New Discord server advice

One of the more common questions I get asked by others as an admin of the MCDM Discord is if I have any advice or recommendations for how to setup a new public Discord. Which is a bit ironic since I didn't start the MCDM server, it was handed to me with tens of thousands of existing members. But nevertheless, I certainly have some advice after overhauling its structure a few times and managing it for several years.

Start small

Give your community a couple channels, no more than ten, and add more as demand requires. Do not try to anticipate every channel your server will ever possibly need and set them up in advance. People get intimidated and overwhelmed when they join a server that has dozens of channels available to them. Plus, if you don't have enough active members maintaining ongoing conversations in the bulk of your channels, your server will feel a lot smaller and less active than it may actually be—which can also be intimidating! No one likes trying to start a conversation if they don't feel like people will engage with them.

As your server grows and it routinely feels like certain channels are moving too fast to keep up with, or specific repeat topics dominate channels, then you can add new channels to siphon off that activity. I can say from experience it is way easier (mentally) to add channels than it is to remove them, so don't be too hasty.

Onboarding

Discord's Onboarding feature (part of the Community settings) lets users hide and show channels at their whim, along with assigning roles to themselves, to customize their experience in a server without the need for bots and a role for each channel. A huge boon for the platform and large servers with dozens of channels!

Unfortunately your server needs to have an arbitrary number of channels (I believe 10+ public channels) to enable this feature. Which is dumb.

Personally I wouldn't try to pad out your server with channels for the sole purpose of being able to enable this feature, you can make due with Reaction Roles via a bot in the meantime if you really want users to be able to opt into roles.

Avoid "cheap" channels

This is a personal preference, but I'm not a big fan of meme, pet pictures, and similar "sharing" channels. Generally I've found that they're not super engaging and often are made up of people who post something and then leave to go post it in five other servers. I sometimes refer to these types of posts as "drive by posts". They don't prompt discussions and thus don't help build relationships between your community members. This isn't to say everyone who engages in those styles of channels is a "drive by poster", but if you enjoy that type of content it can usually be folded into your general chat instead where it can lead to more discussion.

Rules

Community rules and guidelines are a subject all their own. But for just starting out you only need a couple ground rules to cover the basics in your server:

1. Respect others
2. No 18+ content (outside marked channels)

That should just about cover any reason you may need to remove a problematic user. Not that you actually need a reason, mind you.

While those two rules are likely enough, rules set a tone for your server. So you may wish to explicitly call out not allowing fascists, or that misgendering someone is a bannable offense, to show your audience what you care about. Even though those things are covered by the core rules already.

Lastly, you may wish to include a rule for handling advertisements in your server (not allowed, permitted with restrictions, permitted everywhere). It's pretty normal for people to want to share their own products, just be careful to make sure that their engagement in your community/server goes beyond just sharing their stuff.

As your server grows you'll naturally begin to figure out what rules and policies you need to expand upon, add, or remove. My main advice is: don't try to be too specific. When your rules are very specific, you often get people trying to toe the line or try to convince you they're technically not violating a rule. Which can be a detriment to your server.

Moderators

"What makes a good moderator" will probably will get its own post in the future. But if you're just starting out, you probably don't need moderators. You should be able to handle issues on your own, and your audience will be able to wait out whatever is going wrong if you happen to be sleeping or working.

If it helps put you at ease, the MCDM Discord had more than 20,000 members before it got a moderation team.

Learn how permissions work

Something I see often trip people up is how unintuitive Discord's permission system can be at times. The biggest bit of advice I can give on it is that (usually) permissions are additive. If someone has a role that explicitly lets them view a private channel, giving them another role with a permission setup that revokes access to that channel will not work. Having permission to do a thing will override the permission to not do a thing.

Using the "view server as this role" feature, and/or having a test account logged in via an incognito browser window, can help you try out different permission combinations and learn how they work.

Bots

As I write this there are only a couple bots I recommend. Though your server needs may differ.

Dyno

A general purpose bot that can do a lot of things, but personally I only use it for Custom Commands, Reaction Roles (though Discord's native Onboarding feature is better for 95% of situations), logging messages, and creating Embedded Messages.

Pingcord

After trying half a dozen alert/announcement bots for Twitch and YouTube, this is the only one I've found that is reliable and actually announces things within a minute or two. Every other bot I've tried typically took 10–15 minutes to announce livestreams, and occasionally would wait more than 30 minutes before triggering the alert (if at all).

Modmail

This is the most powerful bot listed here, and the most important one utilized on the MCDM server. It brings Reddit's Modmail system to Discord! That is to say, it acts as an intermediate between your moderators and your members DMs, bridging communication so that no one needs to DM individual moderators.

Modmail Bot is a bot for Discord that allows users to DM the bot to contact the server's moderators/staff without messaging them individually or pinging them publically on the server. These DMs get relayed to modmail threads, channels where staff members can reply to and talk with the user. To the user, the entire process happens in DMs with the bot.

The benefit of this is twofold. One, it shifts the burden from one mod to all the mods. Two, it allows for transparency. Oh, it also means your mods' DMs remain a non-work environment so they can more easily separate fun and work.

The major downside of this bot is that you need to host it yourself, which requires a bit of technical skill. But, there are plenty of guides to help you out. There are some similar bots out there that don't require you to host them, but they don't work as well from my experience and they don't have as many features.

Statbot

It does what it says on the tin. With Statbot you can see all sorts of analytics related to your server. Who's sending the most messages, how many messages are sent in specific channels, join/leave data, etc. While Discord's native Server Insights has a lot of this data (and is likely more reliable), Statbot does let you drill down a bit more into specifics.

Watch what permissions you grant

One thing you should be aware of is that many Discord bots often ask for more permissions than they need. Especially if you're not intending on using all features of a bot.

When you add a bot to your server, do not immediately grant them every permission they request. Go through the list and think about what you want the bot to be able to do, and uncheck any permissions that aren't obviously required for those tasks. Never grant a bot Administrator permission! There are only a couple very niche reasons why a bot would ever need that permission, and in my opinion the risk far outweighs the benefit. Usually it's a sign the developer was lazy and didn't want to map out the permissions they actually require.

Always keep in mind that bots can, and do, get hacked. So maybe don't grant the "make and remove channels" and "ban members" permissions to a bot that only needs to be able to read and send messages. Else you may wake up and find your server a lot smaller than when you went to bed.

Words of warning

Often the pitfall of a Discord server is the owner using it for something Discord isn't made for. A support forum, documentation site, file storage and sharing, etc. But the matter of fact is: Discord is not made for those those things! Discord was made for instantly messaging groups of people. Sure it has some features that makes it seem like it can do other things, but it doesn't do them well. So don't try to use it for those things!

Similarly, the vast majority of people will ignore everything except the three most recent messages in any given channel (not to mention they will ignore most channels as well). Any content preceding those three messages might as well not exist. Users will not go searching for it, they will just ask for it to be repeated to them. Which makes sense! Discord is for chatting not for searching.

It's a closed ecosystem

Discord messages are not public to the web, even if they're on a public server. People won't be able to use Google, DuckDuckGo, or even ChatGPT to find the information shared on your server. So if you want people to be able to search and find certain chunks of information, it should be provided somewhere that is indexed on the web. Like a website, blog, or forum that they can get the information from without needing to jump through hoops!

Don't stress

Probably easier said than done, but remember that most people are in dozens of Discord servers already. You can't force people to immediately fall in love with your server and start using it in lieu of their current favorites. All you can do is give people a space to talk about your content, and work hard to make that content something they want to talk about with others. They'll naturally begin seeking out your server as a place to discuss it at that point. The actual structure of your Discord server is a minor factor.