In the Basics section I will cover everything regarding a basic server setup in a chronological order. Now that you have understood why moderation is important, it's time to unlock Community and do some final checks. The Community feature allows you to further personalise your server and track various metrics through Server Insights. This section will cover the following areas:

• Enabling Community
• Special Channels & Server Insights
• Finishing touches: profile pictures, linking accounts, server settings & info

Enabling Community

If you want to unlock the Community feature for your Discord server, you will need to prepare some things to keep your community safe and its purpose clear. Below you will find the requirements before you can unlock Community:

• Have a title and description that accurately describes the server
• Help newbies understand why they want to join. Be accurate here - no one likes being misled.
• Have clearly posted rules/guidelines
• Clearly label what is and is not allowed in your community. Effective rules define what kind of content and behaviour is or isn't encouraged and tolerated.
• Have a moderator team
• Moderators can help ensure rule-breaking actions are not happening in your community and can help build your servers culture.
• Abide by the official Community Guidelines and Terms of Service

Moving on to actually enabling Community in the Server Settings, you will be met with a wizard to do a final check-up in order to ensure safety and peace in your community. If you followed the recommended channels in ⁠the guide Server Stucture, you can assign the Moderator News channel to the #mod-chat channel and the Rules page to the #welcome-and-rules channel. Discord will help you with changing some settings that could invite abuse, as well as laying down some safety basics like a verified email and an explicit content filter.

💡 Tip

If you want to look around first, you can opt for the changed settings when you don't meet the requirements yet and simply go back a page to return to the previous screen. If you change your mind, you can quit the wizard entirely and it will not save the settings that were changed by the wizard.

Special Channels & Server Insights

The main gain from enabling Community is having access to extra channel types (Announcement, Forum, Stage), Events, and Server Insights.

Announcement Channels

Simply edit a read-only channel and find the toggle in the Overview settings to change a channel to an Announcement channel. This allows users to opt into following the channel, a feature that uses integrated webhooks that push published posts to a channel of a server they manage. When a message has been posted in a channel like this, server admins can click on the Publish button to have the message appear on all servers that follow yours:

Forum Channels

The view feature also allows users to switch between list and gallery view. The list view is recommended for text forums like bug reports, feedback and general discussion topics. The gallery view is best used for media topics like photographs or a marketplace. To make the most out of forum channels, be sure to post general submission guidelines, create up to 10 tags, and start an example topic post to get the channel going. Obviously if regular users aren't able to create new topics, just the tags will do.

Stage Channels

Stage Channels are like Announcements channels but for voice and video. When you want to broadcast content without having to worry about users being able to speak, stage channels allows members to sign up as listeners instead. You can have up to a maximum of 10,000 participants (audio only; video starts at 50 but can be expanded with Server Boosts), and you can opt to broadcast this session globally on Discord too. Users on mobile that browse this public list will be able to start listening in without having to be in your server.

Next to speakers and listeners, you can also set up stage moderators that will handle the things behind the scenes. As a stage moderators you can move members around and disconnect them from the stage at the right timing. You also manage the speaker queue by allowing or denying requests from users who raise their hand to join the speakers.

Events

Finally, Events are slotted into their own channel type at the top where instead of a channel view, you are met with a pop-up that shows upcoming events. You can create events that are being hosted in a Stage or Voice channel, or simply elsewhere if you want to link something like a Twitch livestream, launch day or a place in the real world.

Aside from setting the essentials like a topic, time and date, you can include a description that supports Markdown and add a cover image. If you're hosting a lot of events it might pay off to use a spreadsheet to make recurring events easier to create. Feel free to use my workflow template <<link>> to get started.

Server Insights

Server Insights is a new button in your server settings and will help you analyse traffic and statistics of your server to fine tune your content, report tangible numbers to your team and find your audience. Community servers with less than 500 members will only see metrics about other servers following your Announcement channels. After passing 500 members, you will get access to information about your server's growth and user activation, retention and general engagement as well as information about where your audience is coming from. These metrics can be overwhelming at first, but it's highly recommended to keep track of developments if only to make sure your server is headed in the right direction.

Finishing touches

Profile pictures

This one might seem really obvious, but I often see a lack of profile pictures for developers, moderators and other important roles in servers that I join. Take a few minutes to set an illustration, picture or artwork as your profile picture, and encourage fellow developers and moderators to do the same. Setting a profile picture allows you to express yourself and will help people identify your account with you as a person and/or the brand.

Linking accounts

Another worthwhile endeavour to help your audience interact with you is to ensure that accounts to other platforms are successfully linked and showing on your profile. This allows users to find the official Twitter account with ease, or see that you're livestreaming on Twitch thanks to Discord's Rich Presence. You can even add personal accounts for Steam and Blizzard, but be aware that random people might try to connect with you on those platforms!

Server Settings & Info

In the Server Settings, check if you are satisfied with the server icon, name, system messages channel and whether you want to display the server's Boost progress bar. If you enabled the permission "Use Application Commands" for members, exclude any bots from being able to be interacted with by toggling them in the Integrations settings. If your server is boosted, you can upload special images to decorate your server further. For more info about unlocking special perks with Server Boosts, check out ⁠the Server Boosting guide <<link>>.

Finally, the Safety Setup settings will allow you to set up raid & spam protection, as well as custom Automod filters to catch certain words or usernames. The short answer is to enable everything to help you and your members stay safe, but it's definitely worth it to explore the Automod settings and see which particular features should be applied to your server. The Onboarding guide. after this will be more in-depth as it is a vital part of Onboarding. Keep in mind Discord toggled some settings already when you enabled Community.

Next up: Onboarding

It's time for the final step in server setup: Onboarding. Read on in the next guide, Onboarding.