Running your first event

Everyone signs in with Discord — there are no passwords. The first admin is the owner, whoever created the clan; after that, an admin promotes people from People → Staff & roles. Roles stack downward: everything a moderator can do, a treasurer and an admin can do too.

Two of those roles have a page of their own: On the rota for what a moderator actually does with their evening, and Fees and payouts for the treasurer.

Settings → Finish setup is a short wizard (it stays in the menu until you’re done), and the dashboard keeps a five-step checklist until it’s done: name the clan, connect Discord, load your members, create an event, add tiles. Status is computed from real data, so a step only ticks when it’s genuinely finished.

For Discord you have two routes, and they compose: give Anvil a bot and it can create webhooks, sync roles and nicknames, and build private team channels for you; give it a single webhook URL and it can post announcements and nothing else. Start with the webhook if you want to be live in two minutes, add the bot when you want the automation.

On a hosted plan you met that screen once already: adding the bot during setup is how Anvil learned which server is yours, so there was never a server ID to copy. The same link is here whenever you want to move the bot to a different server.

Everything posts to one catch-all channel by default. When that gets noisy, open Discord → What goes where and give the loud categories their own homes — event posts, weekly competitions, rare drops, deaths, PvP kills, combat achievements. Anything left blank falls back to its catch-all, so you can split one category at a time.

With the bot connected you never touch a webhook URL: pick a channel from the row’s dropdown and it saves. On a busy event you can add a second webhook with Add another under Post without a bot — Anvil rotates between them so Discord’s rate limit doesn’t swallow posts.

Clan membership comes from one place: an in-game roster sync. Install the Anvil RuneLite plugin on an admin’s account, open your in-game clan window, and press the Anvil button in its title bar. That pushes your actual in-game clan list to the site in one click.

Signing in, linking a character or playing with the plugin never puts anyone on the roster. If the plugin sees someone playing in your in-game clan before the roster has them, it files a join request; anyone else can ask with Apply on your clan page. Staff answer requests at the top of People → Roster, and People → Who can join decides whether people wait for a yes, get a guest seat straight away, or cannot ask at all. That’s deliberate: nobody joins your clan by typing its name. The whole picture is in Your people.

You can also add someone by hand from People → + Add Manually, and sign them up to an event on their behalf with Add member on the event’s Sign-ups page when they can’t reach the site.

Events → All events → + New event. Pick a format first — it decides how the board is scored and what the rest of the form asks you for.

Then set the dates, the sign-up window, and whether sign-ups carry a fee. Start from a template if you’d rather not start from an empty grid — the gallery holds both the built-in presets and any board you’ve saved as a template before.

Format is only half the decision — how tiles become playable is the other half, and the two compose. Both in full: Formats, and how tiles open.

The event’s Board & tiles page is where a board becomes a bingo. Each tile is one kind of task, and the kind decides what the plugin watches for: a drop, a boss kill-count, skill XP, an NPC kill, a timed clear, an achievement diary, a Combat Achievement, a collection-log unlock, a PvP kill, an inventory gain, or a deathless run. Manual tiles — the ones a human verifies from a screenshot — are always an option too.

For a full board, author in bulk: export the sheet, fill it in a spreadsheet, and import it back. CSV and .xlsx both round-trip, and rows map to positions, so you can rewrite a whole 25-tile grid in one paste.

Which kind to reach for, how to write two hundred of them in a spreadsheet, and the mistakes that import cleanly and then never fire: Building a board that tracks itself.

The Teams & draft page adapts to the format you chose: a format that doesn’t use teams skips straight past it. For a normal team bingo you create the teams, decide who captains them, and either assign players yourself or run a live draft.

Captains draft from the sign-up pool in your chosen order, and each captain sees the answers people gave on the sign-up form — frozen as they were submitted, so nobody edits their “hours per week” after being picked.

You don’t have to draft. Team placement, on the create form and the Sign-ups tab, decides where each new sign-up lands:

Send your captains the captain’s guide before draft night — the war room is most useful in the days before, and nobody reads a new screen while a clock is running.

Playing another clan rather than drafting your own? A visiting side fields its own roster through one link, and their moderator runs it without an admin account here — see Hosting a visiting clan.

Reveal the tiles, then start the event. Anvil refuses to start a board that isn’t ready — a draft still in progress, or players with no team — and tells you which. If you know better (a scrim, a re-run, a board you’re testing), you can force it.

From then on it mostly runs itself. The plugin auto-credits everything it can see and posts proof screenshots stamped with the team and a UTC timestamp. What lands in your lap is:

When the clock runs out the board freezes and the event locks — points, contributions and who-did-what are all frozen as they stood. If you need to fix something afterwards, an admin can unlock it deliberately.

Then point your members at the player setup guide and start planning the next one.

Switch on Post-event survey under Features, then open the event’s Survey page.

Under Build, add questions: Rating (1–5), Free text, Choose one or Choose many, each optionally Required. Or load a template: Bingo wrap-up, Quick pulse, PvM mass, Raid team or Skilling / social. Preview the participant view shows it as a player will.

It opens when the event ends, to approved participants only, and they can change their answers later. Results shows answers By question or By person. It is not anonymous: staff see who said what.