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.
• Usually at most one a day, and on a very quiet day possibly a second one later on, with a good gap in between. Administrators can cap it at one.
• 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 toward the longer end 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, which no other channel does. Your username, your user ID, and the channel name are never sent. Speakers are labelled with the display name the channel already shows, the same as anywhere else he replies; anyone he has no display name for gets a placeholder like "Member B" that means nothing outside that one room. Use the safe word or opt out and neither your words nor your name are sent at all. It is used for that one reply and never stored. 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, briefly: your Send Messages permission in that channel only, for a few minutes at most, and never past the room's closing.

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), a pin for a line that lands, and the occasional deletion of his own message when yours out-reacts it.

The thing on the bench

The room's sticky, the house-rules message that stays at the bottom of the channel, carries one button, and he tells you not to press it. It works seven times per room and then it is dead for good. Whatever it does, it does to the person who pressed it and to nobody else.

Marshal will not tell you what it does. In the room he plays it as something unfinished he left lying about, so the lines you get are atmosphere rather than instructions. This page is the honest version, and it is the whole of it:

• The first three presses cost nobody anything: the room renames itself to something worse, then his own most recent message gets the 🗑️ and is deleted in front of everyone, then one press where nothing whatsoever happens.
• The fourth puts a 🗑️ on the presser's newest message and leaves it there. Nothing is deleted.
• The fifth deletes the presser's newest message. This is the one time in the whole feature there is no 🗑️ warning first, because they asked.
• The sixth deletes their two newest, both marked first.
• The seventh takes their Send Messages in that channel for a few minutes, and the button dies with a "You broke it".

Every press that reaches a member goes through the same checks everything else in the room does, so it does nothing at all to anyone who has used the safe word, pressed Safelight, or opted out for good, and it cannot silence a moderator. If it does nothing when you press it, he will say so and he will not say why: one of the reasons is a protection that naming out loud would give away.

One member cannot walk the whole thing on their own. There is a minute between any one person's presses, and the room's ordinary fairness limits apply on top of that, so the button gets spent across several people and a stretch of time rather than by whoever clicks fastest.

Getting out

A silenced member can still press a button and still run a slash command, because losing Send Messages stops neither. Every route below survives being muted.

• Safelight, on the room's sticky, makes Marshal leave you alone for the rest of that room. It is never refused, never rate limited, and never rolled against his mood. Typing the safe word does exactly the same thing.
• What is this?, beside it, hands you the full house rules privately at any time.
• Apologize is the way out of a silence early. It is attached to the message announcing the silence rather than to the sticky, so it is sitting right there when it becomes relevant.
• The Marshal's Lab entry on the /marshal menu opts you out of every future room, permanently, and toggles it back off if you change your mind. It works from anywhere, including when no room is open at all.

The sticky is not a pin: it is kept at the bottom of the channel, so it is always the last thing in the room and stays readable the whole time. Marshal never DMs anyone about this feature, so if something is confusing, that sticky and this page 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.