LociOiling Lv 1
Since the new Foldit launched, everyone gets access to the #veteran and #global IRC channels on in-game chat.
Back on the old Foldit, #veteran access was earned, by a player completing a certain number of moves. I seem to recall 1,000 moves were required, which is easy to reach with a long-running recipe. The idea was to protect real players from the crowds of ill-behaved students that periodically spam us. This feature was left behind in the old Foldit.
Over on Discord, everyone gets #global, but not #veteran. There doesn't seem to be a way to earn #veteran access. An admin can grant access, as I did when orily1337 articulated the problem. I also granted access for man_the_stan, who I noticed had the same issue. I have no idea who else might need or want access.
Part of the problem is a potential mismatch between the Foldit and Discord usernames. Orily1337 and man_the_stan happen to have the same name in both spots.
I'm not sure how this was handled in the past. Was there an automatic process that got broken, or has it always been this way. I know there was some change to Discord usernames not too long ago, from non-unique usernames with a numeric qualifier to unique usernames with no qualifier. Perhaps that caused a problem.
Meanwhile, we've been on the new system for nearly two years, and the level of problems on #global has been fairly low. It might be better to do away with the #veteran IRC channel. I'd be in favor of keeping #veteran on Discord just for reference, especially if there's a way to make it read-only.
