5 Helpful Tips for Discord Moderators
Suggestions from a veteran platform user and community manager on the Discord platform. This is a follow-up article on the recently published “7 Helpful Tips for Discord Users” found here:
1. discord.com/moderation
Want to start using Discord to get a community server going but don’t know where to start? Discord and its many moderators have compiled a compendium of knowledge that makes it extra easy to understand very basic and advanced features of its platform & provides a lot of material on community management fundamentals right on their website! https://Discord.com/Moderation is a must-read for any serious moderator, admin and server owner!
2. Set up Ping Roles
Ping roles are roles the members of your server can voluntarily opt into to be notified for specific notifications. This enables you to ping for dedicated events, updates & messages without having to use @everyone or @here too often. Doing so often results into members out-right disabeling notifications which is a negative thing — as it results in your ability to reach your community for important matters declining. I recommend the following:
Use @everyone & @here only once a day for smaller communities (sub 500) and once a week for larger communities (post 500)
Create selectable ping roles for:
- Community Updates | For when you have changed features or policies
- Community News | For when you have reached a milestone or to tease future events
- Community Events | For when events take place or are planned to take place
- Question of the Day (QOTD) | Daily engagement drive
- Question of the Week (QOTW) | Weekly engagement drive
- Voice Activity | For members that want to know when people are gathering to Voice Chat
- Chat Revival | For when the chat has died and requires to be ‘revived’
3. Webhooks & Discohook
Take the next step in your static-information-display messaging! More often than not essential display channels such as the rules, information & links are put into normal discord messages — often messy looking and important information not standing out enough. Start learning how to use Webhooks and start making your own using websites like https://discohook.org.
You can easily use Webhooks by going to your server settings > integrations > Webhooks.
How to make a Webhook (tutorial link)
- Create a new Webhook
- Name the Webhook & copy the link
- Open up https://discohook.org
- Paste the link up top
- Build your Webhook
- Use colors, icons, images, gifs to spice things up even more!
- Save your backup
- Click Send!
- (Inevitably make edits in spelling, grammar and lay-out)
4. Enable Community & Server Insights
For communities large and small it is useful to have insight into the statistics of the platform you made. Discord servers can enable “Community” and get additional features. One of which is access to the server insights. Discord Server Insights provides a detailed analytical overview of your server and logs this info. Allowing you to observe your communities growth and engagement from a numbers perspective.
By changing your servers policies and features you can influence trends in the analytics and see what works for your community and what doesn’t. Learning how to read your server insights and make the appropriate changes is a vital part of larger scale discord community management and worthy of its own article at some point. For now I recommend you enable community for servers larger than 100 members and getting used to frequently checking the server insights.
Server insights is no replacement for community feedback, however. And so it is vital to always listen to your communities views on the platform. Communities of People are organic things and so evolve over time. A good community manager finds a healthy balance of evolving the platform along with the community — lest it stagnates and dies out.
5. Join the Community Managers Guild
This community is meant to provide support for these individuals that put themselves in servitude to others. To perform mundane tasks every day to keep platforms safe and clean. To enable communities to further grow and keep things interesting through continuous engagement.
It can often feel like a thankless job and within the confines of one’s own community it can often lead to burn-outs and a negative outlook on being a member of a community for a change. CMG is meant to be a hub for community managers of all varieties and experience levels, where they can unwind in a safe area with peers and others in the Community Management sphere..
Here, community managers can share stories, experiences, support one another and help educate a whole new generation of community managers. Using podcasts, voice sessions, guest appearances and more — this community seeks to enable other communities to thrive.
As this community focuses on the profession of Community Management (as the word Guild or Union would imply) we establish ourselves in the grey area between the commercial and volunteer sides of the spectrum. Enabling volunteers to go professional through education and providing opportunities & networking!
Join today! https://discord.gg/3FVBDycNxG
Thank you for reading — I hope some of these tips were helpful to you. Consider following (for free!) to read on more Discord and Web 3 related content!
- Upcoming article on the best Discord Bots
- Upcoming article on The Community Managers Guild
- Article on the use of invite contests & how (not) to do it!
