AoC: Use a forum channel for per-day spoiler discussion

[janine9vn]

#19 needs to be merged first.

I'd like to use a Forum Channel for per-day spoiler-friendly discussions. It's a better user experience than alternatives.

Update

With the changes to AoC for 2025 and forward, this issue is significantly simplified. The following needs to be done:

• Read for channel id for an existing forum channel
• With that forum channel, at midnight US eastern, open a new thread for the challenge that was just released.
• First post and the description in the channel should include the following:
  • Link to relevant challenge
  • Indicate this forum channel is a spoilers-welcome zone. If you don't want to be spoiled then go somewhere else, etc etc
  • (Optional) short description of puzzle, maybe the first paragraph? I dunno, up to implementer-discretion.

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The Basics

Ideally, what I would like is:

• Per-day thread is created at midnight or shortly before, locked to everyone (except Events Lead (& Admins))
• Bot posts a link to the current puzzle, possible pulling a short description as the first message/an embed (see Revival of Code for inspiration)
• There should be a command to unlock the thread that is role-locked to Mods/Events Team
• Optionally/potentially/maybe, the bot can check to see when the global leaderboard is filled and then auto-unlock the thread (needs more discussion, see below)

Considerations

I'm hesitant to have the bot auto-unlock the thread, because it would require continually checking to see when the global leaderboard fills up. This can unnecessarily contribute to the extreme amount of traffic the Advent of Code websites receives. I'd be curious to see what others think.

The exact role(s) that the thread-unlock command should be available to is TBD. It may be just Admins & Event Lead, it may include Mods, it may be Events Team. Internal discussion needs to happen first.

For testing and implementing this, I am offering my personal testing server which has Forum Channels enabled and available to use. If you need an invite and perms DM me on discord.

[D0rs4n]

It's been a while since we discussed it on Discord, but as a potentional solution, we could probably wait like an hour after puzzle release, and incrementing this as we proceed in AoC? This way we don't have to send requests to check the leaderboard. (Avoiding unnecessary requests to AoC servers when the traffic is rather high)

[onerandomusername]

Global leaderboard no longer exists, so this thread can be created at exactly 0500 and opened to conversation.

[onerandomusername]

I am interested in implementing this, once a new decision regarding implementation around a lack of a global leaderboard is decided