ORBATBot

A Discord bot for managing Arma 3 operation slot requests. Members request slots via a two-step squad → slot picker or the 📋 Request a Slot button on the ORBAT embed; admins and Unit Leaders approve or deny requests with a button click.

The roster an operation runs on lives either in the bot's own database — built and edited in the browser under ORBATs — or in a Google Sheet, the way it always did. You pick one per operation; everything else behaves the same.

It also manages self-assignable game roles — permission-free tag roles for games like Minecraft or DCS that members opt into themselves, so you can @mention everyone who plays a given game. See Game Roles.

And it runs standalone events with sign-ups — trainings, movie nights, anything — where members answer Accepted / Tentative / Declined on a button, or whatever options the organiser defined, and get reminded before the start. No Google Sheet involved. See Events.

Looking for how to do one particular thing? How-tos has a short recipe for each — and the bot serves the same text at /help, behind the ? in the site header.

Much of this can also be done from a browser instead of slash commands — events, the slot roster, slot approvals, game roles, embeds and the logs: an optional web interface with Discord login, running inside the same bot process. See Web UI.

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Features

Three independent feature areas plus maintenance commands. ORBAT & Slots is the Arma operation system, running on an ORBAT you build in the browser or on a Google Sheet; Events and Game Roles work on their own and never involve either.

In the Who column, Unit Leader+ means Unit Leaders and Admins, and Unit Leaders are scoped to their own unit. See Role-Based Access for the full matrix.

🗺️ ORBAT & Slots

Operation slot requests, approvals and the live ORBAT board.

Command	Who	What
/request-slot	Everyone	Open the squad → slot picker for the current operation
/cancel-request	Everyone	Cancel your pending slot request
/change-slot	Everyone	Forfeit your current slot and pick a new one
/leave-operation	Everyone	Remove yourself from the operation entirely (pending or approved)
/assign-slot <member>	Unit Leader+	Assign a member to a slot directly, bypassing approval
/clear-slot	Unit Leader+	Remove a member from a slot; on a sheet-backed operation the cell is restored and the unit tag stripped
/setup-slots	Admin	Start an operation from an ORBAT or a Google Sheet; optional event time and reminder; auto-posts the ORBAT to #orbat
/post-orbat [channel]	Admin	Post or re-post the live ORBAT board
/set-event-time <time>	Admin	Update the operation's start time and reminder
/post-event [channel] [mission_name] [event_time]	Admin	Post an announcement embed for the operation, pointing at #orbat for sign-ups
/clear-requests	Admin	Cancel all pending requests for the current operation
/current-operation	Admin	Show which operation is active, and which ORBAT or sheet it runs on

/post-event only announces the active operation — sign-up still happens through ORBAT slots. For a standalone event with its own attendee list, use /event-create instead.

How it behaves

• Two-step slot picker — squad first, then slot. Used by /request-slot, /change-slot, /assign-slot and the ORBAT button alike
• 📋 Request a Slot button — persistent button on the live ORBAT embed, so no command is needed
• Slots show 🟢 available, 🟡 pending (also requested — compete for it) or 🔴 filled, in real time
• Several members can request the same slot; the approver picks, and the rest are auto-denied and notified
• Approvals happen in #slot-approvals with Approve / Deny buttons and a denial modal for an optional reason — or on the web interface, which does exactly the same thing
• Actioned requests leave #slot-approvals and are archived as a compact embed in #approval-archive
• Those three channel names are the defaults — an admin can point each one somewhere else on the Operation page
• Cancelling voids the approval message automatically (greyed out, buttons removed)
• Members are DMed on submission, approval and denial
• Operation reminders DM every approved member and ping #orbat before the start
• Availability is re-validated at selection time, so two people can't take the same slot
• A squad left out of the counts is still shown on the board, so a reserve bench doesn't make the operation look under-strength. On an ORBAT that is the nocount option; on a sheet it is a squad called Reservists
• On an ORBAT-backed operation the board also shows each squad's unit and radio channel, and the shared radio nets underneath

📅 Events

Standalone events with their own sign-ups — trainings, movie nights, campaign sessions. No Google Sheet, no operation required. Full detail in Events.

Command	Who	What
/event-list	Everyone	Upcoming events with sign-up counts and jump links
/event-create <title> <start_time>	Unit Leader+	Create an event; optional description, duration, location, channel, ping role, reminder, banner image, repeat interval and custom sign-up options
/event-edit <event>	Organiser or Admin	Change any field including the sign-up options; moving the start time re-arms the reminder. repeat:none stops a series
/event-cancel <event> [reason] [stop_series]	Organiser or Admin	Cancel it and DM everyone who signed up; the message stays as a record
/event-delete <event>	Organiser or Admin	Delete it and its message for good, after a confirmation

How it behaves

• Sign-up defaults to three buttons — ✅ Accepted, ❓ Tentative, ❌ Declined — with the attendee list updating live for everyone
• Custom sign-up options — replace those three with your own, e.g. 🚁 Pilot | 🔫 Infantry | -❌ Can't
• Pressing the button you already chose withdraws you, which is not the same as declining
• Repeating events — seven patterns: daily, weekly, every 2 weeks, monthly by date, monthly by weekday (last Saturday or 2nd Saturday), and weekly-except-the-last-of-the-month; the next one posts itself when the current one ends
• Reminders DM everyone who signed up as coming, plus a channel ping and the event's ping role
• Times render as Discord timestamps, so everyone sees the start in their own local time
• Finished events close themselves out — greyed out, buttons removed, no stray sign-ups
• event parameters autocomplete over upcoming events, so nobody types IDs

🎮 Game Roles

Permission-free tag roles for games (Minecraft, DCS, …) that members opt into themselves. Full detail in Game Roles.

Command	Who	What
/game-roles	Everyone	Pick your own game roles, with the ones you have pre-ticked
/game-role-list	Everyone	List every game role on the server
/game-role-add <name> [emoji] [description]	Admin	Create a permission-free game role and make it self-assignable
/game-role-remove <role> [delete_role]	Admin	Stop a role being self-assignable, optionally deleting it
/game-role-panel [channel]	Admin	Post the self-assign panel; it updates itself when roles change

How it behaves

• 🎮 Choose your game roles button — persistent panel button, so members need no command
• Roles the bot creates grant no permissions and are mentionable; pre-existing roles are refused if they grant any
• Unit roles and Unit Leader can never become game roles, so nobody self-assigns approval rights
• Drop a role by unticking it, or via the ➖ Remove a role button for a list of only what you have

🗺️ Tactical maps

Draw the plan on the terrain and share it with a link — unit symbols, movement lines, objectives and boundaries, in the browser. No slash command: the whole thing lives in the web interface.

• Proper APP-6 symbols — a blue rectangle for friendly, a red diamond for hostile, a green square for neutral, a yellow quatrefoil for unknown, with infantry, recon, armour, mechanised, mortars, artillery, medical, engineers, supply, aircraft and vehicles on them, size marks above the frame (Ø team · • squad · ••• platoon · I company · II battalion) and (+) / (-) beside them — plus Arma's own mil_* task markers for objectives, rally points and the rest
• The frame says where and whether, not just whose — an open-bottomed frame for anything in the air, an open-topped one for subsurface, and a dashed frame for what is only planned, with the mobility indicator (wheeled, tracked, towed) under it and the parent unit beside the size mark
• Movement lines, areas, markers and free text — drawn by dragging, the way Arma's own map does it, in any of ten colours; an arrow head goes on the lines that mean a direction rather than on all of them
• Your actual terrain as the background — upload the same tile archive you prepare for OCAP (zip or 7z) and the bot serves it itself, or point it at a running OCAP server; either way the Arma coordinates come along with the terrain
• A share link anyone can open without signing in, read-only or with drawing rights, and replaceable the moment it has travelled further than intended
• Straight into Arma 3 — the whole plan as markers in a running mission, pasted into the debug console, no mod on either side. Two scripts side by side: one whose markers stay put, and one whose markers can be dragged and deleted in game, in whichever map channel you pick
• Post it in a channel as a link, so it stays current while the plan is still being drawn
• Works read-only with JavaScript off, because the map is rendered on the server as well

📣 Reddit announcements

Watch a Reddit user or a subreddit and announce every new post in a Discord channel, in your own words, pinging the roles and people you choose. Set up entirely in the web interface — there is no slash command, and no Reddit API registration either. Full detail in Reddit announcements.

• Watches a user's posts (u/TaskForcePhalanx) or a subreddit's new posts (r/arma)
• Your own message text, with {title}, {url}, {author} and {subreddit} filled in
• Pings any roles you tick, plus any members you list
• Checked every 5 minutes; the first check notes what is already there so switching a watch on never dumps old posts into the channel
• Handles Reddit turning a cloud-hosted bot away: retries on old.reddit.com, then waits it out instead of hammering
• Announcements only — the bot will not ask anyone to upvote, because organised voting gets accounts banned

📊 Kill Tracker

Per-player kills, deaths, kill distance, shots and more for every Arma mission, counted straight from the unit's OCAP server — public, no Discord login. There are no commands: the bot checks the OCAP server every 10 minutes and counts any finished recording it hasn't seen. See Kill Tracker.

⚙️ Server & Maintenance

Command	Who	What
/set-timezone <tz>	Admin	Server timezone used when reading any time you type — operations and events alike (default UTC)
/sync	Admin	Force-sync slash commands with Discord and refresh the ORBAT embed
/restart	Admin	Restart the bot (the container relaunches itself — see /restart)
/debug-slots [squad]	Admin	Show the raw slot data the bot reads, whichever roster is in use, for diagnosing missing slots
/archive-old-approvals	Admin	One-time migration of pre-existing approved messages into #approval-archive
/purge [amount] [since]	Manage Messages	Delete messages in the channel it is run in — the last N, everything since a date or an age, or both

Across the whole bot

• PostgreSQL — every operation, request, event, sign-up and game role survives restarts and redeployments
• Buttons survive restarts — approval buttons, the ORBAT request button, the game-role panel and event sign-ups are all persistent views
• Commands sync automatically on startup and when the bot joins a server; /sync is only for when something looks missing
• Role-based access control — Unit Leaders get extra commands scoped to their own unit
• Optional web interface — manage events, the ORBAT and slot approvals from the browser, signed in with Discord, running inside the same process
• A built-in help page — every how-to in How-tos is also served at /help, with a ? in the header and another beside each page's tabs that opens that page's own instructions

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How-tos

Short how-tos for everything the bot does, one per thing you might want to do. The bot serves the same text at /help — the ? in the site header, and next to each page’s heading.

Slots and operations — Request a slot · Change, cancel or leave · Approve or deny a request · See just your own unit, and clear the easy ones · Put somebody on a slot directly · Take somebody off a slot · Start an operation · Set the start time and reminder · Post or re-post the ORBAT board · Announce the operation · Empty the approval queue · Check what the bot is reading

ORBATs and rosters — Build an ORBAT · Edit an ORBAT without unseating anybody · Rename, copy or delete an ORBAT · Export an ORBAT to a Google Sheet · Run the operation on an ORBAT · Run the operation on a Google Sheet

Events — Create an event · Sign up for an event · Repeat an event · Custom sign-up options · Ping roles on an event · Edit, cancel or delete an event

Game roles — Pick your game roles · Add and remove game roles

Tactical maps — Draw the plan · Use layers · Put a real terrain behind the plan · Put the town names on the map · Share, copy or post a map · Get the plan into Arma 3 · Bring markers back from Arma 3

Campaign planner — Set up the campaign planner · Plan a campaign · Write a mission in the wizard · Use and edit the objectives library · Give a mission its ORBAT · Download the briefing packs · Plan on the campaign and AO maps · Link the OCAP recording and use its numbers · Approve and post the drops

Reddit announcements — Watch a Reddit user or subreddit · Catch a post up, or skip a backlog · Follow someone whose profile hides their posts

Kill Tracker — Rename a mission · Manage campaigns · See a player’s missions and map them to Discord · Link a player’s names · Set a player’s unit · Check the longest kills · Check the biggest multikills · Take over the old sheet and JSON files

Server and members — Read Launcher presets from a channel · Roll back or upload a modlist · Promote Cadets to Members after enough missions · Log joins, leaves, kicks and bans · Welcome new members · Label your invite links · Track time in voice · Build a rich message · Delete messages in bulk · Choose the channels and the timezone · Sync, restart and the one-time migration

Slots and operations

Asking for a slot, deciding who gets it, and running the evening.

Request a slot

Who: Everyone · Where: Discord — the ORBAT board, or /request-slot

Ask for one of the slots on tonight’s board and wait for a Unit Leader to decide.

1. Go to the #orbat channel and press 📋 Request a Slot on the board, or run /request-slot anywhere.
2. Pick the squad from the first menu, then the slot from the second.
3. That is it — the request goes to the approvers, and you get a DM confirming it.
4. Watch the board: your slot turns 🟡 while you wait, and 🔴 once you have it.

Somebody else may ask for the same slot. Both requests stand, the approver picks one, and the other person is told — so a 🟡 slot is worth asking for rather than avoiding.

You can only hold one request at a time. Use /change-slot to move rather than requesting twice.

See also: Change, cancel or leave · Approve or deny a request

Change, cancel or leave

Who: Everyone · Where: Discord — /change-slot, /cancel-request, /leave-operation

Move to a different slot, withdraw a request you have not had answered yet, or drop out of the operation.

1. To swap: /change-slot. It gives up what you hold and opens the picker again.
2. To withdraw a request nobody has answered: /cancel-request.
3. To drop out entirely, approved or not: /leave-operation, then confirm.

/change-slot frees your old slot the moment you run it, so somebody else can take it while you are choosing. If you only want a different squad, that is the trade.

All three release the slot on the board straight away, so nobody is planning around a seat you have left.

See also: Request a slot

Approve or deny a request

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Discord — #slot-approvals, or the Slot Approvals tab

Decide who gets the slot, in the channel or in the browser — both do exactly the same thing.

1. In Discord: open #slot-approvals and press ✅ Approve or ❌ Deny on the request. Denying opens a box for an optional reason.
2. In the browser: 🎖️ Operations → Slot Approvals, where the same two buttons sit next to each request with a reason field.
3. The member is DMed either way, the message leaves the queue, and a record goes to #approval-archive.

Approving a contested slot denies the other requests for it automatically and tells those members why.

A Unit Leader may only decide requests from their own unit. The web page still lists the rest — it says CNTO only instead of the buttons, so the queue never lies about how many people are waiting.

Old requests stay clickable after a new operation starts, and are always decided against the operation they were made for.

See also: Take somebody off a slot · Put somebody on a slot directly

See just your own unit, and clear the easy ones

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Discord — /my-approvals

A private list of the open requests you can actually decide, with one press for the ones nobody is competing over.

1. Run /my-approvals. The reply is only visible to you and lists the open requests from your own unit — admins see all of them.
2. Press Approve all uncontested to approve every request in that list that only one person has asked for. It tells you what it did, slot by slot.
3. Anything marked ⚠️ is left alone: more than one person wants that slot, so it stays in #slot-approvals to be decided there.

It shows less than #slot-approvals does; it does not let you do anything you could not already do. The same unit check runs on every decision, wherever you make it.

The list is a snapshot. If somebody asks for one of those slots between the list appearing and you pressing the button, that slot is skipped rather than decided for you, and the reply says so.

Approving in bulk is not all-or-nothing. If one fails — a sheet that will not write, say — the rest still go through and the reply names the ones that did not.

Denying still happens one at a time, in #slot-approvals, because a denial takes a reason.

See also: Approve or deny a request · Take somebody off a slot

Put somebody on a slot directly

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Discord — /assign-slot, or the Slot Approvals tab

Book a member onto a slot without them asking and without an approval step.

1. In Discord: /assign-slot @member, then pick the squad and the slot.
2. In the browser: the Assign somebody panel at the bottom of Slot Approvals. Type a Discord ID, a mention or a name.
3. The member is DMed that they now hold it.

This is stricter than approving: you need a unit of your own and the member must share it. Choosing who goes on the roster is not the same act as answering somebody who asked.

Members are searched rather than listed, because the bot does not read your member list. More than one match is reported with IDs rather than guessed at.

It is refused if the member already holds a slot — clear the old one first.

See also: Take somebody off a slot

Take somebody off a slot

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Discord — /clear-slot, or Release / Withdraw on the web

Give a booked slot back, or take an undecided request out of the queue.

1. In Discord: /clear-slot and pick from the dropdown of who is currently on the operation.
2. In the browser: Release on a booked row, Withdraw on a pending one — the same action under two names.
3. Confirm. The member is DMed and told who removed them.

Neither can be undone, which is why both ask first.

Clearing a pending request greys out its approval message, so nobody finds it later and presses Approve on a request that is gone.

The archive record of an earlier approval is left alone. The archive says what was decided; this is a later decision, not a correction of that one.

Start an operation

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /setup-slots, or the Operation tab

Load a roster, set the start time, and put the board up.

1. Decide where the roster comes from: an ORBAT you built here, or a Google Sheet.
2. In Discord: /setup-slots orbat:<name> or /setup-slots sheet_url:<link> — one or the other, never both.
3. Add event_time and reminder_minutes if you know them; both can be set later.
4. In the browser: 🎖️ Operations → Operation → Start a different operation, which is the same thing with a dropdown.
5. The board is posted to #orbat automatically, with the request button on it.

Starting an operation archives the previous one. Its pending requests are left alone and stay decidable.

Times are read in the server timezone — set that once with /set-timezone.

If the bot cannot post in the ORBAT channel the operation is still created and you are told. Post the board yourself afterwards.

See also: Set the start time and reminder · Post or re-post the ORBAT board · Build an ORBAT

Set the start time and reminder

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /set-event-time, or the Operation tab

Move tonight’s start, and choose how long before it everybody is reminded.

1. /set-event-time time:25/06/2025 19:00 reminder_minutes:30.
2. Or the Start time field on the Operation page.
3. The board updates itself, and the reminder is re-armed for the new time.

The reminder DMs every approved member and pings #orbat. It fires once — moving the time arms it again.

The time renders as a Discord timestamp, so everyone sees it in their own local time whatever the server timezone is.

See also: Choose the channels and the timezone

Post or re-post the ORBAT board

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /post-orbat, or the Operation tab

Put a fresh board up when the old message has scrolled away or been deleted.

1. /post-orbat posts it in the channel you run it in; /post-orbat channel:#orbat sends it elsewhere.
2. Or press Post the board on the Operation page.
3. The new message becomes the one the bot keeps up to date.

There is only ever one live board. Posting a new one means the old message stops updating — delete it, or it will mislead somebody.

The board refreshes itself on every approval, denial and release, so you should rarely need this.

Announce the operation

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /post-event, or the Operation tab

Post an announcement embed pointing people at the board to sign up.

1. /post-event channel:#announcements, optionally overriding the mission name and time.
2. Or the Post the announcement panel on the Operation page.
3. It names the operation, its start, and links #orbat for sign-ups.

This only announces. Sign-up still happens through the board — for an event with its own attendee list, use /event-create instead.

See also: Create an event

Empty the approval queue

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /clear-requests, or the Operation tab

Cancel every pending request for the operation at once.

1. Run /clear-requests, or press it on the Operation page.
2. Every pending request is cancelled and its approval message greyed out.

Nobody is DMed and nothing is archived. This empties a queue that was never going to be answered — it is not the same as turning people down, which is what Deny is for.

Approved bookings are untouched.

Check what the bot is reading

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /current-operation, /debug-slots

Find out which operation is live and what the bot sees on its roster, when a slot is missing.

1. /current-operation names the operation and says whether it runs on an ORBAT or a sheet.
2. /debug-slots prints the raw slots as the bot reads them; /debug-slots squad:<name> narrows it.
3. On the web the same output is on the Operation page, under Read the raw roster, rendered in place.

Each slot is keyed db:412 on an ORBAT or sheet:r12c4 on a sheet. A slot missing here is missing in the roster, not in the board.

On a sheet, a slot the bot cannot see usually means the cell does not start with 1. or 1-, or its <Insert Name> marker is gone.

ORBATs and rosters

Where the slots themselves come from — built here, or in a sheet.

Build an ORBAT

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🎖️ Operations → ORBATs

Write the roster as indented text and let the bot turn it into squads and slots.

1. Go to ORBATs, give the new one a name, and press Create.
2. Write the roster in the big text field: squad names at the left margin, slots indented under them.
3. Put a squad’s options after a |, separated by commas: left or right for the column, unit:TFP, radio:343 CHN:3, and nocount for a bench that should not count against the numbers.
4. Fill in the Nets field underneath for the shared channels, one per line as Platoon Net | 152 CHN : 1.
5. Press Preview to see the board, then Save.

A line starting with # is a comment. A leading 1. or 2) on a slot is stripped, so lines pasted out of a sheet land clean.

Leave the column out entirely and the squads are split down the middle for you. One explicit left or right turns that guessing off for the whole ORBAT.

Discord will not render an unlimited board. The editor warns you before you save when the ORBAT outgrows 25 fields or the character limits — eight squads plus a net list is the practical ceiling.

See also: Edit an ORBAT without unseating anybody · Run the operation on an ORBAT

Edit an ORBAT without unseating anybody

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🎖️ Operations → ORBATs → the ORBAT

Change the roster while it is in use, and see who an edit would affect before it happens.

1. Open the ORBAT and change the text.
2. Press Preview. The diff lists what would be added, removed and renamed.
3. Press Save. An edit that would remove or rename a slot somebody holds stops at a confirmation page naming them.
4. Read that page, then confirm or go back and fix the text.

Reordering lines is free — slots are matched by name first, so moving a squad changes nothing.

Renaming keeps the booking. The person stays on the slot under its new name, which is why a rename asks: right for a typo, wrong if you meant to replace the role.

Cutting three Rifleman lines to two keeps the first two, so a booked one is not the casualty.

A red banner at the top means this ORBAT is backing the operation running right now, and an edit changes tonight’s board.

See also: Build an ORBAT

Rename, copy or delete an ORBAT

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🎖️ Operations → ORBATs

Keep a library of rosters: give one a clearer name, copy it as the basis for the next one, or throw it away.

1. Rename: open the ORBAT and use the Name and description form under the editor. The description is only ever shown in the list, to tell two similar rosters apart.
2. Duplicate: press Duplicate on the ORBAT. You get a copy of the squads, slots and nets — and none of the bookings.
3. Delete: press Delete and confirm.

Duplicating is the way to build next week’s roster from this week’s without touching the one an operation is running on.

An ORBAT backing the active operation cannot be deleted — the delete would take tonight’s whole board with it. Finish or replace the operation first.

Deleting an ORBAT that ran an old operation is allowed, and releases those bookings in the same move rather than leaving records pointing at slots that no longer exist.

Export an ORBAT to a Google Sheet

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🎖️ Operations → ORBATs → the ORBAT

Write the roster into a spreadsheet, for people who want it there as well.

1. Open the ORBAT and find the Export to a sheet panel.
2. Paste the URL of the spreadsheet to write into.
3. Press Export. A new tab is added holding the roster.

It never touches an existing tab. A title collision gets a (2) suffix rather than overwriting anything, so an export can never damage the sheet another operation is running on.

It is one-way. Nothing is recorded about the export, and the bot reads only the first tab — so an exported tab is not picked up on its own.

Needs GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS configured, and the service account invited to the spreadsheet as an editor.

See also: Run the operation on a Google Sheet

Run the operation on an ORBAT

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /setup-slots orbat:<name>

Use a roster held here instead of a spreadsheet — the default choice, and the simpler one.

1. Build the ORBAT first (see Build an ORBAT).
2. Run /setup-slots orbat:<name> — the name autocompletes — or pick it from the dropdown on the Operation page.
3. Everything else behaves identically: requests, approvals, the board, assigning and clearing.

No Google account, no credentials and no network call is involved, so nothing about the evening depends on a third party being up.

The approved request is the booking. There is no second copy to fall out of step with the board.

The board additionally shows each squad’s unit and radio channel and the shared nets, which a sheet has nowhere to put.

See also: Run the operation on a Google Sheet · Start an operation

Run the operation on a Google Sheet

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /setup-slots sheet_url:<link>

Use an ORBAT-style spreadsheet as the roster, the way it worked before ORBATs existed.

1. Share the spreadsheet with the service account in GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS as an Editor.
2. Lay the first tab out ORBAT-style: a squad name, then slot cells starting 1. or 1-, each with [] <Insert Name> beside it.
3. Run /setup-slots sheet_url:<link>.
4. Approving writes the member’s name and unit tag into the cell; clearing restores [] <Insert Name>.

Only the first tab is read, and the operation is named after the spreadsheet unless you pass name:.

A sheet with no <Insert Name> markers has no free slots as far as the bot is concerned, whatever its columns are called.

Inserting a row moves every cell below it. Run /sync afterwards to repair pending requests that now point at the wrong row.

If the sheet write fails on approval the request is rolled back, so the sheet and the board never disagree.

See also: Run the operation on an ORBAT · Export an ORBAT to a Google Sheet

Events

Standalone sign-ups: trainings, movie nights, campaign sessions.

Create an event

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Discord — /event-create, or the 📅 Events tab

Post a training, a movie night or anything else with its own sign-up buttons and attendee list.

1. In Discord: /event-create title:<name> start_time:25/06/2025 19:00.
2. Add what you need: description, duration, location, channel, mention, reminder, image_url.
3. In the browser: 📅 Events → New event, which is the same fields as a form.
4. The message goes up with the sign-up buttons on it and a live attendee list.

A start time in the past is refused.

duration is what lets the event close itself out afterwards — without it the message keeps its buttons indefinitely.

Events are entirely separate from operations and ORBAT slots. Nothing here touches a roster.

See also: Sign up for an event · Repeat an event · Custom sign-up options

Sign up for an event

Who: Everyone · Where: Discord — the event message, or the 📅 Events tab

Answer on the buttons; the attendee list updates for everyone immediately.

1. Press ✅ Accepted, ❓ Tentative or ❌ Declined on the event message — or whatever options that event defines.
2. Changing your mind: press a different button.
3. Press the button you already chose to withdraw entirely.
4. /event-list shows what is coming up with counts and jump links.

Withdrawing is not the same as declining. Declining says you are not coming; withdrawing takes you off the list altogether.

Start times render as Discord timestamps, so you see them in your own local time.

Repeat an event

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Discord — repeat: on /event-create or /event-edit

Make it a series: the next occurrence posts itself when this one finishes.

1. Pass repeat: when creating, or add it later with /event-edit event:<name> repeat:weekly.
2. Pick a pattern: daily, weekly, every 2 weeks, monthly by date, monthly by weekday (last Saturday or 2nd Saturday), or weekly except the last of the month.
3. Bound it with repeat_until: if the series should stop on a date.
4. Use repeat_delay: to hold the next post back a number of hours after this one ends, instead of posting it the moment it closes.
5. Stop a series with /event-edit event:<name> repeat:none.

The weekday patterns take both the weekday and the position from the first occurrence. A series created on Saturday the 13th means 2nd Saturday under monthly by weekday.

Only one occurrence is live at a time — there is no pre-generated calendar, and sign-ups deliberately do not carry over.

Dates are measured from the first occurrence, so a series on the 31st gives 28 Feb → 31 Mar rather than drifting to the 28th for good.

A bot that was offline for ten weeks posts one occurrence in the future, not one per missed week.

See also: Edit, cancel or delete an event

Custom sign-up options

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Discord — responses: on /event-create or /event-edit

Replace Accepted / Tentative / Declined with your own buttons.

1. Pass responses: with the options separated by |, for example 🚁 Pilot | 🔫 Infantry | -❌ Can’t.
2. A leading - marks an option as not coming: those people are left out of reminders and cancellation DMs.
3. A leading emoji is put on the button.

Between 2 and 10 options, labels under 40 characters, and at least one that is not a decline.

Changing the options on a live event drops the sign-ups whose answer no longer exists, and tells you how many. Everyone else keeps theirs.

A repeating event copies its options to each new occurrence.

Ping roles on an event

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Discord — mention: on /event-create or /event-edit

Notify one or more roles when the event goes up and again on the reminder.

1. Pass mention:@Infantry @Armour — type the @ and let Discord turn it into a role token.
2. Role names in a comma-separated list work too, if the tokens are awkward to type.
3. On the web, the roles are checkboxes on the event form.
4. Clear them again with /event-edit event:<name> mention:none.

Up to ten roles. Anything that cannot be resolved is reported rather than dropped quietly.

A role that is not mentionable needs the bot to have Mention All Roles, or the ping notifies nobody. You are warned when that is the case.

Edit, cancel or delete an event

Who: Organiser or Admin · Where: Discord — /event-edit, /event-cancel, /event-delete

Change the details, call it off while keeping the record, or remove it for good.

1. Edit: /event-edit event:<name> and pass only the fields that change. The rest keep their values.
2. Cancel: /event-cancel event:<name> reason:<why>. The message turns red and loses its buttons, and everyone attending is DMed.
3. Delete: /event-delete event:<name>, then confirm. The event and its message are gone.
4. All three are on the event’s page in the browser as well.

Moving the start time re-arms the reminder, so it fires again for the new time.

Cancel tells people; delete does not. If anybody has signed up, cancel is almost always what you want — the confirmation page says so.

On a repeating event, cancelling one occurrence still posts the next one. stop_series:True ends the series instead.

Moving an event to a different channel is not possible — the sign-up history belongs to the message. Cancel and recreate.

Game roles

Tag roles members give themselves, so you can ping everyone who plays a game.

Pick your game roles

Who: Everyone · Where: Discord — the panel button or /game-roles, or the 🎮 Game roles tab

Give yourself the tag for the games you play, so people can ping everyone who plays them.

1. Press 🎮 Choose your game roles on the panel, or run /game-roles.
2. The roles you already have are ticked. Tick what you want, untick what you don’t, and submit.
3. Or press ➖ Remove a role for a list of only the ones you currently hold.
4. In the browser it is the 🎮 Game roles tab — same list, same result.

These roles grant no permissions at all. They exist to be mentioned.

/game-role-list shows every game role on the server without changing yours.

Unticking everything is a valid answer and removes all of them.

Add and remove game roles

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /game-role-add, /game-role-remove, /game-role-panel

Decide which games are on the list, and put the self-assign panel in a channel.

1. /game-role-add name:Minecraft emoji:⛏️ description:Survival server creates a permission-free role and lists it.
2. A Discord role with that exact name already exists? It is reused, not duplicated — running the command again just updates the emoji and description.
3. /game-role-remove role:<role> takes it off the list. Add delete_role:True to delete the Discord role as well.
4. /game-role-panel channel:#roles posts the panel with the self-assign button.
5. The same three live on the 🎮 Game roles tab for admins.

Up to 25 roles — as many as a Discord menu can show.

A pre-existing role is refused if it grants any permission, is @everyone, is managed by an integration, or sits above the bot in the role list.

Unit roles and Unit Leader can never be made self-assignable, so nobody can tick their way into approval rights.

There is one panel per server and it updates itself whenever the list changes.

Tactical maps

Drawing the plan on the terrain, sharing it, and getting it into the mission.

Draw the plan

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Web — 🎖️ Operations → Maps

Put unit symbols, movement lines, objectives and boxes on the terrain.

1. Go to Maps, name the new map, and press Create.
2. The editor: tools down the left, the map in the middle, and on the right what the tool in hand will draw — or, with something selected, its details. Terrain, OCAP, sharing, posting, Arma and the map’s name are menus in the bar above. ⤢ Whole window gives the map the screen (Esc to come back); + − ⤢ on the map zoom and fit it.
3. With the Unit tool, pick a side, a symbol and a size, and click the sheet to place it. With the Marker tool, pick a marker the same way.
4. Select a unit or marker to change it in the inspector: side, symbol or marker, size, colour and label.
5. A drawing tool draws one thing and hands you back Select with it selected, so a click on empty ground just deselects it. Double-click a tool to keep it on (🔒) for drawing several; Esc puts it down.
6. Names are written as in Arma: beside a unit or marker, in its colour. Map settings → Text size makes every name on the map bigger or smaller. Markers turn with Rotation in the inspector, and arrive in Arma turned.
7. Lines work as on Arma’s map: hold Ctrl and click each corner, then let go of Ctrl to finish — or hold Ctrl and drag for freehand. The Line and Area tools do the same without Ctrl; double-click or press Enter to finish. Shift keeps a segment straight and snaps it to 15°.
8. Pick a line’s style (solid, dashed or dotted) and its arrow heads (end, start or both) in the toolbar or the inspector. There is no thickness to choose: Arma draws every line at one width, so a thickness picked here would only ever have been true of the website.
9. The Phase line tool draws a line named at both ends — type the name after the PL it starts with. Any line can be named in the middle, at the end or at both ends from the inspector.
10. Select a line or area to edit it: drag a corner to move it, drag the dot in the middle of a segment to add a corner, Alt+click or right-click a corner to delete it. Tick Snap and new or moved corners land on the nearest corner, symbol or marker.
11. Shift+click adds to the selection and Shift+drag on empty ground selects by box; move them together by dragging any of them. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy and paste — into another map too — and + duplicates.

Units and markers are drawn with Arma’s own pictures, as the game draws them: a unit is the game’s NATO marker for its side (BLUFOR, OPFOR, Independent, civilian) with Arma’s size marker stacked on it, and every marker is the game’s, grouped as in the game. Each exports as exactly that marker.

The pictures are Bohemia’s, so an admin uploads them once, as a zip of PNGs: Maps → 🎖️ Marker pictures (the bottom of the Terrains page), which also lists which files are still missing. The editor only offers the units and markers with a picture; anything else on a map shows as a ? placeholder. The pictures stay private to the server’s members and share-link holders.

Lines get an arrow head only when you ask for one — most lines on a plan are boundaries and phase lines, which point nowhere.

Lines, areas, shapes and markers are black until you colour them, and take whatever you pick from the swatches. Units do not: they take their side’s colour, as in Arma.

Whatever colour you pick is the colour it comes out in Arma, on the nearest marker colour the game ships. Cyan and purple are the two Arma has no match for.

If somebody else saved the map after you opened it, your save is stopped and you choose: reload theirs, or save yours over it.

On a campaign map, an AO’s layer is the planner’s: its name follows the AO, and deleting it deletes the AO when you save. A phase’s layer on an AO map cannot be deleted here.

See also: Use layers · Put a real terrain behind the plan · Share, copy or post a map

Use layers

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Web — the layer panel on a map

Keep phase 1, phase 2 and the enemy picture apart, and show them one at a time.

1. Add a layer in the layer panel and name it.
2. Whatever you place next lands on the layer that is selected.
3. Use each layer’s switch to show and hide it while briefing.

Hiding a layer is not deleting it. The items stay in the document and in every save.

The switches work for whoever is looking, including somebody who only has a share link — toggling changes their view and nothing else.

Deleting a layer moves its items to the first layer rather than taking them with it.

The ↑ ↓ beside a layer change the drawing order — lower in the list is drawn on top. 🔒 locks a layer: it is still drawn, but nothing on it can be picked up or moved while you draw over it.

A hidden layer is left out of the Arma export: markers you have switched off are not part of the plan being handed over.

Put a real terrain behind the plan

Who: Admin · Where: Web — Terrains, or the map editor’s Terrain and OCAP menus

Draw on the actual terrain instead of a blank sheet.

1. Best: upload it. Go to Terrains (linked from the Maps page) and upload the same tile archive you prepare for OCAP — a zip or 7z with the numbered folders 0/ 1/ 2/ … in it.
2. Then open a map and use the 🗻 Terrain menu in its bar to pick it.
3. Or point at a running OCAP server: in the editor’s 🛰️ OCAP menu, press List the terrains, pick one, and import it.
4. Either way the terrain’s Arma coordinates come along, which is what makes the export land in the right place.

Prefer the upload for anything shared outside the unit. A share link is for people who do not sign in here, and expecting them to reach your OCAP instance as well is how a link ends up showing an empty sheet.

If the archive has no map.json, you are asked for the world size in metres. Without it the tiles would draw but the Arma export would be nonsense.

Levels deeper than a planning sheet needs are dropped, and the reply says how many — the terrain is meant to be smaller than the file.

A terrain cannot be deleted while a map is drawn on it, and the refusal names the maps.

See also: Draw the plan

Put the town names on the map

Who: Admin · Where: Web — the map’s OCAP menu, or Terrains

A terrain arrives with roads and contours and no labels. This is how it learns what its towns are called.

1. On an OCAP terrain: open the map, open the 🛰️ OCAP menu → Place names from OCAP, and press Import place names. It reads the server the map points at.
2. On a terrain uploaded here: the archive’s own locations files are read on upload, if it has them.
3. Either way it is once per terrain — every map drawn on it gains the names.
4. Too many? Map settings in the editor’s side panel has a switch per group and a size slider.
5. If it finds nothing, it is that one terrain that carries no location data — other terrains on the same server can still import fine. The same panel then has a script and a paste box: run it in a mission on that terrain, press LOCAL EXEC, paste the clipboard in. Once for the terrain — not once per map, not once per operation.

The names are in the OCAP data, just not in map.json. OCAP builds a terrain from a grad_meh export, which writes them beside the tiles as geojson/locations/<type>.geojson.gz — one file per Arma location type, and the file name is the type.

Whether they are there is decided per terrain, not per server. A terrain built the older way — Arma’s map export through gdal2tiles — carries no vector data at all, so there is nothing to find for it however hard the import looks, while the terrain next to it on the same OCAP imports in one press. A failure names every address it tried, so you can tell that apart from a broken feature.

The tiles genuinely have no labels in them: they come out of Arma’s own map export as pure topography, and the game draws the names over that from its config afterwards.

Place names are never exported to Arma — the game already draws its own.

See also: Put a real terrain behind the plan · Draw the plan

Share, copy or post a map

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Web — the map’s Share and Post menus

Give people a link that needs no login, copy a plan to start the next one, or announce it in a channel.

1. Share: open the Share menu and pick view or edit. You get a /m/… link that works without signing in.
2. Post: pick a channel and press Post. The bot sends an embed with the link and the counts.
3. Duplicate: press Duplicate for a copy of the plan — the share link deliberately does not come with it.
4. Rename: the Name and description form on the map page.
5. Turn sharing off again by setting it to off, or press New link to replace the token.

The link is the credential. Anybody who has it can open the map, and with edit can draw on it. New link is the only way to un-share a map that has travelled further than intended.

Changing view↔edit keeps the same token, so tightening the rights does not break every copy of the link already out there.

A map posted in Discord keeps the link it was posted with. Post it again if the site’s address changes.

It posts a link rather than a picture, which is what keeps it current while the plan is still being drawn.

Get the plan into Arma 3

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Web — the map’s To Arma menu

Paste the plan into a running mission as markers, with no mod on either side.

1. Make sure the map sits on a terrain, or that its Arma corners are filled in — the export needs to know where the sheet is in the world.
2. Open the 🎯 To Arma menu in the map’s bar and copy one of the two scripts.
3. In the mission, open the debug console as a logged-in admin and paste it.
4. Press LOCAL EXEC. createMarker is global, so one machine running it draws the plan for everybody.

Two scripts, side by side. The first draws markers that stay put. The second draws markers players can drag and delete in game — handy, and the same click that fixes a misplaced objective also deletes it, with nothing asking first.

Both are LOCAL EXEC. GLOBAL EXEC is wasted on the first and actively wrong on the second, where the marker names carry the client that made them.

Running it again replaces the markers from the last run rather than laying a second set over them. Two maps can never delete each other’s.

A unit’s size arrives as Arma’s own size marker, stacked on the unit as a mission maker would place it.

Rectangles and ellipses arrive as Arma’s own area markers, filled and turned the way they are drawn. Arma shows no text on an area marker, so their labels stay on the website’s map.

AOs come across as their borders. The grey mask around them does not: Arma cannot draw a cover with holes in it from a pasted script.

Arma has no dashed line and draws every line at one width, so a dashed or dotted line arrives as its dashes — one short line marker each. Arrow heads arrive as Arma arrow markers at whichever ends have one.

A line’s name arrives as text alone at the same place — the middle, or both ends of a phase line — on an invisible marker, because a line marker shows no text in Arma.

Above the scripts, the panel says how many markers the plan makes and what will not survive the trip.

The debug console has to be enabled in the mission’s description.ext.

Bring markers back from Arma 3

Who: Unit Leader or Admin · Where: Web — the map’s From Arma menu

Copy the markers a mission’s players drew onto the map, so a plan finished in game can be kept and briefed.

1. Check the map’s Arma corners match the mission’s terrain — the markers are placed by them.
2. Copy the script in the 📥 From Arma menu, run it in the mission’s debug console with LOCAL EXEC: it copies every marker to your clipboard.
3. Paste into What it copied, leave Only markers players drew ticked unless you want the mission’s own too, and press Import.

They land on a new layer, From Arma, to switch off or delete in one go.

Lines, areas, rectangles, ellipses, the standard military markers and NATO unit markers come back as themselves. Any other marker comes back as a dot named after its type.

Markers outside this map are left out, and the message says how many.

Campaign planner

Planning a three-to-five mission campaign and its weekly drops.

Set up the campaign planner

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🗂️ Campaigns → Settings

Choose who may plan, where the weekly drops are posted, and when they go out.

1. Go to 🗂️ Campaigns → Settings.
2. Pick the Unit role. Server admins can always plan; Unit Leaders can plan when they also hold this role.
3. Pick the Drop channel — the public announcements channel every drop is posted in.
4. Pick the Mission team channel — a private channel I ping when a drop is due but nobody has approved it.
5. Set the Drop day and Drop time, and which drop opens the ORBAT for sign-ups.
6. Save.

With no unit role set, only server admins can plan. That is on purpose: the planner never opens wider than you chose.

Drop times are read in the server's time zone, and posts show every time as a Discord timestamp, so readers see their own time.

Make the drop channel an Announcement channel and partner servers can Follow it to get each drop in their own server: I publish every drop, which is what sends it on to them, and edits follow by themselves. Give me Attach Files there too, for drops with images.

The survey link may contain {op}, which becomes the mission name with spaces as %20.

Who can edit mission ORBATs decides who may open the ORBATs campaign missions use in the ORBAT editor: server admins only, or admins and planners. Also allow these roles adds anybody else — they find those ORBATs under Operations → ORBATs. Creating, copying and deleting ORBATs always stays with admins.

Plan a campaign

Who: Admin, or Unit Leader with the unit role · Where: Web — 🗂️ Campaigns → Campaigns

Set up a campaign of three to five missions, its AOs, and the missions in the order they will be played.

1. Go to 🗂️ Campaigns and fill in New campaign: a name, the era and theatre, and how many missions you plan.
2. On the campaign page, add the areas of operations it is fought over.
3. Under Plan the next mission, give the operation a name and its op date, and press Create mission. The wizard opens.
4. Back on the campaign page, ↑ and ↓ put the missions in order, and Schedule opens each one's back-schedule and drops.

A new mission copies the details that stay the same week to week (time zone, orders time and H-Hour, AO, unit, support, radio plan, loadout and so on) from the mission before it. The story, intel, orders and AAR start empty.

The next mission's date is suggested four weeks after the last one, the length of one cycle of drops.

Creating a real campaign also sets one up in the Kill Tracker under the same name, or links the one that already exists, so stats land in one place.

Set the campaign to Archived to fold it away on the list without deleting anything.

Tick Test campaign to try things out. A test campaign is not added to the Kill Tracker and its drops never post publicly. Delete test campaign removes it with one press, and Delete all test campaigns on the list clears every one — with its maps, its posts and the ORBATs the planner made for it. An ORBAT you only linked stays. Make it real keeps a test you want after all.

Deleting a real campaign asks you to type its name. Its maps go with it. Its Kill Tracker campaign goes too if the planner created it and no recordings have been added; one holding stats, or set up in the Kill Tracker by hand, is kept. Its missions' ORBATs and its posted drops stay.

A campaign closes itself: once every planned mission has been played, its AAR day has passed and its OCAP recording is linked (or a week has gone by), it is marked Complete and the mission team channel is told. Set it back to Active to keep it open; it stays open until another mission is added. Switch this off in Campaigns → Settings.

See also: Write a mission in the wizard · Plan on the campaign and AO maps · Set up the campaign planner

Write a mission in the wizard

Who: Admin, or Unit Leader with the unit role · Where: Web — 🗂️ Campaigns → a campaign → a mission

Six steps from concept to after action, saved as you type, with each drop previewed exactly as it will post.

1. Open a mission from its campaign. The wizard starts on the first step that is not locked yet.
2. Fill in the step. Fields marked * are needed to lock it; the step's chip turns into 🔒 when they are all filled. Each step's tab shows the date it should lock by and how many days are left — red once it is overdue.
3. Watch the panel on the right: the drop preview is exactly what the bot will post, and Checks flags mistakes as you go. Press Preview in Discord to see the drop formatted the way readers will see it — headings, bold, quotes, times in your own time zone and images.
4. In Orders, add the phases in order. Give each its AO and press + Add objective to pick from the objectives library.
5. When a drop reads right, press Approve under its preview. It posts by itself at its time — see Approve and post the drops.

Everything saves a moment after you stop typing — the top right says when. Leave the page while a save is pending and the browser asks first.

Paste a screenshot straight into an image field, drop a file on it, or use Upload. PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP, up to 8 MB.

Drag rows and phases by their ⠿ handle, or use ↑ and ↓.

Held back for Zeus in the Intelligence step is never posted or exported.

A phase reads best with one primary objective, one secondary and one complication; Checks says when one is missing. With Success looks like left empty, the OPORD uses the primary objectives' success conditions.

Two people editing the same field at once: the last save wins. Different fields are fine.

The wizard needs JavaScript. The Schedule page shows the mission, its drops and checks without it.

See also: Plan a campaign · Approve and post the drops · Use and edit the objectives library

Use and edit the objectives library

Who: Everyone with planner access; editing is Admin only · Where: Web — 🗂️ Campaigns → Objectives

The list of objectives and complications the wizard's picker draws from.

1. Go to 🗂️ Campaigns → Objectives to browse it by category.
2. In a mission's Orders step, + Add objective opens it as a picker. Search, then click an entry to add it to the phase.
3. Admins: Edit beside an entry changes it, and Add to the library at the bottom adds a new one.

Entries that pair well with what the phase already has are lifted to the top of the picker and outlined. That is a suggestion only.

Picking an objective copies its wording into the mission, where it can be edited freely. Changing the library later does not change missions that already picked from it, and nor does removing an entry.

The library starts as the TFP Mission Objectives Library: 57 objectives in eight categories, plus 12 complications.

See also: Write a mission in the wizard

Give a mission its ORBAT

Who: Admin, or Unit Leader with the unit role · Where: Web — a mission's wizard or Schedule page → ORBAT

Link the roster a mission is signed up on: last mission's copied, one reused as it is, or a new blank one.

1. Open the mission and find the ORBAT card — beside the wizard, or at the top of the Schedule page.
2. Under Link one, the list starts on the ORBAT the previous mission used. Copy it makes a copy named after this mission; Use as is links that ORBAT unchanged; New blank starts an empty one.
3. Press Edit ORBAT to write or adjust the roster in the ORBAT editor.

A copy takes the structure — squads, slots, radios, nets — and none of the bookings.

Who may edit mission ORBATs is up to the planner's settings: admins only, or admins and planners (the default), plus any extra roles ticked there. It covers only ORBATs a campaign mission uses, and copying and deleting ORBATs stay with admins.

An ORBAT can be edited at any time, even while sign-ups are open: the editor asks before a change would unseat anybody.

Unlink only removes the link; the ORBAT itself stays.

See also: Write a mission in the wizard · Download the briefing packs

Download the briefing packs

Who: Admin, or Unit Leader with the unit role · Where: Web — a mission's wizard or Schedule page → Briefing packs

The mission as a PDF or Word file, in three versions for three audiences.

1. Open the mission and find Briefing packs.
2. Press PDF or Word beside the pack you want. It downloads straight away.

Player briefing — warning order, situation, intelligence and the OPORD; safe for everyone signed up. Leaders' pack — that plus the FragO, timings, tasks, the ORBAT and the ops traces. Full op file — everything, plus the complications, the back-schedule and the after action.

Each phase drawn on its AO's map goes into the leaders' pack and the full op file as an ops trace, before any traces you uploaded — see Plan on the campaign and AO maps.

Complications appear only in the full op file, and Held back for Zeus is never in any pack.

Times are in the op's time zone, with the server's beside them in the FragO timings when the two differ.

The cover carries the site's name and logo. Word files open straight into Google Docs.

Each download is made from what is saved at that moment, so download again after an edit.

See also: Give a mission its ORBAT · Write a mission in the wizard

Plan on the campaign and AO maps

Who: Admin, or Unit Leader with the unit role · Where: Web — a campaign page → Maps and areas of operations, or a mission's Maps card

Draw the AOs on a greyed-out campaign map, then plan each one on a detailed map of its own with a layer per phase, drawn into the leaders' pack.

1. On the campaign page press Make the campaign map. It opens in the map editor, greyed out like a covered Arma map.
2. Put the map on its terrain (Map settings). Pick the AO tool, choose Rectangle, Ellipse or Freehand, and draw each area of operations: it turns clear, with a border in a colour no other AO is using. Type its name straight away — it shows in a tab of that colour at the AO's top-left corner.
3. Press Save. Every AO you drew is now one of the campaign's AOs, listed on the campaign page.
4. Back on the campaign page press Make its map beside an AO. Its map starts on the same terrain, greyed out everywhere but that AO, and one layer for every phase you gave that AO in a mission's Orders step.
5. Draw each phase on its own layer — the layer picker above the map — and save.
6. Download the Leaders' pack: each phase drawn on its layer is in it as an ops trace, cropped to the phase and the AO.

The map and the planner keep each other up to date. Rename an AO on the map and it is renamed in the planner; delete its outline and the AO goes, unless phases are fought in it or its own map has drawings, when it is kept and its outline put back. An AO added on the campaign page appears on the map as a clear box to move into place.

Overlapping AOs merge into one clear area, and stay easy to tell apart: each has its own border colour and its name in its own corner. The campaign page shows a key of every AO and its colour beside the map. Change an AO's colour with the swatches when it is selected. Its Arma marker uses that colour too, and its own map takes it when the map is made. Map settings switches the grey off or changes its strength.

The layers keep up with the planner: a new AO gets an outline, a renamed phase or mission renames its layer, and a phase moved to another AO or deleted loses its layer — unless something is drawn on it, which is kept.

A trace shows its own phase plus every layer that belongs to no phase, such as Plan or an enemy layer you add, so draw shared things there.

A map holds 12 layers, so an AO with more phases than fit says so; delete a layer you no longer need in the editor.

If you have the map open in the editor while you change phases in the wizard, your next save there puts the old layer names back. Opening the map from the planner again fixes them.

Removing an AO removes its map. Deleting a campaign deletes its maps.

See also: Plan a campaign · Download the briefing packs · Write a mission in the wizard

Link the OCAP recording and use its numbers

Who: Admin, or Unit Leader with the unit role · Where: Web — a mission's wizard or Schedule page → OCAP recording

Which OCAP recording is the mission, so its stats land in the campaign's Kill Tracker campaign and its numbers in the AAR.

1. Play the op. The Kill Tracker reads the recording from OCAP by itself within about ten minutes.
2. Open the mission. When there is exactly one recording on the op date that is at least half an hour long, the OCAP recording card has already linked it and put it in the campaign's Kill Tracker campaign.
3. If there are several, or the op ran past midnight, open Choose one and Link the right one.
4. Press Use in the AAR stats to put its numbers — players, length, enemy killed, vehicles, deaths, teamkills, longest kill, most kills — into the AAR's Stats field, then edit them as you like.

The bot only links a recording by itself in the week after the op, and never one somebody changed or said None of these to. Let the bot choose hands the choice back.

Unlinking, linking another, or deleting the mission takes the recording back out of the Kill Tracker campaign — but only if the planner put it there. One an admin added by hand stays.

A test campaign links recordings so you can try the numbers, but adds nothing to the Kill Tracker. Make it real adds them then.

Zeus is not counted as a player, as on the dashboard.

See also: Write a mission in the wizard · Plan a campaign

Approve and post the drops

Who: Admin, or Unit Leader with the unit role · Where: Web — a mission's Schedule page → Drops, or the drop preview in the wizard

Each drop posts by itself at its time once somebody has approved it.

1. Open the mission's Schedule page and open a drop, or look at the preview beside a step in the wizard.
2. Read it, then press Approve. If its time has already come it posts at once; otherwise it shows Approved and posts on the day.
3. Changed your mind before it posts? Withdraw approval. A drop you will not use at all, or posted by hand, gets Don't post.

An approval is for exactly the words and images you read, at that time. Edit the drop afterwards, or move the op date, and it says Needs re-approval and will not post until somebody approves it again.

A drop whose time comes without an approval is Held: the mission team channel is pinged once, and it posts the minute it is approved.

Approving a change to a drop that already posted edits the posted message in place, Part 1/2 and images included.

When the drop that opens the ORBAT posts, sign-ups start by themselves on the mission's ORBAT, with H-Hour as the start time. They never replace an operation that is still to be played: then the team channel is told, and Start sign-ups now on the Schedule page does it once that one is over.

A test campaign's drops go to the mission team channel only, never start sign-ups, and are deleted from Discord with the campaign. A real campaign's posted drops stay in Discord when it is deleted.

Set the drop channel and the mission team channel in Campaigns → Settings — nothing posts without them.

See also: Write a mission in the wizard · Set up the campaign planner · Give a mission its ORBAT

Reddit announcements

Watching a user or a subreddit and announcing new posts.

Watch a Reddit user or subreddit

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📣 Reddit

Announce every new post in a channel, in your own words.

1. Go to 📣 Reddit → Add a watch.
2. Pick user or subreddit and type the name without the u/ or r/.
3. Choose the channel, write the announcement text, and tick the roles and list the people to ping.
4. Press Preview to see the newest post rendered with your text — it posts nothing.
5. Save. The first check notes what is already on the feed and announces none of it.

{title}, {url}, {author} and {subreddit} are filled in. Everything else is literal.

Checked every five minutes. Check now runs that check early and does announce.

No Reddit account, API registration or secret is needed — it reads the public feed.

The bot will not ask anybody to upvote anything, and there is no wording for it. Organised voting is what gets accounts banned, and the post score is deliberately never read or shown.

Pointing a watch at a different source resets what it has seen, so the new feed is seeded rather than announced from scratch.

See also: Catch a post up, or skip a backlog

Catch a post up, or skip a backlog

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📣 Reddit → the watch → Recent posts

Post something the watch missed, or clear a queue you do not want announced.

1. Open the watch and go to Recent posts. It reads the feed and says which posts have already been announced.
2. Press Announce on one to post it by hand.
3. To skip instead: tick the posts you do not want and press Mark ticked as announced, or Mark all for the whole list.

Marking posts nothing. It just takes them out of the queue so the next check does not work through them three at a time.

This is the way past a flood — an account that un-hid its posts, or a subreddit that suddenly woke up.

Marking needs no working connection to Reddit, which matters: a backlog most needs clearing exactly when Reddit is refusing us.

Follow someone whose profile hides their posts

Who: Admin · Where: Web — Only these authors on a subreddit watch

Watch the subreddit instead, and keep only what that account wrote.

1. Reddit lets an account hide its posts from its own profile, which is what a user watch reads. If a user watch stays empty, that is usually why.
2. Make a subreddit watch on the subreddit they post in.
3. Put their account name in Only these authors — several, comma-separated, if you like.

The filter is applied before anything else looks at the posts, so the other authors’ posts never take up the watch’s memory.

A very busy subreddit can push a post out of its own feed between two checks. Nothing can be done about that from here.

Widening the filter later makes old posts look new. Use Recent posts → Mark all afterwards.

Kill Tracker

The names and groupings the public statistics are shown under.

Rename a mission

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📊 Kill Tracker → Missions

Show a mission under a clean name when it was not named cleanly in game.

1. Open 📊 Kill Tracker → Missions. Every recording the bot has found on the OCAP server is listed, newest first, with the name OCAP has for it.
2. Type the name you want in the box on the right of each mission you want to change — as many as you like.
3. Press Save all changes once. Only the names you changed are written, and none are if one of them is not valid.
4. To go back to OCAP’s name, clear the box and save.

The recording’s own date is added after the name, so type just the name; if you type the date as well it is taken off again.

Only the shown name changes. The statistics are not touched, so the name survives every re-count.

The public numbers pick the new name up within about a minute.

Missions are in a campaign by recording, not by name, so a renamed mission stays in its campaigns.

See also: Take over the old sheet and JSON files

Manage campaigns

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📊 Kill Tracker → Campaigns

Group missions into a campaign, which the Kill Tracker shows as a page of its own.

1. Open 📊 Kill Tracker → Campaigns and press + New campaign.
2. Give it a name and tick the missions that belong to it.
3. Optionally add names to match, one per line: a mission whose name contains one of them belongs to the campaign as well.
4. Press Create. To change it later, open it from the list; Delete campaign removes the campaign and leaves the missions alone.

A mission can be in several campaigns.

Names that match no recording appear only after an import from the old campaigns.json; keep them ticked and they are included as they were.

See also: Take over the old sheet and JSON files

See a player’s missions and map them to Discord

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📊 Kill Tracker → Players

See how many missions each player has played and which Discord member they are.

1. Open 📊 Kill Tracker → Players. Use Find a player to narrow the list.
2. Each row is one player (linked names count as one) with their missions and kills. The list starts filtered to players whose Discord member is a Member, Veteran, Recruit or Cadet; tick other roles and press Filter, or press Show everyone. Tick not mapped yet to list the players who have no member too.
3. To say who they are on Discord, type the player’s name under Map a player to a Discord member, give the member’s id, mention or exact name, and press Save.
4. Leave the member empty and press Save to clear the mapping.

The mapping stays on this page: the public numbers carry no Discord identity.

Players who played under several names are joined under Link names.

See also: Link a player’s names

Link a player’s names

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📊 Kill Tracker → Link names

Count a player who played under several names as one, and pick the name shown.

1. Open 📊 Kill Tracker → Link names. Use Find a name to narrow the list; your ticks stay when you search again.
2. Tick every name that is the same person and press Search / apply ticks.
3. Choose which one to Show as (the name with the most missions is suggested), or add them to a player who is already linked, and press Link.
4. To change the name shown later, press Show “…” beside the one you want in the list of linked players above.
5. To split a name off again, press Unlink “…”.

The Kill Tracker also joins obvious variants of a name by itself. This is for the ones it cannot know, such as a changed callsign.

Linking pulls in everything already linked to any of the names, so there are never chains: they all end up under the name you picked.

See also: Set a player’s unit · Take over the old sheet and JSON files

Set a player’s unit

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📊 Kill Tracker → Units

Correct the unit the Kill Tracker guessed for a player.

1. Open 📊 Kill Tracker → Units and find the player.
2. Choose their unit in the list on their row.
3. Press Save changes at the bottom. Only the rows you changed are written.

Automatic leaves it to the Kill Tracker’s own guess, which uses the squads the player plays in and a tag in the name such as [2nd USC].

Unknown stops the guess and shows no unit.

Players are listed under the name that is shown, after linking.

See also: Link a player’s names

Check the longest kills

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📊 Kill Tracker → Longest kills

Look through the farthest kills of all missions and strike the ones that cannot be true.

1. Open Longest kills. The farthest infantry kills of all missions are listed, farthest first, with who made them, with which weapon, on whom and in which mission. Choose a mission or type a player to see all of theirs.
2. Tick Strike on a kill that is not believable, and press Save changes. It leaves the list at once and appears under Struck kills; once the mission is counted again the next-farthest kill takes its place.
3. The mission is counted again within a few minutes, and the public numbers change when that is done.
4. To put a kill back, untick it under Struck kills and save.

A struck kill still counts as a kill; only its distance leaves the longest and average kill distance.

Kills from a vehicle are not listed: a vehicle’s weapons reach that far. Each player’s own longest kill is always on offer, so the number on the dashboard can be checked.

Mortars and other indirect fire, pistols beyond 300 m, the crew of a destroyed vehicle and on-foot kills beyond 1500 m are left out automatically and are not listed.

The decision is kept with the recording, so a later re-count does not undo it.

See also: Set a player’s unit

Check the biggest multikills

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📊 Kill Tracker → Multikills

Look through every player’s best multikill and strike the ones that cannot be true.

1. Open Multikills. Every player’s best multikill in every mission is listed, biggest first, with who made it, in which mission and when it began. Choose a mission or type a player to see all of theirs.
2. Tick Strike on one that is not believable, and press Save changes. It appears under Struck multikills; once the mission is counted again the player’s next-best stretch takes its place.
3. The mission is counted again within a few minutes, and the public numbers change when that is done.
4. To put one back, untick it under Struck multikills and save.

The kills of a struck multikill still count as kills; only that stretch of time leaves the multikill statistics.

Kills from a vehicle and the crew of a destroyed vehicle are not counted as multikills to begin with.

The decision is kept with the recording, so a later re-count does not undo it.

See also: Check the longest kills

Take over the old sheet and JSON files

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📊 Kill Tracker → Import

Bring the mission names, campaigns, linked names and units over from the sheet and the dashboard’s JSON files.

1. Export the sheet’s player_stats tab as CSV and choose it under 1 · Mission names. Press Take over the names: where the sheet’s name for a mission differs from OCAP’s, the sheet’s is taken, and the page lists each one.
2. Choose campaigns.json under 2 · Campaigns and press Take over the campaigns. Do this after step 1, because the campaigns name their missions the way the sheet did.
3. Do the same with player_aliases.json and unit_overrides.json.

Nothing is deleted. A mission, campaign, link or unit that is already set here is left alone — except mission names, where Replace names that were already set overrides that.

A recording the bot has not counted yet is not in the list; import again once it is.

A mission name in a campaign that matches no recording stays on the campaign and is shown on its page, so it can be dropped by hand.

Server and members

The log, the welcome, voice time, embeds and the housekeeping.

Read Launcher presets from a channel

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🛠️ Server → Modlists

Post an Arma 3 Launcher preset in a channel and the bot keeps it as that list.

1. Open 🛠️ Server → Modlists and pick the channel presets are posted in.
2. Optionally change the words that tell the lists apart (Weekly, Joint Op, Core, Optional). An empty box uses the defaults.
3. Save, then post the .html the Launcher exports in that channel. The bot reacts ✅ and says what changed.

A post that fits more than one list, or none, gets ❓ and buttons to pick the list. Nothing is guessed.

Reading attachments needs the bot’s MESSAGE_CONTENT=1 setting; without it nothing is read.

See also: Roll back or upload a modlist

Roll back or upload a modlist

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🛠️ Server → Modlists

Put an earlier version back, or add a preset without posting it.

1. Under a list, find the version you want in its history and press Make current.
2. To add one by hand, choose the list, pick the .html and press Upload.

Versions are never edited. Only a version that is not current can be deleted.

Uploading is the way to change Core and Optional without a channel post.

Promote Cadets to Members after enough missions

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🛠️ Server → Promotion

Pick two roles and a number of missions; the bot tells the admins who is due, or promotes them itself.

1. Map each player to their Discord member on 📊 Kill Tracker → Players: only mapped players can be promoted.
2. Open 🛠️ Server → Promotion, pick the role to promote from and the role to promote to, and set how many missions are needed.
3. Pick the admin channel to be told in, tick Promotions are on, and press Save.
4. To see what the admins will get, press Post a test message: it posts in the admin channel about you, with the buttons greyed out, using the text as it is in the form (nothing is saved and nobody is promoted).
5. Whoever is due is posted in the admin channel, one message each with Approve and Reject buttons (server admins only). The Due now list on the page does the same.

Every recording counts as a mission. Linked names are one player.

You can change the text of the message. {member}, {player}, {missions}, {needed} and {role} are filled in; empty means the default. It applies to the message with the buttons, not to the note the bot posts when it promotes automatically.

Promotions are off until you turn them on. Promote automatically makes the bot swap the roles itself after each count; turning it on promotes everyone who already qualifies at the next count.

The bot needs Manage Roles and its role must sit above the role it hands out.

Pass over the ticked removes a person from the list for good; they are not announced again.

See also: Link a player’s names

Log joins, leaves, kicks and bans

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📋 Member log

Announce who came and went in a channel your staff watches.

1. Go to 📋 Member log, pick the channel, tick the events you want, and save.
2. Joins show the account’s age, the member count and which invite link was used.
3. Leaves show how long they were around and which roles they had.
4. Kicks are told apart from voluntary leaves, and name the moderator and reason. Bans and unbans do the same.

Joins and leaves need Discord’s privileged Server Members Intent. Tick it in the Developer Portal first, then set MEMBER_EVENTS=1 and redeploy — asking for the intent before it is granted stops the bot from starting at all.

Bans and unbans need no intent and work without that.

Without View Audit Log every kick reads as a plain leave and bans have no moderator. Without Manage Server the invite list cannot be read. The page tells you which are missing.

See also: Welcome new members · Label your invite links

Welcome new members

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📋 Member log → Welcome message

Greet somebody who joins, in a public channel, by DM, or both.

1. Go to 📋 Member log and scroll to Welcome message.
2. Pick the channel the greeting is posted in — or leave it on Nowhere if you only want the DM.
3. Tick Also send it as a DM to send the same text to the member directly.
4. Write the text. Leave it empty to use the default.
5. Save. The next person through the door gets it.

Four placeholders: {member} pings them, {name} is their name as plain text, {server} is the server name and {member_count} is how many members there now are. Anything else is literal, so a stray { is harmless.

This is separate from the join log. It has its own channel, it does not need the log to be switched on, and it does not care about the Announce joins tick — the log is written for staff, the welcome for the member.

It does use the same join event, so it needs the same Server Members Intent as the join log.

A member with DMs closed simply does not get the DM. Nothing fails, and the channel message still goes out.

See also: Log joins, leaves, kicks and bans

Label your invite links

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📋 Member log → Invite links

Say where each link was published, so a join names the source instead of a code.

1. Go to 📋 Member log and find the invite list at the bottom, with each link’s use count.
2. Type what that link is for next to it — Steam, Website, Reddit.
3. Save. Joins then read rnPAfscGbE · Steam rather than the code alone.

Needs Manage Server, or the invite list cannot be read at all.

Labels for links that have since expired are kept and stay editable, because old join messages still refer to them.

A join through a single-use link can still be attributed: Discord deletes the link immediately, and the bot works out which one went missing.

Two people joining in the same second cannot be told apart, and a member added by another bot has no invite at all. Those say so rather than guessing.

See also: Log joins, leaves, kicks and bans

Track time in voice

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🔊 Voice time

Record how long members spend in voice, and show a leaderboard.

1. Go to 🔊 Voice time. It is off until an admin switches it on, and nothing is recorded before that.
2. Tick Enabled and save. Everybody can then see the leaderboard for 24 hours, 7, 30 or 90 days, or all time.
3. Optionally pick a channel to announce finished visits in, with a minimum length so quick drop-ins do not fill it.
4. For a self-updating board, tick Keep a daily top-10 message up to date, pick a channel, a period and an hour.
5. Post the top 10 once sends a one-off message instead.

By default time only counts while at least two people share a channel, and the AFK channel is skipped — so what you measure is time spent together, not time connected. Both rules can be switched off, and channels can be excluded.

The daily board edits the same message once a day, so you can pin it. It never posts twice in a day, and catches up if the bot was down at the chosen hour.

Members are named, not mentioned. A leaderboard that pings ten people every day would be worse than useless.

A normal restart loses nothing; a hard crash costs at most five minutes, and time is never rounded up.

No privileged intent and no extra permission — it works the moment you switch it on.

Build a rich message

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 📝 Embeds

Compose the server-info and rules posts you would otherwise write by hand, and edit them in place afterwards.

1. Go to 📝 Embeds → New embed and give it a name, which is only used to find it again.
2. Fill in title, description, colour, up to ten fields, author line, thumbnail, image, footer — and the plain text above the embed, which is the only part where a mention pings.
3. Save it as a draft and check the preview.
4. Press Send and pick a channel.
5. To change it later: edit and save. The posted message is updated in place, so a pinned post stays pinned.

Discord’s limits are checked when you save, not when you send — an over-long title is refused on the form rather than becoming an embed that can never be posted.

Sending again posts a new message and stops tracking the old one. That is how you move an embed to another channel.

If the message was deleted in Discord, the embed quietly becomes a draft again rather than failing forever.

Image and icon fields must be full https:// URLs.

Delete messages in bulk

Who: Manage Messages · Where: Discord — /purge

Clear the last N messages in a channel, everything since a point in time, or both.

1. /purge amount:50 — the newest 50 messages.
2. /purge since:2h — everything from the last two hours. 30m, 7d and 1w work too, as does a date like 25/06/2025.
3. /purge amount:100 since:7d — at most 100, and nothing older than a week.
4. A preview says what would go. Confirm to delete.

It deletes in the channel you run it in, and only for people with Manage Messages there.

The confirmation holds the exact messages it counted, so anything posted while you read it is left alone.

Discord will not bulk-delete anything older than 14 days. Those go one at a time, roughly one a second, capped at 200 per run — the reply says how many were left, and running it again continues where it stopped.

Pinned messages are deleted like any other, but the confirmation says how many are in the set.

Choose the channels and the timezone

Who: Admin · Where: Web — 🎖️ Operations → Settings, or /set-timezone

Point the bot at the channels you actually use, and tell it what time you mean.

1. Go to 🎖️ Operations → Settings.
2. Pick the channel for the board, the approval queue and the archive. Default means the bot uses #orbat, #slot-approvals and #approval-archive, creating them if they are missing.
3. Set the timezone to an IANA name like Europe/Berlin, or run /set-timezone.

The timezone is how every time you type is read — operations, events and /purge alike. Times the bot shows are Discord timestamps and localise themselves per viewer.

The empty option is called Default rather than left blank on purpose: nothing chosen and "chosen, and it happens to be #orbat" behave differently the day somebody renames a channel.

A chosen channel that has since been deleted is called out rather than quietly falling back.

Sync, restart and the one-time migration

Who: Admin · Where: Discord — /sync, /restart, /archive-old-approvals

The three commands that are about the bot rather than about an operation.

1. /sync re-registers the slash commands with Discord and refreshes the board. Use it when a command looks missing.
2. /restart restarts the bot. Nothing is lost — everything lives in the database and every button is re-registered on start.
3. /archive-old-approvals is a one-time migration that moves approval messages decided before the archive existed into #approval-archive.

Commands sync automatically on start and when the bot joins a server, so /sync is for when something looks wrong rather than routine.

On a sheet-backed operation /sync also repairs pending requests whose rows moved because somebody inserted a row. On an ORBAT there is nothing to repair.

/archive-old-approvals scans up to 500 messages and is not meant to be run twice.

---

Role-Based Access

Grouped by the same feature areas as Features above, so the two sections line up.

🗺️ ORBAT & Slots

Command	Members	Unit Leaders	Admins
/request-slot, /cancel-request, /change-slot, /leave-operation	✅	✅	✅
/assign-slot, /clear-slot — or Assign / Release on the web	❌	✅ (own unit only)	✅
Approve / Deny — in #slot-approvals or on the web	❌	✅ (own unit only)	✅
/setup-slots, /post-orbat, /set-event-time, /post-event, /clear-requests, /current-operation	❌	❌	✅

📅 Events

Command	Members	Unit Leaders	Admins
/event-list, signing up to an event	✅	✅	✅
/event-create	❌	✅	✅
/event-edit, /event-cancel, /event-delete	❌	✅ (own events only)	✅

Editing and cancelling go by who created the event, not by rank — one Unit Leader cannot change another's event. Admins can change any.

🎮 Game Roles

Command	Members	Unit Leaders	Admins
/game-roles, /game-role-list	✅	✅	✅
/game-role-add, /game-role-remove, /game-role-panel	❌	❌	✅

🗺️ Tactical maps

Action	Members	Unit Leaders	Admins
Open and read a map — web only	✅	✅	✅
Draw on one, create, copy or delete one — web only	❌	✅	✅
Upload a terrain, or delete one — web only	❌	❌	✅
Share it with a link, or post it in a channel — web only	❌	✅	✅
Open a map through a share link	anyone holding the link

📣 Reddit announcements

Action	Members	Unit Leaders	Admins
Add, edit or remove a watch — web only	❌	❌	✅

⚙️ Server & Maintenance

Command	Members	Unit Leaders	Admins
/set-timezone, /sync, /restart, /debug-slots, /archive-old-approvals	❌	❌	✅
/purge	❌	❌	✅ (anyone with Manage Messages in the channel)

Unit roles: 2nd USC, CNTO, PXG, TFP, SKUA

A Unit Leader is any member with the Unit Leader Discord role. They can approve/deny requests, assign slots, and manage slots for members who share their unit role. Admins (Manage Server permission) have unrestricted access.

The unit roles and Unit Leader can never be turned into game roles — the bot refuses, so members can't self-assign their way into approval rights.

---

Sheet Format

Only relevant for sheet-backed operations. If your roster is an ORBAT, skip this section.

The bot reads ORBAT-style sheets, where each slot is a cell rather than a row under column headers. It reads the first tab only, and the operation name is the spreadsheet's title.

	A	B
1	1-1 Alpha
2	1. Squad Leader	[] <Insert Name>
3	2. Rifleman (AR)	[TFP] Panzer
4	3. Medic - [] <Insert Name>

• Squad headers — any cell that isn't a slot line, e.g. 1-1 Alpha or Command. Every slot below it in the same column belongs to it, until the next header. Radio-frequency cells (152 CHN : 1), headings ending in :, and sentences are skipped, so they don't become squads by accident.
• Slot lines start with a number and a . or -, e.g. 1. Squad Leader. (1-1 Alpha is not a slot — a digit after the hyphen means it's a squad id.)
• Available slots contain <Insert Name> — that exact text is what the bot looks for. It can be in the same cell as the role, or in a cell up to four columns to its right.
• Filled slots are [TAG] Name, [] Name, Role — Name, or just a name in the cell to the right.
• On approval the bot writes [UNIT] MemberName in bold; on clearing it restores [] <Insert Name> and removes the unit tag and the bold.

There is no header-row/column layout — a sheet of Squad | Role | Status columns is not read. If /setup-slots says "No available slots found", the sheet has no <Insert Name> cells; that exact text is what marks a slot as open. /debug-slots shows every slot the bot found, with its cell reference.

Share the sheet with your service account email before running /setup-slots.

None of this applies if you use an ORBAT. Building the roster in the browser under ORBATs needs no spreadsheet, no service account and no particular cell format — see Running an operation on an ORBAT.

---

Setup

1. Discord Bot

1. Go to Discord Developer Portal → New Application
2. Go to Bot → Add Bot → copy the Token
3. Go to OAuth2 → URL Generator:
   • Scopes: bot, applications.commands
   • Bot permissions: Send Messages, Embed Links, Read Message History, Manage Channels, Use Slash Commands, Manage Roles
4. Paste the generated URL in your browser and invite the bot to your server

Manage Roles is only needed for the game roles feature. Without it, everything else works fine and the game role commands will tell you what's missing. If you add the permission later, you don't have to re-invite the bot — grant it to the bot's role in Server Settings → Roles.

Important — command visibility: After the bot joins, go to Server Settings → Integrations → ORBATBot → Manage. Make sure @everyone is set to ✅ (allow). If it is set to ❌, all commands will be hidden from regular members regardless of what the bot configures. Admin-only commands are restricted automatically by the bot — you do not need to configure those manually.

2. Google Sheets API — optional

Only needed if you want to run operations from a Google Sheet. If you build your rosters as ORBATs in the browser instead, skip this step entirely — the bot starts and runs without any Google credentials, and only complains if you actually pass a sheet_url to /setup-slots.

1. Go to Google Cloud Console → New Project
2. Enable the Google Sheets API and Google Drive API
3. Go to Credentials → Create Credentials → Service Account
4. Under the service account → Keys → Add Key → JSON — download the file
5. Share each ORBAT sheet with the service account email (found inside the JSON as client_email) — give it Editor access

3. Environment Variables

Copy .env.example to .env and fill in the two required values:

DISCORD_TOKEN=your_bot_token
DB_PASSWORD=choose_a_secure_password

GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS is optional and only needed for sheet-backed operations:

GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS={...paste entire JSON key file contents here...}

DATABASE_URL is constructed automatically by docker-compose from DB_PASSWORD. On Railway it is injected automatically — you do not set it manually in either case. The only time you fill it in yourself is running the bot outside Docker, which is why .env.example carries a commented example of it.

The optional web interface adds DISCORD_CLIENT_ID, DISCORD_CLIENT_SECRET, WEB_SECRET_KEY and WEB_BASE_URL. Leave them empty and the bot behaves exactly as before — no web server is started at all.

REDDIT_USER_AGENT is optional and only matters if you use Reddit announcements: it is how the bot identifies itself when it reads a feed, and Reddit throttles clients that don't. Something like orbatbot/1.0 (by /u/YourRedditName) is ideal. Note that it does not on its own guarantee Reddit will serve the feed to a cloud-hosted bot — see Reddit announcements for what happens when it doesn't.

---

4a. Deploy to Railway

The Task Force Phalanx bot moved off Railway to a Portainer stack on 2026-11-01 — see 4c. These steps still work for a fresh Railway setup.

1. Push this repo to GitHub
2. Go to Railway → New Project → Deploy from GitHub → select this repo
3. Add a Postgres service to your project (Railway dashboard → + New → Database → PostgreSQL)
4. In your bot service → Variables — add DISCORD_TOKEN and GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS
   • DATABASE_URL is injected automatically from the Postgres service — no manual entry needed
   • (optional) RAILWAY_API_TOKEN — an account or team token from Account Settings → Tokens; lets /restart trigger a clean restart via the Railway API. Without it, /restart still works by exiting the process so Railway's restart policy relaunches it. Project tokens do not work — the bot authenticates with a Bearer header.
5. Railway will auto-deploy on every push. The Procfile tells it to run python bot.py

The database lives in PostgreSQL and persists across all restarts and redeployments. No volume configuration needed.

---

4b. Deploy to a VPS with Docker

This is the recommended self-hosted option. You need a Linux VPS with SSH access (Ubuntu 22.04 or similar).

Install Docker

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Verify:

docker --version
docker compose version

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/loltorres9/orbatbot.git
cd orbatbot

Configure environment

cp .env.example .env
nano .env

Fill in DISCORD_TOKEN, GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS, and DB_PASSWORD. Save and exit (Ctrl+X → Y → Enter).

Start the bot

docker compose up -d

This builds the bot image, starts a PostgreSQL 16 container, and launches the bot. Both containers restart automatically if the VPS reboots.

Useful commands

# View live logs
docker compose logs -f bot

# Stop the bot
docker compose down

# Update to the latest version
git pull
docker compose up -d --build

# Restart the bot only
docker compose restart bot

Bot data is stored in a named Docker volume (postgres_data) and survives container restarts, rebuilds, and updates.

---

4c. Deploy with Portainer behind nginx-proxy

This is how the bot runs in production. It needs a Docker host that already runs Portainer and a jwilder/nginx-proxy + acme-companion stack, which terminates TLS and fetches Let's Encrypt certificates.

1. DNS: an A record for the bot's name (bot.example.com) pointing at the host. The certificate is only issued once it resolves; until then Let's Encrypt validation reaches whatever the name pointed at before and fails.
2. Stack: Portainer → Stacks → Add stack → Repository, this repository, branch main, compose path docker-compose.portainer.yml.
3. Variables (Environment variables → Advanced mode, one NAME=value per line, no quotes): DISCORD_TOKEN, DB_PASSWORD (letters and digits only), DISCORD_CLIENT_ID, DISCORD_CLIENT_SECRET, WEB_SECRET_KEY, WEB_BASE_URL=https://bot.example.com, PROXY_HOST=bot.example.com, LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL, and PROXY_NETWORK set to the network the nginx-proxy container is on (Portainer → Networks). Optional: GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS as one line, MEMBER_EVENTS=1 and MESSAGE_CONTENT=1 once those intents are ticked in the Developer Portal. Do not set DATABASE_URL — the compose file builds it.
4. Deploy the stack. The first start builds the image from the repository, which takes a few minutes. A changed variable only applies after Pull and redeploy.
5. Check: the bot's log shows the migrations, Logged in and Web UI listening; https://bot.example.com/healthz answers bot ok · db ok. Add https://bot.example.com/auth/callback as a redirect in the Developer Portal (OAuth2).
6. Updates: Pull and redeploy on the stack, or set the repository secret PORTAINER_WEBHOOK to the stack's webhook so every push to main builds the image to ghcr.io/<owner>/orbatbot and redeploys it (then set BOT_IMAGE on the stack to that image).
7. Backups are yours to arrange. The database is a Docker volume on the host; schedule a daily pg_dump to another disk.

/restart works without any token here: the bot exits and restart: unless-stopped starts it again. To move an existing database in, stop the old bot, pg_dump --format=custom it and pg_restore --clean --if-exists --no-owner --role=orbatuser into the db container, and compare a few row counts before starting the new bot — never run both at once.

---

Usage

Members

Available to all server members.

/request-slot

Opens a squad picker — select your squad first, then choose your slot. You can also click the 📋 Request a Slot button directly on the ORBAT embed for the same flow. You can only hold one slot per operation.

/cancel-request

Cancels your pending slot request and frees it for others.

/change-slot

Forfeits your current slot (pending or approved) and lets you pick a new one via the squad → slot picker. An approved slot is released either way; on a sheet-backed operation the cell is cleared too.

/leave-operation

Removes you from the operation entirely. Works for both pending and approved slots, and on a sheet-backed operation the cell is cleared as well. Shows a confirmation prompt before acting.

/game-roles

Pick which game roles you want (Minecraft, DCS, …). Unrelated to operation slots — see Game Roles.

/event-list

Show upcoming events and sign up to them with the buttons on each event. Unrelated to operation slots — see Events.

---

Unit Leaders

Available to members with the Unit Leader Discord role. Scoped to their own unit only.

/assign-slot @member

Directly assigns a member of your unit to a slot — no approval message, no waiting. Uses the same squad → slot picker. On a sheet-backed operation the sheet is updated immediately; the member gets a DM either way. Blocked if the member already holds a slot; use /clear-slot first to reassign. Also on the Slot Approvals page.

/clear-slot

Presents a dropdown of active slots. Select one to remove the member and free the slot. On a sheet-backed operation the cell is restored to [] <Insert Name> and the unit tag removed. The member receives a DM.

Unit Leaders only see slots belonging to members of their own unit.

The same thing is on the 📋 Slot Approvals page of the web interface, as Release next to a booked slot and Withdraw next to a request nobody has decided.

Unit Leaders can also Approve / Deny requests for members of their own unit — in #slot-approvals, or on that same page.

---

Admins

Available to members with the Manage Server permission. Full access with no unit restrictions.

/assign-slot @member

Directly assigns any member to any slot — no approval message, no waiting. Uses the same squad → slot picker. On a sheet-backed operation the sheet is updated immediately; the member gets a DM either way. Blocked if the member already holds a slot; use /clear-slot first to reassign.

/setup-slots orbat:Platoon ORBAT
/setup-slots sheet_url:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/.../edit

Run this once per operation. Give either an orbat — one you built under the 🗺️ ORBATs tab on the website, autocompleted as you type — or a sheet_url, never both. The previous operation is archived automatically, and a live ORBAT embed is posted to the ORBAT channel — #orbat unless you have moved it, created if it doesn't exist. The whole thing is also a form on the Operation page. Optional parameters:

• event_time — operation start time in DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM or YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM format (uses the server's configured timezone)
• reminder_minutes — how many minutes before the event to send reminders (default: 30)
• name — overrides the operation name, which otherwise comes from the ORBAT or the spreadsheet title

/set-timezone Europe/Berlin

Sets the server's local timezone so event times you type are interpreted correctly. Only needs to be set once. Default is UTC.

/set-event-time 25/06/2025 20:00

Updates the event time for the current operation without re-running /setup-slots. The ORBAT embed and reminder are updated immediately.

/post-orbat [#channel]

Manually post or re-post the live ORBAT board. Defaults to the current channel.

/clear-requests

Cancels all pending requests for the current operation (e.g. to reset before an op).

/post-event [#channel] [mission_name] [event_time]

Posts a formatted event announcement embed with the mission name, start time (as a Discord timestamp with countdown), and a pointer to #orbat for sign-ups. All parameters are optional: the channel defaults to the current one, and the mission name and event time default to the active operation's values.

/archive-old-approvals

One-time migration command. Scans #slot-approvals for old bot-posted approved messages (green embeds with an Approved field) and moves them to #approval-archive. Creates the archive channel if it doesn't exist. Use this once after upgrading from a version that edited approval messages in place.

/debug-slots [squad]

Shows the raw slot data the bot reads from the current roster, each slot with the identifier it is booked against — db:412 for an ORBAT slot, sheet:r12c4 for a spreadsheet cell. Useful for diagnosing why a slot isn't appearing in the picker. Optionally filter by squad name.

/current-operation

Shows the active operation and where its roster comes from — the ORBAT's name, or a link to the sheet.

/sync

Force-syncs slash commands with Discord and refreshes the live ORBAT embed. Only needed if commands appear missing after a deployment.

/purge amount: 50
/purge since: 2h
/purge since: 25/06/2025
/purge amount: 100 since: 7d

Deletes messages in the channel the command is run in. Give it a count, a point in time, or both — with both, the count is a cap on the window.

• amount — the newest 1–1000 messages
• since — an age (30m, 2h, 7d, 1w), a date (25/06/2025), or a date and time (25/06/2025 19:00), read in the server's configured timezone

Nothing is deleted until you confirm: the bot first shows how many messages match, the time span they cover, and whether any of them are pinned. Deleted messages cannot be recovered.

Discord only allows bulk deletion of messages younger than 14 days. Anything older has to be removed one at a time, which is slow, so at most 200 of those go per run — the reply says how many were left over, and running /purge again continues where it stopped.

Needs Manage Messages in that channel, both for you and for the bot. Every run is logged with the requesting user, and the bulk deletions carry your name in the server's audit log.

/restart

Restarts the bot — useful if the bot hangs or misbehaves. Two modes:

• Process exit — the bot exits with a non-zero code and the platform relaunches it: restart: unless-stopped on Docker/Portainer, Railway's ON_FAILURE policy on Railway. This is what runs on Portainer.
• Railway API (Railway only) — if RAILWAY_API_TOKEN is set in the service variables, the bot triggers a clean deployment restart via the Railway API

Either way the bot is back online in ~30–60 seconds. Slots, buttons, and data survive the restart (PostgreSQL + persistent views). The confirmation is ephemeral and every restart is logged with the requesting user.

---

Approval flow

1. Requested slots appear in #slot-approvals (created automatically if it doesn't exist)
2. An admin or Unit Leader from the same unit clicks ✅ Approve or ❌ Deny
3. On approval:
   • On a sheet-backed operation the Google Sheet is updated. On an ORBAT there is nothing to write — the approved request is the booking, which is why an approval there can't fail halfway and need repeating
   • The request is deleted from #slot-approvals
   • A compact record is posted to #approval-archive (created automatically if it doesn't exist)
   • The ORBAT board refreshes
   • The member gets a DM
   • If other members had requested the same slot, they are automatically denied and notified
4. On denial: admin optionally provides a reason; member gets a DM and can request again
5. If a member cancels their request, the approval message is automatically updated to show it was cancelled (greyed out, buttons removed)

Unit role gating: deciding a request needs the Unit Leader role, and Unit Leaders can only approve or deny requests from members of their own unit. Admins can action any request, with or without a unit role. Having a unit role alone is not enough — the buttons sit in a channel everybody can read, and without that rule any member of a unit could approve their own request.

Approval archive

Every approved slot request is logged to #approval-archive as a compact embed showing the operation, unit, member, slot, and approver. The channel is created automatically the first time an approval goes through. To migrate old approved messages that were posted before this feature existed, run /archive-old-approvals.

Event reminders

When an event time is set, the bot automatically:

• DMs every approved member with their slot name and a countdown timestamp
• Posts a ping in #orbat tagging all approved members

Reminders fire at the configured window before the event (default 30 minutes). The reminder fires once and will not repeat.

---

Events

Standalone events with sign-ups — weekly trainings, movie nights, campaign sessions. Completely separate from the ORBAT slot system: no Google Sheet, no operation required, and signing up to an event does not touch anyone's slot.

An event is a message with three buttons. Members press one and the attendee list updates live for everyone.

Built in stages toward full Apollo-style functionality. Already in: sign-ups, reminders, editing, cancelling, automatic close-out, repeating events and custom sign-up options. Coming next: sign-up roles with per-role limits, then waitlist, templates and a calendar view.

Creating an event (Admins and Unit Leaders)

/event-create title:Weekly Training start_time:25/06/2025 19:00

Start times use the same format as the rest of the bot — DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM or YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM — and are read in the server timezone you set with /set-timezone. Times in the past are rejected.

Everything else is optional:

Option	What it does
description	What the event is about
duration	Length in minutes; shows an end time and decides when the event counts as finished
location	Free text — a voice channel, a server name, a map
channel	Where to post it (defaults to the current channel)
mention	Role(s) to ping — type @ and pick as many as you need
reminder	15 / 30 / 60 min, 2 h, 24 h before, or no reminder at all
image_url	A banner image shown on the event
repeat	Daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly by date or weekday — see Repeating events
repeat_until	Stop repeating after this date
responses	Your own sign-up buttons — see Custom sign-up options

/event-edit event:#3 start_time:26/06/2025 20:00

Changes only what you pass — everything else keeps its value. Moving the start time re-arms the reminder, so it fires again for the new time. Only the organiser or an admin can edit.

/event-cancel event:#3 reason:Server maintenance

Marks the event cancelled, greys out the message, removes the buttons and DMs everyone who signed up as coming. The event stays visible as a record rather than vanishing. With custom sign-up options that means every option except the ones marked not coming.

On a repeating event this cancels only that one occurrence and posts the next one — "this week is off, next week isn't" is the usual case. Add stop_series: True to end the whole series instead.

/event-delete event:#3

Removes the event and its message for good, together with every sign-up on it. There's a confirmation step first, because it can't be undone.

Cancel or delete?

	/event-cancel	/event-delete
The message	Stays, greyed out as a record	Removed from the channel
People who signed up	Get a DM	Are not told
Sign-ups	Kept	Deleted with the event
Good for	An event that was real but isn't happening	Test events, typos, clutter

If anyone is signed up to a scheduled event, the confirmation says so and points you at /event-cancel instead. Its autocomplete also lists cancelled and finished events — those are usually the ones you want to tidy away.

All these commands autocomplete: start typing and pick the event from the list instead of remembering its number.

Repeating events

/event-create title:Weekly Training start_time:25/06/2025 19:00 repeat:Weekly

Seven patterns to choose from. Optionally add repeat_until:31/12/2025 23:59 to end the series on a date.

repeat	Meaning	Example series
Daily	Every day
Weekly	Same weekday every week
Every 2 weeks	Same weekday, fortnightly
Monthly — same date	Same day number each month	15 Jun → 15 Jul → 15 Aug
Monthly — last weekday	Last of each month	27 Jun → 25 Jul → 29 Aug → 26 Sep
Monthly — same weekday	Same weekday position each month	2nd Sat: 13 Jun → 11 Jul → 8 Aug
Weekly — except the last one of the month	Every week, but skipping the last <weekday>	6 Jun → 13 Jun → 20 Jun → (skips 27) → 4 Jul

The weekday and the position both come from the start time you give it. So for a monthly op on the last Saturday:

/event-create title:Monthly Op start_time:27/06/2026 19:00 repeat:Monthly — last weekday

27 June 2026 is a Saturday, so the series runs on the last Saturday of every month from then on — 25 Jul, 29 Aug, 26 Sep, 31 Oct, and so on, always at 19:00. If the date you pick is not itself the last Saturday of its month, the bot says so when creating the event, so the shift doesn't surprise you later.

Weekly ops around a monthly one

Weekly — except the last one of the month is the counterpart: every Saturday apart from the last one. Pair the two and you get a monthly op on the last Saturday with weekly ops on all the others, with no double-booking:

/event-create title:Monthly Op start_time:27/06/2026 19:00 repeat:Monthly — last weekday
/event-create title:Weekly Op  start_time:06/06/2026 19:00 repeat:Weekly — except the last one of the month

The weekly series runs 6, 13, 20 June, skips the 27th, then 4, 11, 18 July, skips the 25th, and so on. It adapts to the month: in a month with four Saturdays it runs three times, in a month with five it runs four times — always every Saturday but the last.

Note this is not the same as picking the 1st through 4th Saturdays separately. In a four-Saturday month the 4th Saturday is the last one, so that approach would double-book your monthly op.

Only ever one occurrence exists at a time. When the current one finishes, the bot posts the next automatically in the same channel, with the same description, duration, location, ping role and reminder. Sign-ups start fresh each time — nobody is carried over, so an "Accepted" always means someone answered for that date.

To change or stop a series, use /event-edit:

/event-edit event:#3 repeat:Monthly      # change the interval
/event-edit event:#3 repeat:Don't repeat # stop after this occurrence

Three details worth knowing:

• Monthly keeps its day. A "same date" series on the 31st becomes the 28th in February and then goes back to the 31st in March — it doesn't get stuck on the 28th. The same applies to leap years.
• A "5th weekday" series skips months that don't have one. Pick the 5th Saturday and you get only the months that actually have five — the series doesn't end and doesn't silently slide to the 4th.
• Downtime doesn't produce a backlog. If the bot is offline for a month, it does not post the missed occurrences on startup. It posts the next one that is actually still ahead.

Signing up (Members)

Press one of the buttons on the event. Unless the organiser set custom options, they are:

• ✅ Accepted — you're coming
• ❓ Tentative — you might be
• ❌ Declined — you can't make it

Pressing a different button changes your answer. Pressing the button you already chose withdraws you and takes you off the list entirely — which is not the same as declining. The footer on every event says so.

/event-list shows all upcoming events with sign-up counts and a jump link to each one.

Pinging roles

mention takes as many roles as you need, not just one:

/event-create title:Joint Op start_time:25/06/2026 19:00 mention:@2nd USC @CNTO @TFP

Type @ in the field and pick them from the list — Discord turns each into a proper mention. All of them get pinged when the event is posted and again when the reminder fires. Up to 10 roles.

If you'd rather type them, comma-separated names work too: mention:2nd USC, CNTO. Anything the bot can't find is reported back instead of being quietly ignored.

To change or remove them later:

/event-edit event:#3 mention:@2nd USC @PXG   # replace the list
/event-edit event:#3 mention:none            # stop pinging anyone

A role only actually notifies people if it's mentionable, or if the bot has Mention All Roles. The bot warns you when you pick a role that isn't.

Custom sign-up options

The three default buttons don't suit every event. Give responses your own list, separated by |:

/event-create title:Air Assault start_time:25/06/2026 19:00 responses:🚁 Pilot | 🔫 Infantry | ❓ Maybe | -❌ Can't make it

That event gets four buttons instead of three, and the attendee list on the message is grouped by exactly those options.

• An emoji at the start of an entry becomes the button's icon. It's optional — Pilot | Infantry works too.
• A leading - marks "not coming". Those people are left out of reminders and cancellation DMs, the way Declined always has been. At least one option has to mean coming.
• Between 2 and 10 options, labels under 40 characters.
• Leave responses out and you keep the usual ✅ Accepted / ❓ Tentative / ❌ Declined.

Everything else behaves the same: pressing the button you already picked withdraws you, and a repeating event carries its options to every future occurrence.

To change the options later:

/event-edit event:#3 responses:✅ In | -❌ Out

If anyone had already signed up with an option you removed, their answer is cleared and the bot tells you how many — they need to answer again. Options you keep are unaffected.

Reminders and close-out

When the reminder window is reached, everyone who signed up as coming gets a DM, and the event's channel gets a ping — including the mention roles if any were set. People who declined are left alone, and so is anyone who picked a custom option marked not coming with a leading -. The reminder fires once.

Times always display as Discord timestamps, so everyone sees the start in their own local time without configuring anything.

Once an event's start time — plus its duration, if set — has passed, the bot marks it finished, greys out the message and removes the buttons, so old events can't collect stray sign-ups. If the event repeats, that is also the moment the next one goes up.

---

Game Roles

Self-assignable tag roles for games — Minecraft, DCS, Squad, whatever your members play. They are completely separate from the slot and ORBAT system, and they exist for one purpose: so anyone can @mention everyone who plays a given game.

These roles never grant permissions. Roles the bot creates are created with no permissions at all and are mentionable by everyone. If you point the bot at a role that already exists, it checks it first and refuses when the role:

• grants any server permission at all
• is @everyone, or is managed by an integration (bot roles, the Nitro booster role)
• is a unit role or Unit Leader — otherwise a member could self-assign their way into slot-approval rights
• sits at or above the bot's own role, which Discord won't let it assign

Setting them up (Admins)

/game-role-add name:Minecraft emoji:⛏️ description:Vanilla and modded

Creates a permission-free, mentionable role called Minecraft and makes it self-assignable. emoji and description are optional and only affect how the role looks in the picker.

If a role with that exact name already exists, it is reused rather than duplicated — so you can make your existing game roles self-assignable without recreating them. Running the command again for the same name just updates the emoji and description. You can have up to 25 game roles, which is as many as a Discord menu can show.

/game-role-panel #game-roles

Posts the panel: an embed listing every game role plus a 🎮 Choose your game roles button. This is the normal way members opt in — no command to remember. There is one panel per server, and it updates itself whenever you add or remove a game role. The button keeps working after a bot restart.

/game-role-remove role:Minecraft

Stops the role being self-assignable. By default the Discord role itself stays and members who have it keep it — pass delete_role: True to delete it outright, which removes it from everyone. If you delete a game role in Discord directly, the bot drops it from its own list the next time it reads them.

Picking them (Members)

Click 🎮 Choose your game roles on the panel, or run:

/game-roles

Both open the same private menu listing every game role, with the ones you already have already ticked. Tick the games you play, untick the ones you don't, and submit — your game roles are set to exactly what you left selected. Deselecting everything is valid and removes all of them.

To drop a role, either untick it in that menu, or press ➖ Remove a role for a shorter list containing only the roles you currently have — pick one or several and they are removed. The button only appears when you actually have a game role to give up.

Only the roles that actually changed are touched, and you get a short summary of what was added and removed. /game-role-list shows the available roles without changing anything.

Requirements

The bot needs the Manage Roles permission, and its own role must sit above the game roles in Server Settings → Roles — Discord does not let a bot hand out roles ranked at or above its own. If either is missing, the bot says so with the specific fix instead of failing silently.

No privileged intents are needed for this feature.

---

Reddit announcements

Watch a Reddit account or a subreddit, and every time something new is posted, the bot announces it in a Discord channel — with your wording and your pings. It is set up in the web interface under 📣 Reddit, admin only.

No Reddit account, API key or app registration is needed. Every user and every subreddit has a public RSS feed, and that is all the bot reads. Do set REDDIT_USER_AGENT, so Reddit can see who is asking — clients that don't say get throttled.

That may not be enough on its own, and it is worth knowing why before you go looking for a setting to change: Reddit also refuses requests based on where they come from. A hosting provider's address — Railway's included — gets turned away from the public feeds with 429 Too Many Requests however politely it identifies itself, and however rarely it asks. One watch checked every five minutes is 288 requests a day, which is nothing at all; being refused is not about that number and cannot be fixed by lowering it.

So when a check is refused, the bot retries the same feed on old.reddit.com, which is the older renderer and is much less fussy about who is asking. If both turn it down, the watch stands down for half an hour (or for whatever Retry-After Reddit asked for) rather than asking again every five minutes, since hammering a refusal is what makes a passing throttle into a permanent one. The list page says when the next attempt is due, and Check now ignores the wait, so you can always try immediately by hand.

A word on upvotes

The bot announces posts. It will not ask anyone to upvote them, and there is deliberately no wording for that anywhere in it.

Asking a Discord server to go and upvote a post is vote manipulation under Reddit's content policy, and it is one of the few things Reddit enforces hard — not only against the account that posted, but against the accounts that keep answering the call. It is easy to spot: the same handful of accounts voting within minutes of the same author posting is exactly what shows up in the voting timeline, however the Discord message is worded.

Asking people to read and comment is fine, and comments and real discussion weigh more in Reddit's own ranking than a few early votes do. That is what the suggested templates say.

Setting one up

1. Open the web UI, pick your server, go to 📣 Reddit and press + Watch a feed.

2. Choose Reddit user or Subreddit and give the name. The bare name (TaskForcePhalanx), the u/ or r/ form, or the page URL pasted straight from the address bar all work.

   A Reddit user watch covers everything that account submits, in any subreddit — plus anything it posts to its own profile page. It is not limited to one community. A Subreddit watch is the other way round: every new post in that subreddit, whoever writes it.

3. Pick the channel to announce in.

4. Optionally, fill in Only these accounts to announce just those authors' posts. See following someone whose profile hides their posts.

5. Write the message. Four placeholders are filled in for you:

   Placeholder	Becomes
   {title}	The post's title
   {url}	A link to the post
   {author}	The Reddit account that posted it
   {subreddit}	The subreddit it was posted in — for a post made on the author's own profile, that is u_TheirName, which is where such posts actually live

   Leave it empty and the default is used. Discord unfurls the link on its own, so the title and thumbnail appear underneath the message without you doing anything.

6. Tick the roles to ping, and list any people by user ID (right-click a member → Copy User ID, with Developer Mode on — there is no dropdown, because the bot cannot list your members without the privileged members intent).

7. Save.

Following someone whose profile hides their posts

Reddit lets an account hide its posts from its own profile page (Settings → Curate your profile → Content and activities). A Reddit user watch reads exactly that profile listing, so when the setting is on it comes back nearly empty — the bot sees what a logged-out visitor sees.

The posts themselves are not hidden: the subreddit they were written in still lists them. So watch the subreddit instead, and put the account's name in Only these accounts. Every new post in that subreddit is read, and only that author's are announced. Several names are allowed, separated by spaces.

Two limits worth knowing:

• A very busy subreddit can push a post out of its own feed between two checks — the feed carries roughly the last 25 posts, and the bot looks every five minutes.
• Adding an account to the filter makes their posts new to the watch, so the next check would announce whatever of theirs is still on the feed. The save warns about it; open Recent posts and mark what you don't want first.

The first check after that notes down what is already on the feed and announces nothing — otherwise switching a watch on would post the author's last 25 submissions at once. From then on, every new post is announced, within about five minutes of going up.

The buttons

• Preview newest post — shows the newest post rendered exactly as it would be announced, using whatever is currently in the form. It posts nothing and marks nothing as seen, so press it as often as you like while working on the text.
• Check now — runs the scheduled check immediately. This one does announce anything it hasn't announced before.
• Recent posts — lists everything the feed still carries, saying which have already been announced, with an Announce button on each.

Catching a post up

If a post never made it into the channel — the bot was down when it went up, Discord refused that one message, or you only set the watch up afterwards — open Recent posts and press Announce on it. It goes out exactly as the scheduled check would have posted it, pings included, and is then marked as announced so the next check doesn't repeat it. Each row can be expanded to see the message first.

The one limit is that only what the feed still lists can be caught up: Reddit's feed carries roughly the last 25 submissions, and anything older than that is out of reach.

Stopping a flood

Tick the posts you don't want announced and press Mark ticked as announced — or Mark all for the whole list. Nothing is posted; the posts simply leave the queue.

That is what to do when a feed suddenly fills up — an account that un-hid its posts, a subreddit that was quiet for a month. Without it the bot works through the backlog three posts at a time, every five minutes, until all of it has been announced. Mark them, and only what comes after that point reaches the channel.

Marking needs no connection to Reddit: the page has already read the feed, so ticking and marking works even while Reddit is refusing the server — which is exactly when a backlog is waiting.

The page also names the exact address it read and how many entries came back, with a link to open it yourself. That is the answer to "why hasn't it announced X": if a post is missing from that page, it is missing from the feed, not being skipped by the bot. Each post says where it lives too — r/arma, or the author's own profile for one posted to u/TheirName.

Good to know

• Pings are limited to what you ticked. A post title containing @everyone cannot ping your server: the announcement quotes Reddit, so only the roles and people on the watch are allowed to be mentioned.
• A burst is spread out. At most three posts are announced per check; the rest follow on the next one. Nothing is skipped.
• Errors are visible. A misspelled name, a private or suspended account, a channel the bot lost access to — the reason for the last failed check is shown next to the watch on the list. If Reddit ever answers with something that isn't a feed, the message quotes the part it choked on, so the cause is visible rather than only its line number.
• Repointing a watch resets it. Change which user or subreddit it follows and it starts fresh from that feed's current posts, rather than announcing its back catalogue.
• A watch with no channel is simply idle — untick Check this feed to park one without losing its text.
• Persistent 429s are a hosting problem, not a settings problem — see above. If a watch is refused from both hosts every single time, the public feed is not usable from that server's address, and the way through is Reddit's OAuth API with a registered script app rather than any change to how often it checks.

---

Kill Tracker

The unit's public scoreboard. The bot reads the OCAP server's recording list every 10 minutes, downloads each finished recording it hasn't counted yet, and stores the per-player rows. Nothing is uploaded by hand.

Address	What
/kt/api/stats.csv	Every counted mission as CSV — the 35 columns the Google Sheet had plus two for the weapon of the longest kill, so the existing dashboard reads it unchanged
/kt/api/missions	JSON: which recordings are counted, under which rules, and how our kill count compares with the OCAP server's own

| /kt/api/campaigns.json, /kt/api/player_aliases.json, /kt/api/unit_overrides.json | The campaigns, the names that belong together and the units set by hand, in the shape of the dashboard's own JSON files |

The page that reads them is in dashboard/ and is published to GitHub Pages (https://armatfp.github.io/ORBATBot/) by .github/workflows/dashboard.yml. It reads only this bot — nothing reads a Google Sheet any more.

All of them are open to everyone and need no login.

Managing it (server admins)

📊 Kill Tracker in the tab bar, for server admins only:

• Missions — show a mission under a clean name when it wasn't named cleanly in game.
• Campaigns — group missions into campaigns.
• Players — link a player's several names and pick the one shown.
• Units — correct the unit the Kill Tracker guessed for a player.
• Longest kills — the farthest infantry kills of all missions (filter by mission or player); tick the ones that cannot be true and their distance leaves the longest/average kill distance (the kill still counts).
• Multikills — every player's best multikill per mission; tick the ones that cannot be true and that stretch no longer counts as a multikill (the kills still count).
• Import — take over the mission names from the old sheet and the dashboard's campaigns.json, player_aliases.json and unit_overrides.json, once.

How-tos for each are under How-tos → Kill Tracker.

Set OCAP_BASE_URL if the OCAP server is not https://ocap.taskforcephalanx.com, and KT_SYNC=0 to stop the polling. A rule change is a code change: bump RULES_VERSION in utils/killtracker.py and the bot counts every mission again by itself. How it counts, and why, is in docs/killtracker.md.

---

Tactical maps

The mission plan, drawn on the terrain and shared with a link. It lives entirely in the web interface — there is no slash command, because dragging a symbol onto a hillside is not something a Discord modal can do.

Open Operations → Maps. Every member of the server can read the maps; creating one and drawing on it needs the Unit Leader role or Manage Server.

Drawing

Tool	What it places	Key
Select	Pick something up and move it; drag the background to pan	V
Unit	An APP-6 symbol — infantry, armour, mortars, air, medical, supply… — with its size mark	U
Marker	One of Arma's task markers — objective, destroy, flag, warning, pick-up… with optional text	M
Line	A route, a boundary or a phase line	L
Area	A shaded boundary or a suspected position	A
Text	A free label — phase names, timings	T

Pick the side (friendly, hostile, neutral, civilian, unknown), the layer, the symbol, the size mark, whether it is in the air and whether it is there yet or only planned, in the toolbar before you place something; everything can be changed afterwards in the panel on the right, which also holds the mobility indicator and the parent unit.

Drawing a line is like the game: press the left button and drag. With the Line or Area tool that is all there is to it; from any other tool — including Select — hold Ctrl while you drag. Letting go finishes the line, Esc throws the stroke away, and the Area tool closes the shape into an area.

A plain drag is freehand — as straight as your hand is, which a boundary or a phase line is not. Hold Shift while you drag for a straight segment: it runs from wherever you were when you pressed Shift to wherever the pointer is now. Let go and freehand carries on from that point, so one stroke can be a straight leg, a curve round a hill and a straight leg again — and tapping Shift again chains another one.

Lines, areas and markers are black until you colour them — they belong to the plan, not to a side, which is why they no longer take the colour of whichever side happens to be picked. They can be red, orange, yellow, green, blue, cyan, pink, purple, white or black, from the swatches in the toolbar before you draw or in the panel afterwards — or any other colour from the colour field beside them. A unit symbol keeps its side's colour, because that is what says whose it is. A line gets no arrowhead unless you tick one: most lines on a plan are boundaries and phase lines, not directions of attack.

The symbols follow APP-6, the way the planning tools and pocket cards do: the frame's shape says whose a unit is, so the plan still reads when it is printed, projected, or looked at by somebody who is colour-blind.

• Scroll to zoom, drag the background to pan, ⛶ Full screen gives the map the whole window
• Del removes what is selected, Ctrl+Z undoes, Ctrl+S saves
• Nothing is saved until you press Save — the page warns you if you try to leave with unsaved work
• Tick HQ on a unit to give it the headquarters staff
• Symbols are deliberately small — twenty of them on one sheet still has to be readable — and the Size slider goes a long way further down for a crowded area

Layers

A map holds up to twelve named layers, each with its own switch: Phase 1, Phase 2, Feindlage. Add one in the Layers panel, pick which layer you are drawing on in the toolbar, and move anything between layers from its properties.

• Hiding a layer hides nothing permanently — what is on it stays in the map and stays saved. The switch only decides what is drawn.
• Anyone you send the share link to gets the same switches, so one map covers the whole operation instead of one map per phase.
• What is on a hidden layer stays out of the Arma export as well: markers you switched off are not part of the plan you are handing over, and Arma has no switch to turn them off again.
• Areas are drawn under lines, lines under symbols, so nothing gets buried under a boundary somebody drew later. Bring to front decides between two of the same kind.

The background

Best: upload the terrain. The tile archives you already prepare for OCAP work as they are — a zip or 7z holding the numbered folders 0/ 1/ 2/ … and, if it came from OCAP, a map.json. Go to Terrains (linked from the Maps page), upload it once, and from then on every map can be put on it from the editor's 🗻 Put it on a terrain panel.

Uploading is worth the storage for one reason: the bot then serves the tiles itself, so nothing outside has to be reachable — not for your members, and not for whoever you send a share link to.

• The name and the world size are read out of map.json, so usually you only pick the file. Without one, type the world size (Altis 30720, Tanoa 15360, Stratis 8192).
• Deepest level to keep decides the size: each step is four times the tiles. Level 4 is around 7 MB per terrain and is plenty for planning; deeper levels in the archive are simply left out, and the reply tells you how many.
• A terrain can't be deleted while a map is drawn on it — the reply names the maps.

Alternative: point at a running OCAP server. Open 🛰️ Load a terrain from OCAP — the directory field starts filled in, so for most people it is just List the terrains — or give it the folder OCAP keeps its terrains in — e.g. https://ocap.your-unit.net/images/maps — and press List the terrains: everything in it comes back as a dropdown, so you never have to remember that Cham is tem_cham. The address is saved for the server, so it is typed once. Same terrain, same automatic Arma coordinates, nothing stored here; the catch is that everyone opening the map loads the tiles from that server, so it has to be reachable for them too. If your OCAP does not list its directory, Paste an address instead takes one map folder's URL as before.

Or paste the URL of any image the browser can load — a terrain screenshot, a map export — under Map settings. It is stretched across the sheet, so pick the sheet shape (square, landscape, portrait) that matches it, and set the Arma corners yourself if you want the export.

However the background got there, Detail under Map settings picks how deep into the tile pyramid to draw, an optional grid can be laid over the top, and the map works with no background at all: a plain dark sheet with a grid is enough for a schematic.

Town names

A terrain arrives with no labels on it — the tiles come out of Arma's own map export as pure topography, and the game draws the names over that afterwards. Where they can be read from depends on how the terrain was built. OCAP's current maptool builds one from a grad_meh export, which writes the locations beside the tiles as geojson/locations/<type>.geojson.gz, one file per Arma location type — so on such a server this is a read, not a trip into the game. Its older route is raster tiles only and carries none.

On an OCAP terrain: open the map → Terrain and background → Place names from OCAP → Import place names. It reads the server the map points at.

On a terrain uploaded here: the archive's own locations files are read on upload if it has them.

It is decided per terrain, not per server. The .emf → gdal2tiles route in OCAP's own tile guide produces raster tiles and no vector data at all, so no amount of probing will turn up locations for a terrain built that way — while the terrain beside it on the same OCAP, imported from a grad_meh export, gives up its names in one press. That is a property of how each terrain was built, not of the server and not of the import. A failure therefore names the terrain and every address it tried, so you can tell it apart from a broken feature.

When there is nothing to import, the same panel carries a script and a paste box. Run the script in a mission on that terrain — debug console, LOCAL EXEC — and paste what lands on your clipboard into the box. That is once for the terrain: not once per map, not once per operation, and every plan drawn on it afterwards has them.

The box is on the map rather than only on the Terrains page because a map backed by an OCAP server has no terrain row there to paste into — which for a while made the one remaining path unreachable for exactly the people who needed it.

Names belong to the terrain, not to one map, so this is once per terrain and every plan drawn on it gains them — including maps on an OCAP server, which have no terrain record here but are matched by the folder's world name.

They are drawn under the plan, so a symbol you place is never hidden behind a village name, and they scale by rank the way a paper map does — a capital larger and letter-spaced, a rock small. Nameless entries are dropped: Arma's terrains are full of FlatArea helpers that exist to position things and have nothing to say.

Because you may well want all of them on one terrain and almost none on a briefing sheet, the editor's background panel carries a switch per group — towns and villages, hills and landmarks, water and coast, places of interest, everything else — plus a size slider. That setting belongs to the map; the names themselves belong to the terrain.

Place names are never exported to Arma: the game draws its own.

Sharing it

A map is private to people who can sign in here until you give it a link. Under Share link, choose:

• Not shared — only people signed in here can open it
• Anyone with the link can look at it — for the people who just need the plan
• Anyone with the link can draw on it — for co-planning with somebody who is not on the server

The link looks like https://your-domain/m/xxxxxxxx, works without a Discord login, and Replace the link issues a new one — the old link stops opening the map immediately, for everyone who has it. That is how you take a plan back once it has been forwarded further than you meant.

If the site answers on more than one name, the link always carries the first one in WEB_BASE_URL — even if you made it while browsing the other. That is deliberate: a share link is copied to somebody who was never on the site, so it has to be the name you want people to see. The same goes for the link the bot posts into a channel. A map already announced in Discord keeps the link its message was posted with; post it again to refresh that.

Copying a plan. Duplicate gives you the whole plan again under a new name — every symbol, line and layer, on the same terrain. The share link deliberately does not come with it, so a copy made to try something out is not reachable by everyone who already has the original's link. Rename is the Name and description form on the same page.

Posting it in a channel

Post in a channel sends an embed with the map's name, what is on it and a link. It posts a link rather than a picture on purpose: the plan usually keeps changing after the briefing is announced, and a link is always current where an image is not. If the map has a share link, that is what gets posted; otherwise the link only opens for people who can sign in here.

Putting the plan into Arma 3

The map can be dropped into a running mission as ordinary Arma markers, with no mod on the server or the client. Arma cannot fetch anything from outside without one, so the way in is the debug console:

1. Make sure the coordinates are set. Loading the terrain from OCAP does this for you; otherwise pick the terrain under Map settings → Arma 3 coordinates, or type the corner coordinates if your background image is a crop of the map. Get this right before the first export, or everything lands on the wrong terrain.
2. Save the map, then open 🎯 Put it into Arma 3. There are two scripts there, side by side — copy one, or download it as a .sqf:
   • 1 · Fixed markers — nobody can move or delete them in game. This is the one for a plan that should stay as briefed, and the one to use unless you specifically want the other.
   • 2 · Markers you can move and delete — the same plan, but named the way Arma names a player's own markers, so whoever ran the script can drag a symbol or delete it with DEL. For planning in game, at the map table. The same click that fixes a misplaced objective deletes it, and nothing asks first. This one also lets you pick which map channel the markers sit in, so a plan meant for one side need not be in Global.
3. In game, log in as admin (#login <password>), open the debug console, paste it and press LOCAL EXEC — for both scripts, once, on one machine.

LOCAL EXEC, not GLOBAL, even though every player sees the markers: createMarker is global by itself, so one machine running the script draws them for everybody. GLOBAL EXEC runs the script on every machine instead, which is wasted on the first script and actively wrong on the second, where each marker's name carries the id of whoever ran it — you would get one plan per player.

Pasting a script again after changing the plan replaces that map's markers instead of adding a second copy — each map owns its own marker names.

The mission has to allow the debug console: enableDebugConsole = 1; (admins) or 2 (everyone) in its description.ext. Lines and areas need Arma 2.00 or newer, which is anything current.

What comes across:

On the map	In Arma
Unit symbols	The matching NATO marker, in the side's colour — b_inf, o_armor, n_med …
Anything in the air	That side's air marker, whatever branch the symbol was
Headquarters	The hq marker of that side
Size, strength, mobility, parent unit, planned	Written into the marker's name: 1-1 Alpha / A Coy (planned Plt twd)
Markers (OBJ, TGT, RP …)	mil_objective, mil_destroy, mil_dot and friends, with the text
Lines and areas	Polyline markers; an area closes itself, a line's arrow becomes a mil_arrow
The colour you picked	The nearest marker colour Arma ships — a red line arrives red. Cyan and purple are the two it has no match for
Text labels	An empty marker carrying the text

Anti-tank, snipers and a few others have no marker in vanilla Arma, so they come across as the nearest one that exists. Dashed lines arrive solid, and so does a planned symbol's dashed frame — Arma has no dashed marker, which is why "planned" is written into the name instead.

Good to know

• One map holds 400 items, a line up to 120 points, labels up to 48 characters
• Two people drawing at the same time will overwrite each other when they save — agree who has the pen, or share a read-only link and keep the drawing to one person
• Copy is how you build phase 2: same plan, new name, no share link of its own
• The map renders without JavaScript as well, so a read-only link opens on anything

---

Web UI

An optional browser interface for most of what the bot does — events, the slot roster and its approvals, tactical maps, game roles, embeds and the logs — without touching a slash command. You sign in with your Discord account, and everything you do goes through the same code as the slash commands, so it produces the same messages, in the same channels, with the same buttons.

It is off until you configure it. With DISCORD_CLIENT_ID, DISCORD_CLIENT_SECRET and WEB_SECRET_KEY unset, the bot starts exactly as it always did and opens no HTTP port. The startup log says which of the three is missing.

What it does

Page	What you get
Sign-in	Continue with Discord — OAuth2, identify scope only
Help	Every how-to, searchable — reachable signed out, at /help
Server picker	Every server you and the bot are both in (skipped when there is only one)
Events	Upcoming events with live sign-up counts, plus recently finished and cancelled ones
Event	Full details, the attendee list per response, and RSVP buttons for yourself
New / Edit	Title, start, duration, description, location, channel, ping roles, reminder, repeat pattern, custom sign-up buttons, banner image
Cancel	Reason field, DMs everyone attending, optionally stops the whole series
Delete	Confirmation page stating the sign-up count, then removes the event and its message
Operations	One group holding the three pages that are always about the same evening:
· Operation	Start an operation, set its start time, post the board and the announcement, empty the queue, read the raw roster
· Slot Approvals	Approve, deny or withdraw the pending requests, release a booked slot, or put somebody on one outright
· ORBATs	Build and edit the slot roster
· Maps	Draw the tactical plan, share it with a link, post it in a channel
· Terrains	Upload the tile archives the maps are drawn on, and see what each one costs (linked from Maps)
· Settings	Which channels the bot posts into, and the server timezone
Game roles	Tick the games you play; admins add and remove roles and post the self-assign panel
Embeds	Build rich messages, post them, and edit the posted message in place
Member log	Announce joins, leaves, kicks, bans and unbans in a channel, and welcome new members in a channel or by DM
Reddit	Watch a Reddit user or subreddit and announce new posts, with your own text and pings
Voice time	Leaderboard of time spent in voice channels; admins configure what counts

Who may do what is read live from your Discord roles, not from the login:

• Any member of the server — view events, RSVP, pick their own game roles, see the voice leaderboard, read the tactical maps
• Unit Leader or Manage Server — create events; draw, share and post tactical maps; approve and deny slot requests (Unit Leaders for their own unit only)
• The organiser, or an admin — edit, cancel and delete that event
• Manage Server — add and remove game roles, post the self-assign panel, build embeds, build ORBATs, watch Reddit feeds, upload and delete terrains, configure the member log and voice tracking

That is the same rule set the slash commands use; it is literally the same code. Roles are cached for a minute, so if you have just been given a role, the “Changed your roles on Discord? Re-read them” link at the bottom of the event list picks it up immediately.

Times are entered and displayed in the server timezone (/set-timezone), the same as every time you type into a slash command.

Setting it up

1. Create the OAuth2 credentials. In the Discord Developer Portal → your application → OAuth2:

• copy the Client ID and generate a Client Secret
• under Redirects, add https://your-domain/auth/callback — it must match WEB_BASE_URL exactly, including https:// and with no trailing slash. Serving the site on two names? Put both in WEB_BASE_URL, separated by a space, and add a redirect URI here for each — the site then keeps whoever opened one of them on that one

Already have a Discord OAuth2 app? Reuse it. Take its existing client ID and secret, and just add https://your-domain/auth/callback as an additional redirect URI — Discord allows several per application and the existing ones keep working. Do not regenerate the client secret if that app is used elsewhere; that would break the other integration. It doesn't even have to be the bot's own application: membership and roles are read through the bot's connection, not through the user's token, so any application works — only the name on the consent screen changes. Using the bot's application is still the tidiest.

2. Generate a session key.

python -c "import secrets; print(secrets.token_urlsafe(48))"

Changing this key later signs everybody out; nothing else is lost.

3. Set the variables on Railway (service → Variables) or in .env for Docker:

DISCORD_CLIENT_ID=your_application_id
DISCORD_CLIENT_SECRET=your_client_secret
WEB_SECRET_KEY=the_random_string_from_step_2
WEB_BASE_URL=https://orbat.example.com

4. Expose it.

• Railway — service → Settings → Networking → Generate Domain. Railway injects PORT and the app listens on it; use that domain as WEB_BASE_URL. A domain of your own goes in the same place (Custom Domain, then the CNAME it gives you at your DNS provider); put both names in WEB_BASE_URL if the old one should keep working — your own domain first, because the first name is the one share links carry. Each name also needs its own redirect URI in the Developer Portal.
• Docker — port 8080 is published by docker-compose.yml; put it behind a reverse proxy that terminates TLS (Caddy or nginx), and point WEB_BASE_URL at the public name.
• Portainer — docker-compose.portainer.yml publishes nothing; the bot joins an existing nginx-proxy's network and is announced by VIRTUAL_HOST / LETSENCRYPT_HOST, which also gets the certificate. See 4c.

Restart the bot. The log line ✅ Web UI listening on … means it is up; /healthz answers ok once the bot is connected to Discord.

Name and logo

The site is called TFP BOT. Set WEB_BRAND to rename it — that string is the header, the browser tab title and the footer.

For the logo, commit an image to web/static/logo.png (.webp, .svg, .jpg also work). It is picked up on the next start and appears next to the name in the header, large on the sign-in page, as the browser-tab icon, and — when WEB_BASE_URL is set — as the preview image when the site's link is pasted into Discord or Slack. Square images look best; anything else is fitted rather than squashed. With no such file, the name shows on its own and the tab falls back to a 🛡️ emoji — nothing breaks.

The help pages

Every how-to in How-tos is also a page on the site, at /help. There are two ways in:

• the round ? in the site header, which opens the index — searchable, and grouped the same way as this README;
• a ? at the end of the tab row on every page, which opens that page's how-to directly. On 📋 Member log it lands on Log joins, leaves, kicks and bans, on 🔊 Voice time on Track time in voice, and so on.

Both work signed out, which is the point of putting them outside the server pages: somebody who cannot get past the sign-in screen is exactly the person who needs to read one.

There is only one copy of this text. The topics live in utils/help.py, the site renders them, and python scripts/gen_help.py writes the same thing into this README between its help:start and help:end markers — so the two cannot drift apart. tests/test_help.py goes further and reads the command names straight out of cogs/: adding a slash command without writing a how-to for it makes the test suite fail. Run python scripts/gen_help.py --check to find out whether the README has fallen behind.

How it is wired

The site runs inside the bot process, on the same event loop. That is why a page can post a message, register a persistent button and read a member's roles directly — there is no second service, no polling and no queue table, and one Railway service still runs everything.

The session is a signed cookie, so there is no session table and a redeploy doesn't sign anyone out. It holds nothing but your user id, display name, avatar hash and a CSRF token; the Discord access token is used once to read your profile and then discarded. Every permission decision is made fresh from the bot's live view of the guild.

Game roles in the browser

The 🎮 Game roles tab does everything the slash commands do. Members get one page with every game role, the ones they already have ticked; saving sets their roles to exactly what is ticked, and unticking removes. Admins additionally get an add form (name, emoji, description — an existing role with that exact name is reused, never duplicated), a remove button per role with an optional delete the Discord role too, and a channel picker for the self-assign panel.

Every rule the commands enforce applies unchanged: roles with permissions, @everyone, integration-managed roles, the unit roles and Unit Leader are all refused, the cap is 25, and the panel message refreshes itself after every change. Roles submitted that aren't registered game roles are ignored, so the form can't be used to hand yourself something else. If the bot is missing Manage Roles, the page says so and the controls are disabled rather than failing on submit.

Embeds

📝 Embeds is a builder for the rich messages you'd otherwise write by hand — server info, rules, announcements. Title, description, colour, up to ten fields (optionally side by side), author line, thumbnail, image, footer, timestamp, and plain text above the embed for pings. A preview shows roughly what Discord will make of it.

Each embed is saved with a name and starts as a draft. Posting it records which message it became, and saving an edit afterwards updates that message in place — no delete-and-repost, so pinned server info stays pinned. Posting again sends a new message and stops tracking the old one, which is how you move an embed to another channel. Deleting offers to remove the Discord message with it.

Discord's limits are checked when you save, not when you post: an over-long title or a 6000-character total is refused on the form rather than becoming a saved embed that can never be sent. Image and icon fields must be full https:// URLs.

Member log

📋 Member log posts an announcement when someone joins, leaves, is kicked, banned or unbanned. Pick a channel, tick which events you want, save.

• Joins show the account's age (a fresh account is worth a second look), the member count, and which invite link was used — including who created that link and, if you've labelled it, where that link was published.
• Leaves show how long the member was around and which roles they had.
• Kicks are told apart from voluntary leaves through the audit log, and name the moderator and reason. Bans and unbans do the same.

Three prerequisites, and the page tells you which are missing:

1. Joins and leaves need Discord's privileged Server Members Intent. Tick it under your application → Bot → Privileged Gateway Intents in the Developer Portal, then set MEMBER_EVENTS=1 in the bot's variables and redeploy. In that order — asking for the intent before it is granted stops the bot from starting at all, which is why it is off by default. Bans and unbans work without it.
2. View Audit Log, or a kick can't be told from someone leaving and bans won't name the moderator.
3. Manage Server, or the invite list can't be read and joins won't say which link was used.

Label your invite links at the bottom of the same page: the invite list is shown with its use counts, and next to each one a free-text field — Steam, Website, Reddit, whatever you use it for. A join through that link then reads rnPAfscGbE · Steam instead of just the code, so nobody has to look it up in a spreadsheet. Labels for links that have since expired are kept and stay editable, because old joins still refer to them.

Invite attribution works by comparing each invite's use counter before and after a join. Two people joining in the same second can't be told apart that way, and a member added by another bot has no invite at all — those simply show no link.

Welcome messages

The same page also greets the member, which is a different job from the log above and is configured separately. The log is written for staff in whatever channel they watch; the welcome is written for the person who just arrived.

• Pick a channel for the greeting — a public one, usually — or leave it on Nowhere if you only want the DM.
• Tick Also send it as a DM to send the member the same text directly. Both, either or neither is fine.
• Write the text, or leave it empty for the default.

Four placeholders are filled in: {member} pings them, {name} is their name as plain text, {server} is the server name, and {member_count} is how many members there now are. Everything else is literal, so a stray { in your wording is harmless.

Neither destination depends on the join log being switched on, or on Announce joins being ticked — but the welcome does use the same join event, so it needs the same Server Members Intent as the join log. A member with DMs closed simply doesn't get the DM; nothing fails, and the channel message still goes out.

Voice time

🔊 Voice time records how long members spend in voice channels and shows a leaderboard for the last 24 hours, 7, 30 or 90 days, or all time, plus which channels see the most use. Every member can see it; only admins can change the settings.

It is off until an admin switches it on. Nothing is recorded before that.

What counts is deliberately narrow by default: time is only counted while at least two people share a channel, and the AFK channel is skipped. Counting pauses the moment somebody is left alone and resumes when somebody joins them, so what you measure is time actually spent together rather than time connected. Both rules can be switched off, and individual voice channels can be excluded.

Optionally, a finished visit is announced in a channel of your choice — with a minimum length, so quick drop-ins don't fill it up. Leave the channel unset to keep the statistics without any messages.

A daily board. Switch on Keep a daily top-10 message up to date, pick a channel, a period and an hour: the bot posts one message and edits that same message once a day, so you can pin it and it always shows current standings. It never posts twice in a day, and if the bot was down at the chosen hour it catches up as soon as it is back rather than skipping. Moving it to another channel posts a fresh message there.

Posting once. Separately, Post the top 10 once sends the leaderboard as a one-off message for a period you choose. Either way members are named rather than mentioned, so nobody gets pinged.

Two details worth knowing about the numbers:

• A redeploy doesn't lose time. Open sessions are closed cleanly when the bot shuts down, so a normal restart records everything up to that moment.
• A hard crash costs at most five minutes. Open sessions carry a heartbeat that is refreshed every five minutes; on the next start, anything left open is closed at its last heartbeat. The time is never rounded up — an interval with no heartbeat counts zero.

Voice state updates need no privileged intent and no extra permission, so unlike the member log this works the moment you switch it on.

Slot Approvals

📋 Slot Approvals shows the pending requests for the operation that is running right now, with ✅ Approve and ❌ Deny next to each one and a field for an optional denial reason. Below them, who already holds a slot.

Deciding here does exactly what the buttons in #slot-approvals do — it is the same code: the member is DMed, the request leaves #slot-approvals and is archived in #approval-archive, the live ORBAT board refreshes, and anyone else who wanted that slot is denied and told. You can work through a queue in Discord and finish it in the browser without anything noticing.

Two things to know:

• Unit Leaders see every request but can only decide their own unit's. A row you may not action says so (“CNTO only”) instead of showing the buttons — you can still see how many people are waiting. Admins can action everything.
• A slot two people want is marked contested. That is the case where approving is a choice rather than a formality, and it is not otherwise visible: in Discord it is simply two separate messages.

Taking somebody off a slot is on this page too. A booked slot has a 🧹 Release button and a request nobody has decided yet has 🧹 Withdraw — the same two halves /clear-slot offers in one dropdown, and the same code again. The slot goes back on the board immediately, the member is DMed and told who removed them, and on a sheet-backed operation the cell is restored to [] <Insert Name>. Neither can be undone, so both ask first.

Withdrawing is not a denial: nothing is written to #approval-archive and the member is not told a reason. Use ❌ Deny when the answer is no, and 🧹 Withdraw when the request should simply stop being in the queue.

Putting somebody on a slot outright is the box at the top — the same as /assign-slot. Type who (a name, an @mention, or a Discord ID), pick a free slot, and they are on the roster with no request and no approval. There is no member dropdown because the bot deliberately does not hold a copy of your member list; a name is searched for when you submit, and if it matches more than one person you are told who, with their IDs.

A Unit Leader can only assign members of their own unit, and needs a unit role themselves — slightly stricter than deciding a request, because choosing who goes on the roster is not the same as answering somebody who asked.

Requesting a slot is still Discord-side — this page is for deciding requests, not making them.

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Operation

🎖️ Operations is a group of four pages, with a second row of tabs under the main one. Operation is the admin half of the slot system, and everything on it has a slash command behind it doing exactly the same thing.

The page opens on what matters most weeks — which operation is running, how full it is, and when it starts. Everything else is a row you click to unfold, so the page stays short:

On the page	Same as	What it does
Start an operation	/setup-slots	Archives the operation running now, loads an ORBAT or a Google Sheet as the new one, and posts the live board
Start time	/set-event-time	Moves the start and re-arms the reminder, so it fires again for the new time
Post the live board	/post-orbat	A fresh board in the channel you pick. It becomes the one that updates; the previous one stops
Post an announcement	/post-event	The "we play at 19:00, sign up here" message, linking to the ORBAT channel
Empty the queue	/clear-requests	Cancels every request still waiting. Nobody is DMed and nothing is archived — this resets a queue, it does not turn people down
The roster as the bot reads it	/debug-slots	Every slot with the key it is booked against — for when one is missing from the board

The header is /current-operation: which operation is live, whether it runs on an ORBAT or a sheet, and how many slots are open, pending and filled.

Settings

The last tab in the group, for the two things you set once rather than every week.

Timezone — /set-timezone. What a time typed anywhere on this site or into a command means. The Discord messages localise themselves for each reader either way, so this is about input only.

Channels

Where the bot posts is now yours to choose. Three channels, each with a Default option that is selected until you change it:

Channel	Default	Used for
ORBAT board	#orbat	The live board, and the reminder ping before an operation starts
Slot approvals	#slot-approvals	Where a new request goes to be decided
Approval archive	#approval-archive	The record of every request that was decided

Leaving one on Default means exactly what the bot did before this setting existed: it uses the channel of that name and creates it if it is missing. Nothing changes for a server that never opens this form. If you pick a channel and later delete it, the bot falls back to the default name rather than posting nowhere — and the form says so.

/sync, /restart and /archive-old-approvals stayed slash commands: they are bot maintenance and a one-off migration rather than parts of running an operation.

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ORBATs

The slot roster, written out on a page instead of kept in a Google Sheet. Manage Server only, under the 🗺️ ORBATs tab.

An ORBAT is a template: the same one is meant to back as many operation nights as you like, which is what duplicating the sheet used to be for. Copy takes the structure and none of the bookings.

Which ORBAT is live is marked in the list with a red 🔴 chip naming the operation running on it — only one can carry it, because a server has one active operation at a time. Opening that ORBAT in the editor says the same thing at the top, since an edit there changes tonight's board, and the Start an operation dropdown on the Operation tab marks it too.

Deleting one is refused while an operation is running on it — say so with /setup-slots for the next operation first. Once it is no longer the live one, deleting takes its squads and slots with it and everybody booked into it comes off the roster, the same as deleting their slot in the editor would.

Renaming and copying. The Name and description form under the editor renames an ORBAT; the description is only ever shown in the list, to tell two similar rosters apart. Duplicate gives you a copy of the squads, slots and nets — and none of the bookings, which is the point: it is how you build next week's roster from this week's without touching the one tonight's operation is running on.

You write the roster as indented text — squad at the left margin, its slots indented under it:

1-0 Platoon HQ  | left
  Platoon Leader
  Platoon Sergeant

1-1 Alpha  | left, unit:TFP, radio:343 CHN:3
  Squad Leader
  Team Leader
  Automatic Rifleman
  Rifleman

Reservists  | right, nocount
  Reserve

Everything after the pipe belongs to the squad, and several options are separated by commas — | left, unit:TFP, radio:343 CHN:3:

• left / right put it in that column of the board
• unit:TFP marks the whole squad as one unit's — the tag is the unit's role name, and you get a warning if it matches none of them
• radio:343 CHN:3 is the channel that squad talks on internally, shown under its name on the board

Leaving a comma out still works — | left unit:TFP is read as both — but the comma is the form to rely on.

• nocount leaves it out of the open/filled counts (what Reservists gets today)

A line starting with # is a comment, and a leading number — 1. Rifleman — is removed, so lines pasted straight out of a sheet work.

Under the roster there is a second, smaller box for the radio nets everyone shares — the platoon net, logistics, air, high command. One per line:

Platoon Net   | 152 CHN : 1
Logi          | 152 CHN : 2
-Air Net      | 152 CHN : 3
High Com Net  | 152 CHN : 4

A line starting with - is a net that exists in the plan but is not in use this time; it shows struck through, the way you would cross it out on paper.

Preview shows the board exactly as Discord would render it, without saving. It also warns you before you hit a limit Discord enforces silently: more than 8 rows of squads, a squad too long for one field, or an embed over 6000 characters. Save writes it.

Editing an ORBAT never quietly drops anyone. Renaming a slot keeps whoever is booked into it; reordering lines changes nothing at all. Anything that would take someone off the roster — or move them onto a differently named role — stops at a confirmation page that names them and which operation they are in, and you have to click Save anyway.

Exporting to a Google Sheet

At the bottom of the editor there is an Export to a Google Sheet form. Paste the sheet's URL and the roster is written into a new tab, named after the ORBAT and the time. An existing tab is never touched, so you cannot overwrite a sheet another operation is running on; a second export with the same name gets a (2) suffix instead of replacing the first.

Tick Include who is booked in to export the current operation's board rather than the empty roster. That only works while the active operation actually runs on this ORBAT.

The layout is the one the bot itself understands — squad header, 1. Squad Leader beside [] <Insert Name> — so the tab looks like the sheets you already keep by hand, and if you ever move it to first position the bot can read it as a sheet-backed operation again.

It is strictly one-way: nothing is read back, no link is stored, and there is no sync. The sheet has to be shared with the service account as an editor, which means this is the one ORBAT feature that does need GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS.

Running an operation on an ORBAT

Once the roster is written, start an operation on it from Discord:

/setup-slots orbat:Platoon ORBAT event_time:14/09/2026 19:00

orbat autocompletes over the ORBATs on your server. From there everything works as it always did — /request-slot, the 📋 Request a Slot button, the approval buttons in #slot-approvals, /assign-slot, /clear-slot — except that no Google Sheet is involved anywhere. The board in #orbat shows each squad's unit and radio channel and the shared net list underneath.

The old way still works: give sheet_url instead of orbat and the operation is sheet-backed exactly as before. You give one or the other, never both.

Two things get better on the ORBAT side. Approving is instant, because there is no spreadsheet to write to and therefore nothing that can fail halfway and need re-approving. And the board no longer re-reads a Google Sheet on every refresh.

Still Discord-side: requesting and approving slots. Clicking a slot on the web page is not built yet, and neither is entering somebody who is not on your Discord.

Limits

• ORBATs can be built here and an operation can run on one, but requesting and approving slots is still Discord-side
• An event can't be moved to another channel after posting; cancel it and create a new one
• Approving slot requests is unchanged and still happens in #slot-approvals

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Local Development

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate   # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env        # fill in your values
python bot.py

You will need a PostgreSQL instance running locally and DATABASE_URL set in your .env — .env.example has an entry for it, since this is the one setup where neither Railway nor docker-compose provides it. No manual command sync is needed — the bot syncs slash commands to all guilds automatically on startup.

To work on the web UI locally, add DISCORD_CLIENT_ID, DISCORD_CLIENT_SECRET and WEB_SECRET_KEY to your .env, leave WEB_BASE_URL empty so the callback URL is taken from the request, and register http://localhost:8080/auth/callback as a redirect URI in the Developer Portal. WEB_PORT changes the port. The bot has to be in a server with you for anything to show up.