Before I begin, here's a sort of "timeline" of events leading up to this suggestion for context.
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In November 2020, @"Telesphoreo"#36 created a suggestion to implement a panel. After a heated showdown between Ryan and Packs, the suggestion was denied likely because there were more important matters on hand.
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In March 2021, I created a suggestion to revisit Packs' suggestion. In my suggestion, I justified implementing it by noting that relying on a Discord bot to control everything is not only a bad idea, but also a potential security hazard. The suggestion was approved in April 2021, but it was considered a low priority.
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In May 2021, after the Discord bot went down temporarily I asked that we prioritize getting a panel in internal development channels. It resulted in an argument in which I questioned the reliability of Discord as a service in both stability and security for the long term. Other developers assured me that Discord was a reliable service, but I stood firm. Later in the argument, I questioned why we had to wait until the worst case scenario to happen to do something. The argument went nowhere, and getting a panel remained a low priority.
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In August 2021, the reliability of Discord as a service as a whole was put to the ultimate test when the Discord server was wiped through a security issue regarding the TotalFreedom bot and we needed to restore from a backup, which turned out to not exist. As I predicted, it failed miserably. Not only that, but for a period of time after the wipe, we had no way to stop and start the server in the event it went down or something broke that required a restart to fix, since the Discord bot was banned from the server and no alternative was provided for a while.
The writing is on the wall. A panel would not only be a much cleaner solution than the unstable implementation (which has proven time and time again to be unreliable) we have now, but also provide multiple large benefits in terms of security, maintainability, and stability. People have been asking and patiently waiting for a panel since November of last year. Guess what? It's August 2021 now and nothing has changed. People (including myself) are growing increasingly impatient. We've been running into issue after issue regarding the Discord bot, many of which could be avoided using a simple panel.
This suggestion is not a reiteration of the previous suggestion, but a suggestion to make getting a panel a higher priority. It's time we put this issue to rest once and for all by implementing a panel.