So your Discord server is growing and you’re now wanting to turn it into a full-fledged Discord Community server? Well, you have come to the right place! Before diving in this article, we recommend checking out the Server Setup articles as these cover permissions, setting up channels, and more.
What this article covers:
For our example, we will be creating a community server called Orchard eSports. This is an eSports organization that has 3 teams (Apple, Cherry, and Lemon).
Server Roles
As mentioned above, we are using Orchard eSports community server as our example. Before we start creating channels, let’s create some roles for our members and we’ll go over what each role is for.
Head Orchard - Role for someone that is an administrator on the server. With this role they have all edit and manage permissions enabled for the server.
Farmhand - Role for someone that is a moderator on the server. They don’t have the exact same permissions as an admin would (Head Orchard), but they do have some permissions that a regular member would not. For example: ability to delete messages from other members, able to post in the announcement channel, etc.
Team Apple Captain - This role is for someone that is a Team Captain. Because they are part of a team, they have access to all Team Apple text and voice channels. They can not access the channels for other teams or admin and moderators.
Team Cherry Captain - This role is for someone that is a Team Captain. Because they are part of a team, they have access to all Team Cherry text and voice channels. They can not access the channels for other teams or admin and moderators.
Team Lemon Captain - This role is for someone that is a Team Captain. Because they are part of a team, they have access to all Team Lemon text and voice channels. They can not access the channels for other teams or admin and moderators.
Team Apple - For this role, this is for members of the Team Apple team. They are not able to see other team’s channels but their own.
Team Cherry - For this role, this is for members of the Team Cherry team. They are not able to see other team’s channels but their own.
Team Lemon - For this role, this is for members of the Team Lemon team. They are not able to see other team’s channels but their own.
Member - This is a general member role for someone that is not on one of the eSports teams, but is a member of the server. They do not have access to any of the team channels or admin and moderator channels, but they do have access to channels like #general that is for everyone.
Categories
In our example for a community server, Orchard eSports is an eSports organization that has 3 teams (Apple, Cherry, and Lemon). Now that we have roles created, let’s get started on some categories for our text and voice channels to be under. You can even set up permissions to be category-specific, so it applies to all text and voice channels nested inside of the category.
The categories we have for our server are: Welcome, Team Apple, Team Cherry, Team Lemon, and Voice Channels.
If we want only members of Team Apple to be able to view all of the text channels in that category, we can do so through category permissions. You can do this by right-clicking on the category name and selecting “Edit Category”.
Under here we want to enable Private Category since this is a category only created for a specific team. This means the category will automatically sync the permissions for all text and voice channels under this category.
Before we set it so Team Apple members can view these channels, let’s also make it so other members of the server can not.
With @everyone selected we want to make sure View Channels is disabled. You can go ahead and also disable all of the other settings, but the main setting we want disabled is View Channels so not everyone can access these channels.
Now let’s add the role Team Apple and make sure they have certain settings enabled so they can read and message in these channels with their teammates. Here are the settings that we enabled for the role, Team Apple.
View Channel - This setting is enabled so all team members can view any of the channels under this category.
Add Reactions - This setting is enabled so team members can add reactions to messages. This is great for polls or just seeing the overall sentiment towards something posted.
Use External Emoji - This setting is enabled so team members can use emojis from other servers as long as they have Discord Nitro.
Read Message History - This setting is enabled as it allows team members to read the message history in each channel. If it’s disabled, once a member logs off they will no longer see those new messages that came in when they were online. We want this setting enabled so someone can see new and past messages.
And that’s it! Now that we’ve created categories and text channels, let’s move on to voice channels.
Text channels
We’re going to continue to use our example server, Orchard eSports, to help us in creating some text channels for our members to chat in! One recommendation for creating a server is to have a welcome channel for when new members join. This allows new users to get some information about the server and allows you, your mods, and even server members to see when someone new has joined.
Perfect! You can see here that when a new member joins the message is automatically shared in the welcome channel. You can have this information shared anywhere, but it is quite handy for when new members join especially if an admin or a moderator needs to add specific roles for this user.
To set up the system message for when someone joins the server head to Server Settings > Overview and set the channel under “System Messages Channel”. While there you can also enable or disable any additional settings for the system message.
Let’s go ahead and also create an announcements channel, this is where an admin or moderator can post updates about the server or upcoming tournaments. This channel should be readable by anyone that joins it, however, only admins and moderators should be able to post in this channel.
Since we want new members in the server to be able to read the announcement channel, but not be able to post any messages of their own, we'll want to restrict their permission access.
To learn more about channel permissions, please check out the Channel Permissions Settings 101 article.
Here are some examples of enabled settings and how the announcement permissions are set up for everyone and why. These are completely personal preferences based around your specific server.
View Channel - This setting is enabled so it allows everyone to be able to view the announcements channel.
Add Reactions - This setting is enabled so members can add reactions to posts. This is great for polls or just seeing the overall sentiment towards something posted.
Use External Emoji - This setting is enabled so members can use emojis from other servers as long as they have Discord Nitro.
Read Message History - This setting is enabled as it allows users to see the message history in the channel. We want this setting on so someone can see new and past announcements.
We’ll also want to add a general channel where any member can chat with one another about anything. They can use this channel to group up and game together, share adorable cat photos, and more!
Voice Channels
Finally, we are going to set up voice channels for our example server, Orchards eSports, so our teams can communicate with one another. Voice channels are very similar to text channels in the sense that you can have specific permissions for them. Each team in this server has their own voice channel that only a member of that team has access to. These voice channels are in the team-specific categories, but you can also just have one category for all voice channels. After setting up team specific channels, we set up some general channels for the teams to come together and chat, or for other members of the server to join as well.
Let’s go over the voice channel settings for the Lobby voice channel that we set up. This channel is set up so anyone within the server can join it, no matter what team they’re on.
Connect - This is enabled so a member can actually connect to the voice channel.
Speak - This setting is enabled so a member can talk in a voice channel and they are not muted by default.
Video - This setting allows members to share their video, screen share, or stream a game in this voice channel.
User Voice Activity - This setting allows someone to use Voice Activity over using Push-to-Talk when it comes to speaking in this channel. If disabled, the member is required to use Push-to-Talk only.
As with the other settings, these are all going to come down to preferences for you and your server.
And that’s it, our server is created and we can start inviting more members! There are certainly a lot of options when it comes to setting up a full fledged Community Server and the settings you use can vary depending on how you want your server to be and what kind of server it is. You can always remove and add channels and other settings as your Discord server grows.