#general (January 15, 2020) is an announcements channel with the send-permission enabled for @everyone. It is currently the de facto group chat for Andref.

#general began as a test channel by Yuto for developing bots on Discord. However, due to his lack of experience interacting with developer APIs, the test bot only succeeded at a basic ping-pong test example. This bot user is the same bot that later became YutoBot.

Yuto experimented with the MatterBridge protocol for bridging Discord with other platforms, but this experiment also failed due to lack of developer experience.

Development with YutoBot continued. Simultaneously, the first instance of west-1 afforded the use of DiscordSRV, a popular Minecraft server plugin for bridging the chat in Minecraft with Discord. This instance of DiscordSRV used the YutoBot bot user for status updates and system information.

During the remote semesters, #general became the default group chat for communication in Andref.

In early 2021, once Andref gained the announcements channel feature, #general was quickly converted into an announcements channel while keeping the send-permission enabled for @everyone. To see announced messages, an announcements channel subscription was added to #luigi.

#general now is an effective public chat room for posting interesting content and messages.