Introduction

The UEA CS Paper 98 group is primarily a group of computer scientists from UEA. It is well know for producing the UEA CS Paper 98 Discord Server on the 15th of September 2020 A.D.. It was originally setup by Arun Osborn, and is current owner of the server.

Early Era

Before the discord server, the most popular way to communicate about the upcoming course was on the facebook group chat, ran by a student with some sort of official relation to the university. A poll was done to see who should run the group chat and they were elected but the second most popular option went along the lines of "I only use discord bruh", an option made by Arun, primarily to see if there was a discord server, and secondly, to see the demand for one. About a week after this, Arun finally decided to make a discord server. The first few people to join the server got the invitation from this fairly small facebook group chat. Many of these members have the "Cheese Gang" role or "James" role and some were even allowed to become admins just by asking. The server was mostly themed around the James May cheese meme at the time with the icon being the thumbnail for the popular internet video.

The First Great and Bountiful Era

The server became very popular once the first online lecture began as the invitation link was posted in the chat, allowing more than 200 people to see the link, many of which joined. This large and sudden influx in members lead to the "First Great and Bountiful Era". This era was well known for its constant changes and upgrades to better facilitate the communication capabilities to help facilitate learning and socialisation. This was particually important given the circumstances caused by COVID-19. Social events were organised almost immedietly after the first surge occured. For the next couple of online lectures, large influxes of people would join as the invitation link got posted in chat, this was only helped by people needing to be more social online, wanting more help and of course, wanting QR codes. One of the admins setup a bot to convert the qr code image into a link which was and still is used in the #qr-codes channel. Eni and many others would consistently, without fail, ask for the qr code, often leaving soon after. Some people from the UEA CS Paper 98 server were beginning to get fustrated that they were getting qr codes for attendance without actually attending the lectures, so they made there own qr code. A link took them to the dowehavetheqrcodeyet website. Once there, a qr code could be scanned, registering you on the SEX OFFENDERS register by using the same microsoft registration system to make it convincing. At the beginning of this era, it was usual to see 4 and later 5 members watching Death in Paradise, playing CSGO or a couple of other games but as more members joioned the almost daily voice chats, the night's entertainment was diversified. During this era, there was a minecraft realm setup by one of the most active members which around 10 people joined. This became an example of how having a bad admin can hinder the experience and enjoyment as the owner repeatedly cheated for personal gain. Arun used this to show how he was a much better leader to enforce his grip on the server.

Settled Age of Comfort Era

Around halfway through October, growth had began to slow down but more people were regularly joining voice calls, this is the "Settled Age of Comfort Era". Due to many of the active, sociable people on the server all knowing eachother a lot better, there was a call for another election, but this time, current admins could be unelected. This caused mild panic for the admins, including the server owner, Arun, who decided that democracy should be the way forward with the server, even if it meant him losing his power. He created an algorithm to elect a small group of people based on the amount of upvotes and downvotes their comment recieved and shared this on github for all to understand. He ended up getting re-elected along with most of the others from the admin team apart from Jack who was replaced with another Jack from the "Jacking Off" party. A minor change was made to the server with somewhat major effects when Arun decided that you have to have one of the four "Essential Roles" to access the majority of the server channels. These roles were "Maths A", "Maths B", "Buisness" and "Outsider" (originally called "non-computer science"). This meant that more people would be forced to get their roles and this also prompted people to get other roles using Nick's bot called "Botette Chin" but this also lead to many people not used to discord, complaining about not being able to see channels so Arun received many DMs asking how to access the server. Over time this issue was resolved and now, everyone has an "Essential Role" and most people have non-essential roles which meant mentioning groups of people would get more people allowing for more people to know about game sessions or meetups. Eventually this change was liked by many people for these reasons.

The Cold Winter

By mid December, most of the course for 2020 had finished and many members had returned home for Christmas, meaning they were spending much more time with their family and consequently, less time engaging with the server. This lead to "The Cold Winter" where the people regularly online drastically changed. This meant R6S was being played more and there were no more watch parties. It was around this time that a #question-of-the-day channel was suggested which Arun rightfully said belongs in a dead serve but was still implemented due to his love of democracy.
During the dark days when the server was mostly only active in the #general channel, the #question-of-the-day channel looked more and more like a desperate attempt to keep the server alive so Arun, the sole contributer to questions, decided to not prioritise updating the questions. About a week after Christmas Day, activity increased again as people had less time to, or got tired of talking to their families.

One of the most popular events during this time was a quiz night, suggested and made by an active member of the server. The server had many quiet days as some members were talking to their old friends or just too tired to join voice calls so the quiz nights were small, but shining glimmers of what the server had been prior to the cold winter and what it will be once again. A couple more people started joining the server during this time, many of which were friends of people on the server to fill slots in games and just to have more people on the server in general. This was a result of their being not many people active on the server at this time and people wanting to catch up with their old friends outside of University.

The Age of Social Chaos

After a new election was called for by many active members of the server, Arun reluctantly decided to hold one. Little did he know that it would lose him his power. The growing meme culture and want for change for the ssake of change meant lead to some odd results never seen before in an election. On January 31st 2021 at 5pm, Arun announced that he had been voted out, replaced by two new admins, Ben and Jack, as well as the other admins being re-elected. This marked the beginning of a new age. An experimental age where anything could happen. Watch a vide here to find out more.


The proceding day marked the first day of the new semester so the server became much more active, which in turn lead to chaos so the new admins sprang into action. There were some actions made which many considered to be harsh punishment and there was an outcry for the return of Arun, but he just watched as his old server came to terms with the new age. The age that they voted for.

With the new semester came new subjects which meant new lecturers. The legend of Pierre from the Maths A module was seen by everyone in Computing Principles. There was also a huge influx (around 30 people) of new members as more buisness students were invited to the server as they shared many of the modules. There was some backlash from some people with more purist views but adjustments were made to facilitate the buisness modules. In many ways, the server had returned to its previous state, with voice calls for people in common lectures and a highly active general chat. The only key difference was that everyone had now gotten use to eachother and memes about evrything and everyone were being spread, which arguably was the main reason for Arun's loss. Before 4pm the day after the election, Ben was given ownership of the server as a few admins agreed and because he had the highest score of any candidate. Arun's last wish was that there should be another election in April and the candidate with the highest score will become the next owner. It turned out that a few permissions were set wrong for commands, according to the new admin team. This included people with the "Cheese Gang" role being able to honour people giving them the noblemun role for around 3 days. This would then let them pleb anyone they wanted. Arun set this as a test to see if anyone noticed but it was only discovered when Arun used it as a joke and it actually worked. This may have caused suspicion of Arun giving himself additional permissions after he demoted himself and the backdoor command didn't help with this suspicion as it allowed anyone to become admin by doing the command /backdoor although this was assumed to be removed before it was ever used.

Ben hadn't previously taken a strong stance on his views on memes in general so when the issue arrose, he decided to side with the loudest voices, letting them post memes in general, adding a #sh*t-posting channel and many other channels to spread out and divide the conversations. This lead to memes being spammed during particually boring lectures and on the 8th of February 2021, a 6 hour long slowmode was activated in #general as an emergency act to stop the meme spam. This was reduced to 5 seconds but for many people, it was still 6 hours because it wasn't setup correctly. Ben claimed it was a bug. More and more channels were created including #cars, #our-chronological-history (where you can find this article), #computer-stuff and channels for all the games that there are roles for. This brought up complaints, even from within the admin team. To fix the problem of having many channels visible to all the members, roles were added so people could select what they saw.

An incident occured one night during a game of jackbox, where a group of around five people randomly joined the server and the voice call. At first they seemed relatively friendly, asking about which flats people were staying in at UEA but it soon went down hill as some of these people used the f slur, offending some of the gay people in the call. They were warned before Ben kicked them from the server. This was the first incident of hate on the server so rules were quickly written to state that the f slur and n slur were not allowed. This was met with praise however, the bot used to write the rules was changed by a member who wasn't an admin and they also changed a few other rules. Whilst this wasn't negative, some joked about it showing signs of weakness for Ben and a bit of nostalgia was shown for the days of Arun's rule. Having said this Ben has shown a strong stance against bribery. On 20.2.21 several members including admins changed their nicknames and profile pictures to reference "Girugamesh", a hindu god because of a meme. In a way, this sums up this era, where memes dominate all. Another noticable change when compared to the previous era, #question-of-the-day was getting updated much more frequently as Ben commited to making a new question every day without fail, showing is commitment.

By the end of February, the server was still active but the voice channels were empty and with most people still living at home, there were very few events, physical and over the internet. During this time, despite Ben and Arun's rivalry over the server, they still remained close friends, throwing backhanded comments at each other and calling eachother out when they do something the other disagrees with. The ability to allow and have debates with people of all sides of the arguments shows Ben's pro-democratic stance that he has always maintained. At this rate, he'll be debating Ben Shapiro in no time!

In early March, the #q-and-a channel was deleted as it wasn't being used much, deleting all of its history as it use to have another use and name at the server's start. A #music replaced this which was meant to be used to talk about music but is now a spam channel for music no one listens to. Jack Hobby and Lukasz have violated the rules by using the same name and profile picture as well as making the pleebs role the same colour as admin and givng Cameron this role, with the same profile picture and nickname making it impossible to differentiate them without clicking on their profile. On the 18th March, the server ownership was given to Jack Mawer due to internal issues although very few thing changed as a result of this because Jack remained mostly innactive.

Post Easter Era

Once the Easter holidays began, many people were finally going back to university, allowing many people to meet up again after 4 months of seperation. Parties and gatherings were being organised in the #events channel once again! Leadership was essentially given to Jack Mawer after Ben decided to take a break from the server. Jack stated that he wanted to re-organise the server and its catagories but that he was affraid of annoying the users that were accustomed to how it was already layed out. All that Jack did was to get rid of the innactive voice channel.

On the 14th of April, ex-admin Arun decided to invite a few of his friends onto the server to show them what he had previously made. He was expecting them to have a look and then go back to improving their own server but they ended up in a voice call with the Hobster and Arun, and the plague of Wucashade Citrus Chill spread. On the 16th at around 2am, Wucashade died as the members had become tired with having the same profile picture, and after a spam of memes in general,the meme died.

By June, Jack still hadn't made any of the changes he talked about, despite him being a bit more active than he had been in 2021. Jack Hobby got elected by accident and was rumoured to have made Ben's outstanding election video but he didn't beleive he deserved admin so stepped down with no replacement. This is the only time an admin has stepped down by choice during a term.

Finally on July 2nd, Luke was given ownership of the server again and immdedietly started the process of the next admin election which was supposed to happen 3 months prior in April but Jack Mawer who held temporary ownership of the server when Luke had a break, decided to not hold an election, fearing he would lose. In an interesting turn of events, Mawer started getting more votes than Luke despite this. Then on the 7th of July, days after the election was announced, Luke decided to stop using the algorithm and set a percentage of seats for admin instead. He wanted 80% of the candidates to become admins, gaining a seat at the #chamber-of-admins. Brandon then decided to pull out of the election thinking that this would help Arun win, when in fact it made it harder, so he immedietly tried to re-enter but was denied permission by the current admins. Dom was one of the leading candidates saying he would "literally delete the fucking server". The situation was clear, the first election not ran by former leader Arun, had been a mess with all the previous issues of memes accusations of an undemocratic system getting more heated than ever. This update in history probably didn't help either. Arun won the election, finally returning as admin, along with Jack, Luke, Charis and Ish. The system to decide which members become admin wasn't decided upon so Luke decided to give all the people with a score of 11 or more admin, making some people angry that a solid system still hadn't been put in place. However, overall, most people were happy to see a strong and diverse admin team.

The Restart

With the second academic year coming up, Arun took it upon himself and his great new bot Sirius to re-jig the permissions system and also add channels for all the new modules. This potentially risky change was made 20:00 on the 1st September 2021 with suprising success. The discord bot, Sirius (made by Arun and his friend Pablo) would allow people to pick roles for modules and other categeroies very similar to the old system made by Nick's Bottete Chin. His bot was replaced as he became less active over the summer and technically was no longer an admin (despite him not havig the role revoked after not entering the last election). Now when a role was selected by a user, they would get a verified role as well, allowing them into most channels, cleaning up permissions just like Arun promised in his election campaign.

On the 16th September at 1am, discord released the hubs feature which allowed people with school/uni emails to find servers on ran by other people in that school/uni and of course UEA CS - Paper98 was one of these servers, coming in at 2nd biggest and soon reaching 300 members as dozens of members joined through the hub. As well as this, now owner Arun, saw an empty spot to capitalise on in the form of a general UEA server. There was already a "UEA Central" server but the role selection didn't work and didn't let people into any other channels so he made "UEA Central +" (initially called "UEA Plus +") and this overtook the member count of the other server in just over a day.

With the continued lack of activity from Nick who made the Bottete Chin bot and the rising of Sirius taking over the main functions of bots in the server, Jack Mawer decided to make his own bot, "Font". This, of course was vastly inferior to Sirius but it did implement a new QR code scanner that gave the user a button instead of a link to click on ... cause innovation. Arun responded to this new bot by quickly adding the button roles feature so that Jack's Font bot would not take over. Charlie (Jugger) suggested making an anonymous confessions system on the server, similar to the UEA Concrete Confessions facbeook page. This was met with overwelming support and Jack Mawer quickly added a command to his new Font bot which would allow this. This idea was one that Arun had mentioned in his July Manifesto and was pleased to see it finally being implemented after he forgot to do it himself. After an innapropriate confessions was made, Arun implemented a superior confessions system with Sirius that allowed admins to remove confessions before they were posted, taking over from Jack's bot. Jack was also suspended form admin at this time. Around 9 am on the 4th of November, Arun made Charlie, Lukasz and Arvy admins, becoming the first admins to not be democractically elected since the first week of the server's existence. This decision was made after careful consideration over the period of a week. The admins and active people on the server seemed to be happy with this decision.

The Third Year

Everything plodded along. The comp sci community stayed fragmented. Groups keeping to themselves. Looks like someone changed the variable to a constant...
After the half way point of the year, more and more people started asking how good certain year 3 modules were and this, combined with talk about the university in general made up the majority of the chat in general. #confessions were getting fewer and further between but were still being used and the #memes channel was still being used frequently.