Half of Discord's friction is not knowing whether someone is actually around. You ping them, wait, ping again, wonder if you said something wrong. An AFK command removes the guesswork: people mark themselves away, and everyone else gets told.
Set it, with an end in sight
A member runs /afk set with an optional reason — "dinner", "in class", "on a call" — and they're marked away. If they know how long, they add a duration: 2h, 3d, 1w. No dates to type; the bot counts forward from now. The AFK docs list every accepted format.
Anyone who pings gets a heads-up
When someone mentions an away member, CloudMod replies with a short note: their reason, and — if they gave a duration — when they're back. No more sending three messages into the void. If they've set a timezone, the note also says what time it is where they are, which is often the part that actually settles whether a reply is coming tonight.
Short absences clear themselves. Long ones don't.
Step away for an hour and posting again clears your status — that's what "back in a minute" means, and it's the behaviour people expect.
Book two weeks off, though, and one message from your phone shouldn't undo it. From a day upwards, the status stays: you get a quiet reminder that you're still marked away, and /afk back ends it when you actually return.
The line is drawn on the duration you declared, not the time left — so a two-week absence still behaves like one on its final day.
Nothing lingers forever
Every entry expires. A duration you set runs out on time; a plain /afk set expires after 30 days. That matters more than it sounds: /afk list shows everyone currently away, sorted by who's back soonest, and a list full of people who left the server months ago is worse than no list at all.
There's also /afk info @user — checking whether one person is around without pinging them, which is otherwise the only way to find out and defeats the point.
A note on Alpha
Away & Timezone is an Alpha plugin — fully usable, just newer than our stable features, so if anything feels off, that feedback moves it to stable.