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Build great Discord reports

Discord is where most teams get their richest feedback and their worst reporting. The activity is enormous, the signal is real, and the usual summary is either a message count — which tells you nothing — or a paragraph someone wrote by scrolling for an hour.

A good Discord report answers three questions: what changed, what's wrong, and what people want. This playbook builds one, then puts it on a schedule.

Before you start​

You need Discord connected, with the channels you care about included. Point Kinn at support and bug-report channels first — they give the cleanest signal — and widen later.

tip

Include your general chat channels too, even though they're noisy. Feature requests and early sentiment shifts show up there long before anyone files a proper report in a support channel.

1. Decide who it's for​

This is the step that gets skipped, and it's why most reports go unread. The same week of Discord produces three completely different useful reports:

  • For your team — what's broken, what's new, what needs a decision.
  • For leadership — how sentiment is trending and whether anything needs attention.
  • For a specific discipline — just the combat feedback, just the performance complaints.

Write the audience into the request. "Summarize Discord" produces a summary of Discord. "Summarize Discord for our Monday production meeting, focused on anything that should change what we're working on" produces something useful.

2. Ask for the three questions​

A solid general-purpose Discord report:

Look at Discord over the last 7 days. Cover three things:

  1. What changed — what are people talking about more than last week, and what dropped off?
  2. What's wrong — bugs and complaints, grouped by theme, with a count and one representative quote each.
  3. What people want — feature requests and suggestions, ranked by how often they came up.

Keep each section short. Lead with anything I should act on this week.

The structure matters more than the wording. Left open-ended, Kinn writes a good essay; asked for three named sections, you get something you can scan in ninety seconds and forward without editing.

3. Add the charts that earn their place​

Two charts do almost all the work in a Discord report:

Chart sentiment as a trend over the last 30 days, and show message volume by theme as a bar chart for the last 7 days.

Sentiment over time is the one leadership actually reads — it turns "people seem annoyed" into a line that either is or isn't going down. Volume by theme shows where the conversation is concentrated.

Resist adding more. A report with eight charts gets skimmed; a report with two gets read. See Charts & visualizations for what else is available when a specific question needs it.

4. Make it shareable​

Ask for a PDF when it's going to anyone outside the conversation:

Turn that into a PDF report titled "Community Report — week of March 3."

Kinn gathers the data, writes the whole thing, and gives you a download link. Charts render in the PDF exactly as they do in chat. See Reports & exports.

If someone needs to do their own analysis, ask for a CSV or Excel export instead of a document.

5. Put it on a schedule​

Once the report is good, stop making it by hand:

Every Monday at 8am: produce the weekly Discord report — what changed, what's wrong, what people want — for the last 7 days, with a sentiment trend chart. If nothing significant came up, say so in one line.

See Scheduled tasks for how to write a prompt that holds up unattended. The short version: use relative windows, name the output shape, and say what a quiet week should look like.

Going deeper​

Compare Discord against everywhere else. Discord is your most invested audience, which makes it both your best early-warning system and your least representative sample:

Is the frustration about the new progression system showing up outside Discord, or is it concentrated there?

If it's Discord-only, you're often hearing from your most engaged players rather than your whole base — still worth listening to, but weight it accordingly.

Separate the loud from the many. A thread with 200 replies might be fifteen people:

How many distinct people raised the matchmaking complaint, and what share of this week's Discord activity does it represent?

See Size how widespread something is for doing this properly.

Look at the channels separately. Your support channel and your general chat have different populations and different moods. A single blended summary can hide that your support load doubled while everyone else is having a great time.

Common mistakes​

Reporting volume as if it were health. Message counts go up when something's exciting and when something's broken. Sentiment and theme tell you which.

Summarizing without a window. Always say "the last 7 days." Without it you'll get a blend of this week and three months ago.

One report for every audience. A leadership report and an engineering report share almost no content. Make two — they're cheap once they're scheduled.

Forgetting the quiet weeks. If you don't tell Kinn what "nothing happened" looks like, a slow week produces a report that makes ordinary noise sound urgent.

Next​