Marshal's Lab

What it is

Marshal's Lab is a channel that shows up on its own, without warning, and then deletes itself. Marshal treats it as his own room and everyone who walks in as an intruder. It is off unless an administrator turns it on.

• How often it turns up depends on how quiet the server has been. Marshal gets restless while nothing is happening, and a room is how that comes out: a busy week gets one now and then, a dead week gets one most nights. Opening a room settles him for a while, so the next one takes time to build back up. Which days, and when, is never announced and never the same.
• One room at a time, and once one closes a set stretch has to pass before another can even be considered. There is no daily allowance either way: a dead stretch can land two in one evening, a busy one can go weeks without any.
• How long it stays open is drawn fresh every time, between a shortest and a longest the server's administrators set (45 minutes to two hours by default), leaning longer when the server has been quiet. It closes when its window is up, whatever is happening in it.
• When it closes, the channel is deleted, along with everything posted in it. Nothing is archived and there is no undo.
• Nothing announces it. No ping, no post, no @everyone. The unread dot in the sidebar is the whole announcement.

He answers without being asked

This is the one channel where Marshal replies to things that were not aimed at him. He does not answer everything: he reads the room and picks, and the busier the room gets the quieter he becomes. Expect emoji reactions far more often than sentences.

Messages you send in the Lab may be sent to the service that writes his replies even when they were not aimed at him. That is what makes the room the exception: it is the one place where chat reaches that service without anybody speaking to him first. Everywhere else, recent channel context rides along only when somebody actually addresses him. A directed message inside a live Lab uses this same Lab context path, so a ping does not lose the room around it.

The room window is held in memory rather than written down. Background lines are capped short, while the one selected reply target is allowed to run longer so its ending survives. Once a target is selected, the reply keeps that exact room snapshot and target instead of shifting when newer chatter arrives.

Your username and user ID are never sent. Mention tokens never expand into usernames, channel names, or role names. Speakers use a safe display name when one is available; a missing or colliding name gets a room-local stand-in like "Member B" that means nothing elsewhere. Lines age out on a short timer, a restart clears them completely, and member or server departure scrubs the matching context. What gets sent is used for that one reply and nothing else. The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

He will not do his job in there. Rules questions, timers, role pickers, and appeals all get sent back outside, where he is pleasant.

What he can do in the room

• Delete a message. He marks it with 🗑️ first and waits several seconds before it goes, so you can see it coming.
• Take a media post, occasionally, with the same poof grammar as a flash channel.
• Silence someone, temporarily: your Send Messages permission in that channel only. The live setting controls the duration ladder, and every silence lifts on its own or when the room closes.

None of this is moderation. There is no warning, no strike, no mod-log entry, and nothing follows you out of the room. Your other channels are untouched the whole time.

He also gives things back: a nod of approval on a message he likes (three of those and he leaves you alone for the rest of the room), and a pin for a line that lands, kept until the room itself goes.

The house rules, and sitting one out

The house rules are posted and pinned the moment the room opens, so they are the first message in an otherwise empty channel and reachable from the header at any depth of scroll. They stay short: whose room it is, and that its mutes and removals are channel-local rather than moderation. What is this? on that message hands you the full text back privately, any time you want it again.

There is no safe word, no button that opts you out, and no button that ends a silence early. The room is not a standing feature, it is temporary furniture: it appears, it runs its course, and it deletes itself. Sitting one out is exactly like sitting out any other channel you would rather skip, just ignore it while it is open. Nobody keeps a record of who did.

The one thing that still gets a response on its own is real distress. If something you post reads that way, Marshal quietly steps back rather than joking, without asking and without announcing it to the room. Marshal never DMs anyone about this feature, so this page and the pinned house rules are where the answers live.

One honest note

The channel is deleted, but messages posted in it are still counted the same way messages anywhere else are: the bot keeps message metadata (IDs and flags, never text or files) and those records survive the channel, so Lab messages still count toward server activity totals. Deleting the room does not erase that. See the Privacy Policy for what the message index holds.