Discord Server Setup Recommendations
For Creators who are setting up their Discord for the first time, and how to implement for Creator Coin
Offering membership benefits through Discord is a great way to get your Creator Coin economy started and to rally your community around your coin. Setup a Discord, let your fans in, and let them make the magic of connection happen.
Tips on Setting up Your Discord Server
Read this good simple explainer on how to setup a Discord server: https://blog.discord.com/starting-your-first-discord-server-4dcacda8dad5
Follow a good YouTube guide that explains the basics, including setting up roles, categories, channels, and adding bots. This is a highly viewed tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKrfRQOTdb8&t=474s
Find a server you like, and try to emulate some of the Phase 1 channels mentioned below.
If you're creating a server for the first time, start with just a few basic channels, and then expand based on conversations by your community members.
Roles and Permissions Primer
Discord starts off with 2 roles: Server Owner (you) and Everyone (everybody else).
As Server Owner, you can do absolutely everything.
You definitely want to limit what Everyone can do, especially as you create new roles using the Rally Discord Bot to access specific areas and do specific things. Everyone should generally be limited to View Channels, Create Invite, Send Messages, Read Message History, and Add Reactions.
Eventually, once your community gets big enough, you'll want to create an Administrator or Admin role and assign that to a select few people that you trust. The Admin can pretty much do all the things you'll need to run your Discord.
Roles are assigned to channels. Channels are where information or conversations are shared. Channels can be public or private. If you make a private channel, you will need to assign roles to the channels for select people to participate.
You will also create a number of channels where either everyone or select roles will be able View Channel and Read Message History, but not Send Messages. These channels are where only you and/or your Admins can post messages.
Phase 1: Channels You Should Absolutely Consider Setting Up
For Channel Owner and Admins/Mods to type in only:
Announcements: An announcements channel is a must have. Discord offers a specific "announcements" channel type option, which allows you to post messages to your community, and allows your community to subscribe to get alerts when you post in this channel. You should limit access to write in this channel to the channel owner and admins/mods so the information is easy to scroll through.
Rules: Discord typically requires a rules channel, so good to list some rules like "no spam," "no hate speech," and any other rules for your community. You should limit access to write in this channel to the channel owner. You will likely only post once to this channel and edit the list over time.
Links: Set up a channel with all of your key links, such as your website, social media/content channels (Twitter, YouTube, etc), and any other important links for your business. You should limit access to write in this channel to the channel owner. You will likely only post once to this channel and edit the list over time.
Welcome: Think of this as the "roll call" channel where new members are listed when they join. There should be no other typing or conversations in this channel.
Coin Info: Create another open but read-only channel where you post one message: the steps required by fans to join the coin holder areas. Click here to see the brilliant $WAX Gang message for an example.
For everyone to type in:
Bot Commands: You should set up a channel for people to enter commands to join various bots, like the "!coin join" command required to join the Rally Discord Bot. This will keep that type of activity in a separate area allowing you to keep normal conversation flowing. You should allow any user to be able to type in this channel. Name it something like "bot-commands".
Phase 2: Setting up Roles
Server Owner
When you create a Discord server, you have permission to do anything and everything in the server (obviously). Should you want, you can transfer server ownership to another user should you want to retire from being responsible for the server.
Administrator
Assigning someone the "Administrator" permission allows another user to do pretty much everything except make themselves the Server Owner or create new Administrators. You should only assign this to trusted people.
Moderators
Traditionally, Moderator (or Mod) is a custom role you create to allow a community member to moderate your chat for proper behavior and content. Typically this role would have permissions such as Manage Messages (delete messages), Kick Members, Ban Members, Mute Members, and Deafen Members.
You can also consider allowing Moderators to Mention @everyone, @here, and All Roles if you want to give a Moderator the ability to post messages that alert all or a subset of users immediately.
Bots
More on Bots below.
Coin Holder Roles
Once you have installed the Rally Coin Bot, you will want to create roles for your coin holders based on the amount of coins they hold and/or amount they have spent. For more on how to do this, see Creating Roles with Rally Coin Bot.
Phase 3: AutoMod, Anti-Spam, etc.
This section is committed to automating a significant portion of the server moderation work through publicly available Discord Bots. Please read the entire section before committing to adding bots, as some complement each other, and some might be overkill for your particular situation.
These are additional bots you may wish to setup if your server is larger than a couple hundred members or so, or is likely to gain significant public exposure. Discord's default settings aren't usually sufficient to avoid the majority of spambots. We recommend setting at least the "Medium" Verification Level under the Moderation server settings, although if you're fine being a little more strict, the "Highest" level makes anti-spam efforts easier.
Recommended Bots
For each of these bots, please follow their installation and configuration instructions on their respective pages. We can provide general guidance on configuration recommendations, but you should always follow their installation tutorials for the most up-to-date process.
Mee6 - and for large servers, Mee6 premium - is useful for the majority of basic auto-moderation tasks such as preventing obvious spam, link-spam, invite-spam, etc. It also has easy-to-setup custom commands you can use from Discord chat.
SoulOfJacobeh is experimenting with LightCord at the moment and will report back as to whether it can effectively replace Mee6.
Anti-Raid, Additional Auto-Moderation: GiselleBot
GiselleBot is a little difficult to configure out the gate, but thankfully its defaults are good enough in most cases. Find and configure its anti-raid options and it should block most of the larger bot swarms your server may encounter. Some smaller ones or stragglers will still get through, but handling 10-20 spam bots instead of hundreds to thousands (yes thousands) is always preferable.
You must enable the anti-raid feature (use !amset and follow the menu prompts to find and enable it).
We recommend restricting this bot's channel access to the 'welcome' channel so it doesn't overlap auto-mod with Mee6, but can still see new users to ban raids and swarms.
User Verification, Human-Check: Server Captcha Bot
This has proven invaluable for blocking low-effort spam bots that can trip up Mee6 and other auto-mod through sheer volume and frequency. This bot DMs new users a Captcha to solve and grants them a role if they pass. With proper channel permissions setup, this locks most bots in their own isolated box.
We recommend setting up a @verified role that can, by default, see channels. Then restrict the @everyone role from seeing channels. Do both of these from the "Roles" settings, and not per-channel.
Configure a single channel that @everyone can still view (but @verified cannot). This way unverified members (likely bots) cannot see the full user list. (Unverified members will still be able to see server admins and other roles you allow to see this channel. This can be useful for legitimate users who fail the Captcha to reach out and get verified - assigned the @verified role - manually.) Include your server rules in this channel, as well as a message instructing users who are stuck to message an admin to get verified.
Configure Server Captcha Bot to grant the @verified role to those who pass.
Combined with Anti-Raid, this should prevent most cases of a bot wave joining, one passing verification, and sending the whole user list to the unverified bots.
Duplicate Name Prevention, Impersonation Prevention: [Still looking for a good one]
A common spam and phishing tactic is for scammers to join with names such as "admin", "help desk", "support", generic names with "support" profile pictures, or simply copying the name and profile picture of existing server admins, moderators, or other prominent names.
We recommend policing the Members list on occasion for names containing or matching the above and kicking or banning them for impersonation.
SoulOfJacobeh is looking for a bot to automate this process.
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