User Guide

Welcome to the Discord User Guide. Read through these steps to help you login, verify, and get start with our discord server!


Login and Verify

Log in to the discord via the invitation link that you received via email
If you already have a Discord account you can use that
If you don’t, you should create a new discord account (this is not controlled by NMA, just make a new account). To create an account follow:  Discord create an account  guide (Scroll down to section “Create Your Account”).
In the #verify channel, send the email you used to sign up to your NMA portal (or other authorized email, e.g. if you are a speaker/consultant)
If you’re successful, you’ll see that the list of channels on the left increases and that you can now access your pod channel. 
If you accidentally use the wrong email, after 3 failed verification attempts a new channel called #onboarding-ticket-XXX will automatically appear and you will be contacted by one member of the support team in this channel. 

Important: please log in to discord by using an email + password. Do NOT log in with just a username. If you do that, you will see a warning from Discord at the top of your screen about your account being “unclaimed”. Then, if you log out you will lose access to your assigned channels and will have to re-verify your NMA registered email on #verify every time you login (see step 2 for verification details).

Make sure to use the correct email! 

Q1: What is the correct email?
A1: an email written in all lowercase, it is case-sensitive
A2: The email that you received the discord invitation and all other course related info from NMA. Your discord account email might be different but the bot is not asking for your discord email, the two are unrelated.)

Please note: all members of the NMA community management/support team (referred to as NMA staffers) on discord are professionals (professors, postdocs, students, industry professionals) who are volunteering their time to resolve your issues. Please be patient and kind. 



Getting Started

If everything went well: 
You should now have access to CHAT IN (for Interactive students and TAs) most or all the channels listed in the  📺Channel Guide  (except a few that might be private).

You can start private messages with anybody.  By searching for a username. (Use the @ symbol before the username to quickly search and tag that user).
Make sure that your friend is not a bot!
  
You can start group private messages with anybody as long as you first send them a friend request and they accept.
This is particularly useful for your group projects!
You can also video chat and screen share in private messages -- very helpful for group projects!
You can have group DMs up to 10 people!
Say hi in the #introductions channel if you are an Interactive student or TA! It’s really fun to get to see how many people are here at NMA! (Observer students will have their own channel for this.)
Where to find your zoom link for your pod: In your pod channel, look at the pinned messages, you can see the zoom link is pinned. Usually the first message in the pod. You can find these messages by clicking on the pin icon on the top of the channel. 



Threads (How to use thread on discord)

This section is based on the FAQ available here :  https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403205878423-Threads-FAQ 

The goal of threads is to allow multiple topics in a channel to exist and grow with their dedicated space. It is for example super useful to answer different questions in the content channels or to discuss different topics in the social channels.

To create a thread - Hover over the message you would like to create a thread from and press on the # icon to create a thread.

This will ask you how you want to name the thread and you can then create the thread
Once you are done with the thread, you can archive iit by clicking on the three dots at the top of the thread and archiving it.
Inside the thread, the behavior is similar to any other channel, you can reply to specific messages, react to them, pin them if you have the permission, etc.