! Check it out and don’t forget to bookmark it! Oh, and let us know if you find an easter egg .

New User Group Sessions on the Horizon

As our community continues to flourish, we’re always looking for ways to keep the momentum going and the knowledge flowing. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we have some new user group sessions in the pipeline. These gatherings are the perfect opportunity to connect, learn, and share in ways that only the WinAdmins community can. Keep your eyes peeled for announcements on dates and topics.

Spotlight on Community Growth

Speaking of growth, our community is stronger and more vibrant than ever, thanks in no small part to each and every one of you, our incredible members. Your enthusiasm, expertise, and eagerness to share have turned this space into a thriving ecosystem of knowledge and support. Joining us at MMS? Don’t forget to connect in ⁠conferences to get your flair and get invited to WinAdmins events while you’re there!

As we march through February, let’s embrace the challenges and opportunities this month brings. Whether it’s exploring our new website, participating in upcoming user group sessions, or simply engaging in day-to-day discussions, your contributions make WinAdmins the community it is.

Stay warm, stay connected, and here’s to a fantastic February!

Cheers,
The WinAdmins Team

P.S. Have you found us on BlueSky, yet?
https://bsky.app/profile/winadmins.io

This year at MMSMOA (Midwest Management Summit, Mall of America), the WinAdmins community had an incredible turnout of members who wanted to come socialize, share stories, and recall what it was like to be together before a global pandemic. Look no further than half of the room standing up when Adam Gross, on stage with our own Jóhannes, asked “How many of you here are from WinAdmins?” to realize how large we’ve grown in so few years.

I wanted to briefly share, and I believe the entire Admin and Moderator team agrees, the following sentiment.

This community is fantastic. I don’t know of anywhere else with so many people who are so genuinely committed to trying to help those around them or accepting help from others to improve themselves – hopefully, one day being the mentors they depend on today.

During our WinAdmins dinner on May 4th, 2022, I stepped back and looked at 38 people across four tables laughing, hugging, sharing stories, and having fun. I can’t quite put into words how it felt to be part of a group as magnificent as all of you are. I’m better as a person and I’m a better employee because I know so many people have my back.

And that’s why those who run events, keep Discord going, moderate our community, and countless other activities in the name of WinAdmins do what we’re doing. Because you’re all just so amazing that not bringing you all together would be tragic.

From the bottom of my heart, and the hearts of so many who consider WinAdmins a home, thank you.

Community Heroes

We have been growing. In fact, we have over 7,800 meat popsicles on this server, and to that end, we are delighted to announce a new internal project.

Most everyone has heard of the concept of Microsoft MVPs. Well, we wanted to create our version of MVPs, and after many Saturdays filled with snacks, we finally are ready to announce the “Community Heroes” program.

Community Heroes will be given a unique role to stand out in the member list and have a dedicated channel with the WinAdmins staff to share their thoughts and ideas for the community. The WinAdmins community admin team selected the first group of Community Heroes as part of the program’s initial rollout; however, we anticipate turning over the reigns to the community to nominate heroes going forward. We’re still working out the details for how long each group will last before re-nominations happen.

The starting membership list will include:

• Adam Gross
• Chris Dent
• Chuck Lanctot
• Crom
• Missy Quarry
• Timothy Watson

For more information regarding this program, please see Community Heroes.

Community-Inspired Training

I don’t think anyone on the Admin Team expected the server to grow so much so fast, nor did we expect to accumulate so much knowledge from so many different experts. To that end, we are hard at work to try and develop a better community-driven platform that can aggregate all of those little pieces of Discord Wisdom people are sharing. If you would like to help out with operation code-named “0 to Hero” training, please let us know as we will be looking for help!

This project will not compete with any other community blogs or programs. The goal with this is to create something more like “Microsoft Learn” or “Udemy” but with some more “systems administrator real-world spice” thrown in.

Housekeeping Items

We have split apart the m365-and-on-prem channel to better differentiate the associated components into:

• #exchange
• #teams
• #sharepoint-and-onedrive
• m365-apps
• #power-apps-and-automate

Admin Team Contact Method

We now have a public-facing email address for contacting the Community Admin team. winadmins dot io should be used to contact the Admin staff directly with any questions or concerns that you would rather do outside of Discord, or unban requests.

That’s all for now, folks, happy February.

Discord Native Events

• Discord native events are here; please see https://dis.gd/events for more information.
• All future events that were already created in #events have been duplicated in the new native format.
• The #events channel will remain around for the meantime.
• New events will only be added via the native Discord feature.
• The Microsoft Employee and Trusted Vendor/Organization roles have been granted the “Manage Events” permission in order to add events themselves.
• You may need to reload your Discord client (Ctrl+R) in order to see the new Events section at the top of the channel list (above #announcements).

Server Name Change

• The server name has been changed from “Windows Admins” to “WinAdmins”.
• This is more in line with our name/representation in most other places.
• Due to this change, we no longer appear in server discovery if you search for “Windows”, hopefully cutting down on joins looking for tech support.

New/Updated Commands

• -TechSupport has been updated with a similar format to other custom commands, with additional links to other communities.
• -MSFeedback has been created, with links to the new Microsoft Feedback Portals.
• -CMLinks has been created, with links to useful ConfigMgr-related documentation.

6,400 Members!

We’re now up to 6,400+ members! In the words of submarine captain Jóhannes, “neat-o”.

Role Icons!

Discord rolled out a new feature to add icons to roles. We’ve added “official” icons to all of the vendor roles, as well as a few other roles. The icon displayed next to your username will be your highest role with an icon defined.

StatBot Role!

We created a new role named “Frequent Visitor”, where members will be automatically added/removed from this role as thresholds for the role are met/lost, based on statistics gathered by StatBot. This role has the same orange color as the Helper roles of the past, and was designed to make our regular members that are not vendors/MVPs/staff “stand out” a bit more.

Server Discovery!

Discord dropped the requirements for enabling server discovery from 7,000 members to 1,000, so we’re now listed as a “public” server (that “Explore Public Servers” button at the bottom of your server list). We’re doing this as a trial for now; hopefully we just don’t attract more folks in need of some -techsupport.

Reminder! Upcoming Windows 365 Event!

If you haven’t already registered, be sure to check out our upcoming event “Introducing Windows 365 – The CloudPC” on October 13th, featuring Donna Ryan. Please see Introducing Windows 365 – The CloudPC for more information.

Some fun facts:

• We grew from 4,000 members to 6,000 members in 10 months, averaging 50 new members per week.
• Over 52,000 messages were sent in the past 30 days.
• There were over 22,000 “speaking minutes” in our voice channels in the past 30 days.
• We recently added the #shameless-self-promotion channel, to encourage members to highlight any cool things they may have done.

On behalf of the administration and moderation teams, thanks for joining and hanging around. We’re happy to see all of the collaboration that goes on here, and all of the cool things that you folks come up with and share with the community, to make us all better admins.

Happy Friday, cheers!

Community News

We hit 5,900 members on July 28th! Hooray!

Threads

Threads have recently been added to Discord (check out Discord’s blog post here). After some initial testing, we have decided to enable threads on a pilot basis, to see how they work in our community.

• All threads permissions are disabled in the #community channel.
  • Due to the rolling nature of discussion in the #community channel, we feel that threads are not needed there.
• The ability for anyone to start a new public thread has been enabled in the following channels: #intune, #powershell, #patch-my-pc, and #entertainment.
  • The above listed channels now have a 1 minute slowmode enabled to encourage the use of threads for responding to others and to keep specific topics together.
  • The #shameless-self-promotion and #uservoice-discussion channels also has public threads enabled, to allow for responses/discussion to occur about a user’s post. These threads will not be impacted by the 6 hour slowmode in the channel itself.
  • All other technology-focused and off-topic channels will remain unchanged at this time.
  • These changes may be revisited in the future, please provide any feedback in the #uservoice-discussion channel.
• Private thread creation is disabled server-wide.
  • There is currently no need for private threads; conversations can be moved to direct messages if needed.
• Threads will automatically be archived after 24 hours of inactivity.

Role Changes

• The Nitro Booster role has been moved down in ranking from above the Microsoft Employee and Trusted Vendor/Organization roles to below them, in order to highlight vendors with their role color regardless of boost status.

Other Changes

• We’ve create a new repository in our GitHub organization for Intune-related items, similar to the existing ConfigMgr repository. Please feel free to contribute anything you may have found useful by submitting a pull request! https://github.com/windows-admins/Intune
• The #get-off-my-lawn channel has been renamed to #home-and-garden, per Uservoice #25.

We’d love to hear about what you’ve been doing that you want to shamelessly brag about to the community. This can be technology related, something in your personal life, or maybe you just want to show off your new blog post or tweet.

We ask that you refrain from discussion in this channel (tag the creator in an appropriate channel to talk about it), and so we’re setting a six hour slow mode.

Community News

We hit 5,500 members on May 28th! Hooray!

Security Advisories Channel

The #security-advisories announcement channel has been created per UserVoice item 24, as a place to post automated and curated CVE/security-related announcements that the community may be interested in. Community Staff, Microsoft Employees, Microsoft MVPs, and Trusted Vendors are currently able to post messages here. We plan to automate some of the posting in the future, but felt it was best get the channel added for now, to separate security-related items from general community-related posts in #announcements.

Events Channel

The #events channel has been created as a replacement for the shared Google calendar that tracked various events such as conferences, meetups, webinars, AMAs, etc. We started to utilize the event command in various channels but quickly realized that these posts get buried and even if pinned, they can still easily be missed. Community Staff, Microsoft Employees, and Trusted Vendors are able to post events here. Please see the pinned message in the #events channel for help/command syntax.

To request an event be added, please ping the @Admin role in the relevant channel or in #community with information about the event, links, etc.

Status Command

Have you ever needed to find out what a particular HTTP status code means, but didn’t know where to look? Check out the new status command! Just run -status <code> in any channel!

The WinAdmins team has been fielding many questions and suggestions regarding methods in which our community members can identify their preferred pronouns or gender information to other community members. This feedback has come in the form of public discussions in #uservoice-discussion, #community, and direct message to the moderation team and admin staff.

There have been a lot of great ideas. The two that we find ourselves limited to (as we don’t have control over the Discord platform) are role-based identifiers and nickname identifiers.

After dozens of discussions over several months, we’re moving forward with encouraging our members to use their nicknames to help identify their pronouns to others. While many of our members were hoping for a role list, we don’t feel like we could maintain inclusivity with that method; this is the IT equivalent of using a textbox instead of a dropdown.

If you need help changing your nickname, there are instructions available here: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames#h_01EJTEHFA19Q5BK1GQY2XJ2ZJS

We will also be updating our WinAdmins Welcome Screen (shown to new members) and our website to encourage members to use this functionality.

The WinAdmins community does not tolerate harassment, including harassment based on race, gender, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or age. Members engaging in harassing behavior will be issued warnings or banned.