A session is any scheduled thing your group runs: a shift, a training, a meeting, a raid. Evalyn tracks when it is, who is running it, who turned up, and what state it is in.
The three things you can rename
Almost every group means something slightly different by "session". Rather than force one vocabulary, Evalyn lets you define your own in Settings → Features → Sessions.
Types
What kind of thing is being scheduled. You start with Shift, Training and Other. Add, rename or remove them freely.
Each type also carries two optional Discord ids — a board channel and a ping role — which is how sessions get routed to different channels. See Sessions in Discord.
Roles
The jobs people take on a session: Host, Co-Host, Trainer, Helper. Each role has a number of slots, which is how many people can hold it at once. A session can open fewer or more slots than the default when you create it.
The rule that matters: one person holds one role per session. Someone who has claimed Host cannot also claim Helper until they unclaim. This is enforced on the server, not just hidden in the interface, so a second browser tab will not get round it.
Statuses
The states a session moves through — Scheduled, Delayed, In Progress, Completed, Cancelled by default.
Each status has a behaviour next to it, and this is the part to understand:
| Behaviour | What it means |
|---|---|
| Upcoming | Nothing has happened yet. |
| Running now | Stamps the session's start time. |
| Finished | Stamps the end time. |
| Called off | Stamps the end time, and the Discord board keeps showing it for four hours. |
The label is yours to change; the behaviour is what Evalyn acts on. That split is deliberate. If renaming "Scheduled" to "Planned" also changed the behaviour, your sessions would quietly stop being able to start. Rename whatever you like — the behaviour dropdown is what decides what happens.
Three statuses can be renamed but not deleted: Scheduled, In Progress and Completed. Too much of the product refers to them, and a finished session with nowhere to go is not a state worth allowing.
Creating a session
Sessions → Create Session. Set a title, pick a type, choose a date and time, and tick the roles you want to open. Every configured role is ticked by default with its normal slot count, because that is what most groups want; untick anything this session does not need.
The time you type is your own local time. Evalyn converts it to a real instant before storing it, so someone in another timezone sees the same moment rather than the same clock reading.
Claiming a role
Anyone in the workspace opens a session and clicks Claim next to a role with a free slot. To move to a different role, unclaim the first one.
Managers — anyone with the manage_sessions permission — can remove someone else from a slot.
If two people claim the last Helper slot at the same instant, exactly one wins and the other is told the slot just went. Nobody gets silently overwritten.
Changing status
Managers can move a session to any status you have configured, from the session's detail panel. Everyone subscribed to that session gets a direct message describing the change in your own wording, so a session you renamed "Postponed" says "Session postponed".
Registering versus claiming
These are different, and the difference confuses people:
- Claiming a role means you are running part of the session. It occupies a slot.
- Registering means you are attending. It counts toward the session's participant limit.
You can do both.