Meet people where they are, then get the workflow right

The applications were being lost in direct messages. Admins had a spreadsheet, a backlog, and a habit of doing things twice. The obvious move was a web form. The right move was to not build a website at all.

Adoption is a platform question

The community already lived in Discord. Putting the workflow there meant zero onboarding, no new bookmark, and no second place to check. Every feature I could have added to a separate site would have cost more attention than it returned.

1 / 1

Close-up of an old stone step, cracked and worn smooth along the edge

The sequence was the product

1. A form that asks the questions that actually matter, once.
2. A review message with approve and reject, so the decision is one click.
3. A registry that updates itself, so nobody maintains a second list.
4. A result visible in the game, because that is where it counts.

Neither the form nor the button was hard. The work was the order of those steps, and removing every place a human had to remember something.

Automation touching a live world

Once real players' cities depend on a bot, safety stops being stylistic. Every action had to be repeatable, reviewable, and reversible, because the cost of a wrong write is not a bad screen — it is someone's afternoon.

I have built the other kind of tool since: the new site, the new login, the new thing to learn. It is almost always the harder sell.