Conwaylife Lounge

The Conwaylife Lounge is a Discord server founded in September 2017 by user M. I. Wright of the conwaylife.com forums as a place for casual discussion and investigation into cellular automata such as Conway's Game of Life. As of the time of writing (May 2021), it has 13 discussion channels, including 8 specifically for cellular automata (as well as several non-discussion channels and a voice channel), and enjoys a highly active userbase, seeing hundreds to thousands of posts per day. It retains a very close relationship with the conwaylife.com forums, with most members who are active on the server having accounts on the forums and to some extent vice versa.

Accidental deletion
Following the server's founding, a small but dedicated base of users grew over the course of a month and the server saw steady activity. In October 2017, about a month after the server's founding, a user named ...#7290 gained access to the server bot Caterer through a publicly revealed token and deleted all channels and banned all users, resulting in the loss of a number of patterns and cellular automata (most notably in the 2-state isotropic non-totalistic range-1 Moore rulespace) that had been discovered over the prior month. Wright (whose Discord username has changed several times in the years since) reinstated the server and unbanned all users, and the community recovered and continued to thrive.

Channels
At the time of the server's founding, Wright had set up 7 discussion channels:


 * #general-discussion
 * #questions-help
 * #cgol (for Conway's Game of Life)
 * #other-ca: (for other cellular automata)
 * #other-math:
 * #off-topic:
 * #sandbox: (a spam channel)

In addition to these, a #rules channel and an #announcements channel also existed. Between 2017 and mid-2019, several changes had been made to that list, including deleting #questions-help due to inactivity and creating a more specific #tools channel for discussing search programs (and directing other types of questions to other channels), deleting #sandbox and adding a similar #bots-and-mute-this for memes and spam, adding a #starboard channel associated with the bot Dinny to compile popular messages, adding a #general-theory channel, adding an #info channel with a permanent invite link to the server, adding a #programming channel, and, notably, splitting up #other-ca into two channels, #naturalistic and #synthetic. The voice channel "boice" was added at some point likely in early 2020, and the corresponding #boice-text channel was created on April 1st of that year. On January 1st, 2021, following a long and often heated community discussion about the ambiguous definitions of the #naturalistic and #synthetic channels, #synthetic was renamed to #circuitry, #naturalistic was explicitly defined as being for brathic rules (Generations/weighted higher-range outer-totalistic cellular automata, implicitly understood to have two states), and a new #misc-ca channel was added for any cellular automata that did not fit the other two. A #music channel was created in February of that year to divert discussion of music from #off-topic. In March of that year further disagreements arose over widely disparate types of cellular automata (multiple-neighborhood cellular automata and three-state variants of Conway's Game of Life) both being posted in #misc-ca, and, following discussion in the temporary #channel-debate channel, #exotic-ca was created to house cellular automata with unusual/continuous neighborhoods or state values.

Moderation
Since the server's founding, Wright has been its owner and admin, although he has only been intermittently active in recent years. Until May 2018, Wright was the only member with moderation powers (not counting bots), with occasional tempmod stints by user Dani, but due to inactivity Wright designated Dani and Blinkerspawn as permanent moderators on the first of that month. Wright retained the sole admin role until, due to a long period of absence, during which Caterer was experiencing intermittent outages that could not be fixed by anyone but an admin, Dani was promoted to admin status in July 2019, although Wright retained ownership of the server.[Citation needed] In January 2021, KittyTac was brought on as an additional moderator due to a need to diversify time zones within the moderation team. Both Wright and Dani have changed usernames (and in Dani's case accounts) several times over the server's history.

The server has had several modbots over the years, primarily Caterer (a custom-written cellular automata bot that notably is capable of producing gifs for patterns posted in rle format in the server) and Dinny (a general-purpose and moderation-oriented bot known as R. Danny outside the Conwaylife Lounge server, with the additional function of managing the #starboard channel). In addition to those, several color role bots have been present over the server's existence, including Frog (custom-written, with several additional, frivolous commands), JColour, and the current (as of May 2021) Lexa. In July 2019, the same events that led to Dani's elevation to admin status (Caterer's intermittent outages due to a change in Heroku's monthly hour cap system) led to a reshuffling of server modbots, with Caterer's hour cap increased drastically and Frog taken near-permanently offline to compensate. JColour became the replacement color role bot; however, in December it went indefinitely offline due to its creator's unwillingness to update it, causing Lexa to become its replacement; since JColour used a unique naming convention for its color roles, users were unable to remove those roles, and many users still have legacy JColour roles today in addition to Lexa's color roles. An additional modbot, xp3_4hh186z07#9598, is an infrequently used clone of Caterer with extra moderation powers that is almost always offline.

Related communities
The Conwaylife Lounge Discord server is affiliated closely with two other communities, the conwaylife.com forums and LifeWiki, with both of which it shares a large segment of its userbase. Patterns, rules, and other ideas developed on the Discord server are regularly posted on the forums by shared users and vice versa. Many discoveries discussed mainly on the server have met LifeWiki's notability guidelines, so server posts are regularly cited there; the Caterer bot also has a !wiki command which automatically links to LifeWiki articles of a given name.

While the server is not officially affiliated with Catagolue, the owner of Catagolue, Adam P. Goucher, regularly posts in the server, and many server users are regular Catagolue contributors. The head moderator of the subreddit r/cellular_automata, slackermanz, is also very active in the server, although there is again no official affiliation; however, in general there is fairly little crossover between the communities, as they tend to have different interests within the larger field. The Esolangs Discord server is linked in the #announcements channel as part of a 2018 attempt at linking the two communities, but as the Conwaylife Lounge has increased in size the degree of crossover has diminished greatly.

The Conwaylife Lounge has spawned many spinoff communities over the years for various niche subjects that saw enough activity in the #off-topic or #bots-and-mute-this channels to warrant a whole server. These include mathematical communities (Discord's OEIS, Collatz Server™️), game-related servers (Unorthodox chess server, Unofficial Tileworld Server, hex-guess.tournament, Conway Multiplayer), alternate universe or worldbuilding projects (Alt Universe, CAnlang/markoverse server, Typo Chem), Google Forms servers (Gügilførmsürvür, Test Form ω), ban evasion servers (ConwayDeath Lounge), and a few others.[Citation needed] Most are fairly inactive. Significant overlap also exists with several independent conlang (constructed language) servers, including Conlang Critic and 8th Conlangia, as well as miscellaneous or personal servers such as Heav Server, [placeholder name], and several bot test servers, including for the Scholar gliderdb access bot and user wwei's Search results bot.