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Instance notices: tell your community when an instance opens

Instance notices are the community-facing counterpart to the open instances panel. Where the panel is a live list your members can glance at, a notice is a push: when someone opens a group instance, LogDog posts one message about it to a channel you choose, optionally pinging a role, and then keeps that same message honest as the night goes on.

What a notice looks like

  • The world picture, big, so the post reads at a glance.
  • A title like A new VRChat instance is open - The Black Cat, then a row of fields: who opened it and the access type (Group Public, Group+, Members Only), with an Age restricted field when the instance is 18+.
  • A Players field. It reads "Just opened" until LogDog's first instance check, then the live number (for example 17/32), updated as people come and go.
  • An Open in VRChat button that launches straight into the instance.

When the instance goes away, the same message is edited: the title becomes Instance closed - The Black Cat, the colour goes grey, the button is removed, and the Players field gives way to Open for and Peak players. Nothing new is posted, so the channel never fills with stale "come join" messages.

Setting it up

In Discord, run /config and pick Instance Notices; on the dashboard, open Settings and expand Instance notices. Both offer the same controls:

Setting What it does
Channel The text channel notices post to. Required before enabling.
Roles to ping Up to five roles mentioned above each notice. None by default.
Announce Every group instance (default), or only Public and Group+ ones. Members find members-only instances on the panel.
Join links Show or hide the Open in VRChat button.
Live player count Keep the Players line updated while the instance is open.
Mark closed Edit the post to its closed state when the instance goes away.

LogDog needs View Channel, Send Messages and Embed Links in the notice channel.

How LogDog knows

Opening shows up in your group's VRChat audit log, which LogDog reads about every ten minutes, so a notice lands within about ten minutes of the instance opening. Closing is different: VRChat rarely logs it, so LogDog uses its own instance checks instead. Once an instance stops appearing in a check, the notice is marked closed, usually within ten to twenty minutes of the last player leaving.

A few guards keep the channel calm:

  • The same world is not announced again within ten minutes (an opener who closes and recreates an instance does not double-post).
  • An instance that briefly drops out of a check and comes back reopens its original message instead of posting a new one.
  • Instances from before LogDog was watching, or from a backlog after an outage, are never announced.

Premium

Premium servers can customize the notice and its timing:

  • Title template, where {world} becomes the world name.
  • Blurb: a line of your own under the details.
  • Colour and an image that replaces the world picture.
  • Post once N players are in: hold the notice until LogDog counts that many players, so the ping means "something is happening" rather than "someone clicked open".

Free servers get the notice itself, the channel, pings and every toggle above.