Our History
A brief history on our server and community over the years
Last updated
A brief history on our server and community over the years
Last updated
The Marching Band Discord Server was created on the night of July 4th, 2016, but since the bots on the server are all based on UTC, we celebrate our birthday on July 5th. Erik, the server's original owner, had just taken over r/marchingband and wanted to create a Discord community to go along with the subreddit. Soon after, the server began to grow and hit 100 members by October, our first big member count milestone. Soon after, Leo, Poisonchocolate, matt, bayat, and River all became full mods by the end of the year.
In 2016, we had over 137k messages sent and reached 250 members on the server during just those first 6 months of existence.
In January, we introduced our sister server, , the official Discord Server partnered with r/drumcorps. Also in January, the Regular program opened its doors and welcomed our most active members on the server to the new light blue role color! In February, we became official Discord Partners, which came with a super cool hoodie and our neat vanity link that we still have today ().
Also in February, the server underwent some big changes in terms of how the moderator team was structured, along with new controversial changes to the bots we used. These changes angered the moderators and lead to the team resigning out of protest on how Erik was treating the rest of the team. Eventually, Erik decided to take a step back and let the rest of the mod team take more control of the server to make decisions. Leo became the Overseer, which was basically an Admin position, as a result of this. To read more about this specific situation, please see that lays out a full timeline of the events that occurred.
In March, we added awertt and Annika to our mod team, who moved onto becoming full moderators as well. Not much else happened in the first half of the year, especially since that was our first off-season on the server. In July, we celebrated our first birthday as a community! Also in July, matt became Overseer as Leo decided to step down from the position. In September, we added Oliver to our mod team. We also introduced new channels and channel categories, allowing the server look much prettier than it already was. We hit the 500 member mark in September, another big milestone for our growing community. In October, Erik left the server and gave matt ownership of the server as a whole, a position he has held onto since then. In early December, Leo left the server after his long time on the mod team and after being the third person ever on the server. Leo was also the most active member of the server during the first 2 years of existence. Later in the month, we banned a high profile member of the server, Bimps, on Christmas night, who was known for trolling and toxicity, along with constant arguments with the mod team.
In 2017, we had over 362k messages sent and reached 665 members on the server, a 162% increase over 2016's membership count.
The new year brought new changes with it, with our entire rule set being modified into the style that it is today: short, simple, and straight to the point. We also introduced our first ever partnered server (other than Drum Corps), which was the early origins of our Partnership Program that we have today. In April, r/marchingband, our reddit partner, reached the huge milestone of 10k subscribers! Also in April, we reached 800 members on the server. In May, we introduced some new moderators, 44r0n, sapphibee, and baritofu, to our growing team.
In July, we created the for those looking for an anonymous way to reach out to the mod team for assistance. Also in July, we added our #mod-log channel so users could see the actions that our mod team took against rule breakers. We also redesigned our Must Reads category to make it look more like how it appears today. In addition to all that, we finally hit 1k members and released the Regional chats for localized band discussion. In August, Posionchocolate left the mod team after almost 2 years of service to the community. In September and October, we experienced extremely rapid growth, growing by 300 members in just over one month! In November, the server hit 1 million total messages sent, and 500k of those were sent just in 2018 alone up to that point, as well as 1.5k members on the server. In December, we introduced 2 new moderators, Spamakin and Tea_Pawt and welcomed them onto our team. This was the last time we held moderator applications.
In 2018, we had over 577k messages sent and reached 1,673 members on the server, a 251% increase over 2017's membership count.
We started off the new year with a moderator departure from Annika, who had been on the mod team for almost 2 years up to that point. We continued to grow out our partnership program throughout the year, helping 10 servers to grow their member counts. In June, Discord released Nitro Boosting for the first time and we opened up our doors to the Band Boosters program. In August, we hit 2k members on the server and opened up our Class Channels for the first time, allowing directed discussion for members in the same grades as each other. In November, we hit 1.5 million total messages sent on the server.
In 2019, we had over 473k messages sent and reached 2,712 members on the server, a 62% increase over 2018's membership count.
We reached Level 2 of Nitro Boosting thanks to our wonderful Band Boosters helping us out and getting the rest of the server some awesome perks! We also faced COVID-19, which brought a lot of traffic to the server and made 2020's off-season the most active off-season that the server has experienced to date. We closed down the #crushed channel in April after over 3 years of having it open. We also overhauled our role setting system from command-based to reaction-based assignment using bayat-bot. In May, we brought in our new mail bot, mailBot MBD, to give members faster responses. In June, we added a second general channel to help mitigate some of the increased traffic and spam that the server was experiencing. In July, we hit 3k members on the server and released this information center!
In 2020, we had over 856k messages sent and reached 3,074 members on the server, a 13% increase over 2019's membership count.
In January, we welcomed three new moderators, EchoSpark, stomr, and Adolphin, to our mod team. We held Event Nights in January, March, and June to watch a movie and play some online group games. In April, one of our longtime mods, Bari, left the mod team. In July, we celebrated our server's 5th birthday with giveaways and a Mod Team Q&A using Discord Stages. In October, we passed 3 million messages sent in the server, which was only 16 months after we hit 2 million! In December, we opened up the new #sports channel for all sports-related discussion.
In 2021, we had over 955k messages sent and reached 4,026 members on the server, a 31% increase over 2020's membership count.