Quorum — decisions that close themselves

/quorum puts a yes/no question to a server with one command. The question closes itself at a deadline, posts a RESULT card naming an owner and a due date, and nudges that owner once when the date arrives. Below quorum it says "no quorum" instead of declaring a winner. The gap it fills over Discord's native polls is the self-close, the quorum rule, and the posted, owned result.

Filed as spacebot#84.

Commands

Crew is anyone with Manage Server or Manage Messages. Administrators always qualify. The built-in's own enable/disable and permission gate come from the usual built-in command override (Server Settings → Commands), like /room.

/quorum reaches a server by itself: the minute command sync notices the server's command list changed and pushes it (see Command sync). Saving a command or pressing Register on the server's admin page does it at once.

The round

1. ask writes the question row and replies with the card as the interaction's own message, so the channel shows who asked. The reply goes back at once; the card's message id is fetched afterwards via the webhook's @original and the card is pinned (waitUntil).
2. A button press records the vote and answers with UPDATE_MESSAGE, so the bar and counts change inside the same round trip. A second press changes the vote. Counts are recomputed from the vote rows on every press, so they always sum to the votes cast.
3. The minute sweep (sweep_quorum, a superadmin workflow preset beside the room reaper) closes anything past its deadline: it freezes the counts, deletes the vote rows, nulls the salt, disables the card's buttons, unpins it, posts the RESULT card, and mirrors it to the announce channel if one is set.
4. At the due date the sweep posts one "done?" in the channel the question was asked in, with Done / Not yet buttons the owner or Crew can press. An unanswered nudge goes stale after three days. There is no DM in this step.

"Remind me before close" is the one DM: a member who pressed it gets a message 15 minutes before the deadline. Those ids are kept only until the reminders go out.

Doing it automatically

This is off by default. The server owner turns it on, server-wide, with /quorum settings auto_actions:True (and off again with False); nobody else can change it. Until then ask refuses then. The switch is read again when the question closes, so turning it off stops a question already in flight: it posts that it passed but nothing was created.

ask takes three more options for questions like "should we make this voice channel?":

• then — what to do if it passes: Create a voice channel or Create a text channel.
• name — what to call it (text channels become lowercase-with-hyphens).
• if_yes — how far yes must win, as a percent of the yes and no votes, from 51 to 100 (default 66). Abstentions count toward quorum but not toward this.

When the question closes, the channel is made only if quorum was reached and yes met if_yes. The channel goes in the same category as the channel the question was asked in. The bot then says what happened in the channel and the RESULT card's Then line is updated: done (with a link), not done (it needed N% yes and quorum), or passed, but it could not be done if Discord refused — usually the bot lacks Manage Channels. A failure is never silent, and it is not retried.

Because this changes the server by itself, on top of the owner's switch only a member with Manage Channels (or Administrator) can attach then, and a protected class is still refused. The action runs at the close, so an owner veto afterwards marks the decision vetoed but does not undo a channel that was already made. Three choices worth knowing: the card shows the rule while the question is open, so voters know what a yes does; the exact math is integer (2 of 3 yes is 66.67%, which clears 66 and not 67); and the vote is counts only, so nothing about who voted is used or kept.

Privacy

The database holds counts, never who voted.

• While a question is open, quorum_votes holds HMAC-SHA256(salt, user_id) with the current choice. The salt is per question and random.
• On close the vote rows are deleted and the salt is set to NULL, so the hashes could not be recomputed even if the rows had survived.
• quorum_reminders holds user ids for the reminder DM only — a thing the member asked for, unrelated to how they voted — and is emptied as the DMs go out, or on close.
• Nothing in the event log ties a user to a choice. The gateway's generic BUTTON_CLICK log records that a button was pressed, which it does for every button in every bot; the custom id names the question, not the choice's effect on any count. (Note that custom_id does contain the choice word. Servers that want zero trace should turn off button-click logging; this is the one place the choice passes through a log.)

Results

A RESULT card always carries Decision, Owner and Due. Its footer is the server's configured wording, "Advisory to the server owner" by default, so no vote reads as binding on the owner. Below quorum the decision is "No quorum"; a tie is "Tie — no result". Abstentions count toward quorum but not toward the decision.

Protected classes and veto

Some questions are never opened. class on ask tags the question, and a class in the server's protected list — owner-only, money, access, legal by default — is refused with an ephemeral "this is an owner decision". Crew edit the list with /quorum settings protect:; the owner can lock: it.

Vetoing after the fact is for the rare case. It is declared up front (the footer), public and reasoned (the reason is posted on the result and kept in the log), and owner-only.

Tables (migrations 0069, 0072)

• quorum_questions — one row per question, open or settled: counts, timing, owner, status, result, follow-up state, and the result message id.
• quorum_votes — the uniqueness check while open. Gone on close.
• quorum_reminders — who asked for the reminder DM. Gone once sent.
• quorum_settings — per channel, with channel_id = '' as the guild default.
• quorum_questions.auto_* (0072) — the action, its channel name and threshold, its outcome, and the channel it made.

Code: src/lib/server/quorum.ts (commands, buttons, cards, the sweep), wired from the interactions route and the cron route. Tests: src/tests/quorum.test.ts run against the real migration in SQLite.