How to Create and Setup a Discord Server (2019)

Hello everybody, this is David. Today I thought it would be fun to go over how to create your own Discord server. Now at this point I'm going to assume you already have a Discord account and that you're just looking to create your own server, and this video is for you. So on the bottom left here you'll see this Add a Server button. It's gonna be on the very bottom past all the other servers you'll be in. This will look different for you obviously because you'll be in different servers than I am. Uh, but you'll want to click this Add a Server button and then click Create a Server. And I'm gonna call this David's Cool Server. You can call it whatever you want. And I'm going to upload an image. Uh, this one is 1000 by 1000. They recommend a minimum of 128 by 128. I would shoot for at least 500 by 500, but it doesn't matter that much. And then the server region also doesn't matter too much. I would just pick whatever your region is, and then you click Create. I have already created one, so I'm going to click back and just show you the one I have here. Uh, on the left, I want to draw your attention to these collection of channels and categories on the left, and then on the right is a list of users. And by your name will be a little crown that indicates you are the server owner. Okay, so there's going to be a few things I want to cover, uh, with the initial setup. There's going to be two things that everyone should set up in their Discord server that I'm going to cover. And then we'll go over roles and categories and channels and a few other things like that. Okay, so let's go to the first two things everyone should do in their server. The first thing you want to do is click this little arrow up here, uh, click Server Settings, and then down here where it says Default Notification Settings, you'll want to change it from All Messages to Only @mentions, and then click this Save Changes button here. The reason that you want to do that is because by default, if all messages is selected, that means anyone sending a, a message in any chat, everyone's going to get pinged for that, and that's absurd. So we're changing it so only someone gets pinged when they are @mentioned, which should be the default behavior in my opinion. Then you'll want to click Roles on the left, and under where it says @everyone, so you have the role name @everyone Scroll down to where it says mention everyone and turn that off. What you're, what you're basically turning off is any user that doesn't have a role can everybody in the server and ping all of them, and that can get really annoying. I see it getting abused all the time, so make sure you turn that off for the @everyone category. Okay, those are the first two things everyone should do. Now we're gonna go through viewer roles and and how roles affect how you can see and interact with different channels and categories. So let's say, um, you'll notice there's a Backroom, there's a Text Channels and a Voice Channels category, and there's channels underneath those. Um, let's say we wanted to create a set of channels around matchmaking, around playing video games with each other. Where you'd want to start is creating a role. So only people with this role can see and interact and engage with these channels. So to do that, you'll want to click this little arrow, you'll want to click Server Settings, and then you'll want to create a new role by clicking Roles and clicking this little plus button. We'll call this new role Gamer. Alright, so we're not gonna add any fancy settings, we're not gonna give it a color, we're not gonna give it any special permissions. We're just gonna name it Gamer and click Save. So now we have this role. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right-click this open space and click Create Category. I'm gonna call it Matchmaking. But I'm gonna spell it right too. All right, I'm gonna click Create Category. Okay, so with this, I'm gonna right-click this and hit Edit Category as soon as I create it. Click Permissions, and then click— or make sure where it says @everyone, I'm gonna click this red X so that they cannot read the text or see voice channels. So this basically prevents anybody that doesn't— that's not an administrator from seeing any of these channels in this category. So now I'm going to click this plus icon and click Gamer, the one that we created, so that people with this role can see the channels. And I'm going to click this green checkbox next to Read Text Channels and See Voice Channels and click Save. So now any new channels that I make when I click this little plus symbol here under Matchmaking are going to inherit those permissions. So I'll call this one Super Smash Bros Melee, for example. And voilà, we have a role-based channel. So you'll notice the only people that are appearing now are Anna and I, and the only reason Anna's here is because she's also an admin like I am. So if I go back to General, we have all the users here, including people that don't have roles like Alex and John that do not have roles. If you click this though, they disappear, and that's because they don't have the gamer the gamer role. A very easy way to duplicate an existing channel is to right-click one and click Clone Channel. We'll call this Overwatch, and this has inherited all the same permissions as this other channel. It's a very quick and easy way to do it, so I recommend that route. And the other thing I recommend is setting a channel description. So let's call this, uh, let's play Super Smash Bros. Melee. And if you click Save, now there's a handy little description right here also. Okay, so we've gone over how to create your own role, how to create your own category, and then create channels within that category that have inherited those permissions. So that's good. The other thing I want to show you is a vanity role. So you'll notice that my name is green like this, right? So let's say I wanted to give Anna her own color. So the way I do that is I click this dropdown arrow, I click Server Settings, and I would click Roles and I would click Create New Role with this little plus button here. Let's call it Anna's Color. You can also drag and drop these roles order. That helps assign like seniority because admin will always be at the top pretty much, and then you can kind of, you know, decide what the order should be after that. And then you can click this custom color thing. You can pick whatever color you want. I happen to have the color that she wants right here, so I'm just gonna paste that in. And click Save. The next thing I have to do is I have to give her the role. So an easy way to do that is you can click their name and then click this little plus right here and pick the role you want to give them. Oh, I misspelled that. Let me fix that really fast. Anna's color. There we go. So now on the right here, you'll see that her name is the color that we assigned her. So that's great. The other thing I want to show you is a difference between text chats and voice chats. So if I click a text chat, I can kind of type anything in here, and, and, and that's— it operates how you'd expect. If you click this though, this little icon right here indicates that it's a voice text chat— there's a voice channel, I should say, not a text chat. And you'll notice as I'm speaking, a green circle appears around my picture that indicates that I'm I'm speaking and people can hear me. So just a quick distinction for you there. I'm now going to disconnect from this voice chat. That is primarily how you set up your Discord server. The next thing is a bonus and something I recommend. It's not a must-have by any means, but it's something I do recommend, and that's a rules channel of some kind. Now what I've done with this rules channel is I'm going to click Edit Channel. I'm going to go to Permissions, and you'll notice that @everyone cannot send messages, but they can read messages. So that's what you'll notice there. And this is handy because they can all read this, but they can't actually type into it. And so here's some example of some rules you might set up. I'm gonna do something a bit different. I'm gonna add a rule 0 kind of as a joke. This is one that I add to a lot of servers that I manage. It's this server is not subject to your definition of fairness, and that will help you avoid a lot of pointless conflicts, and, uh, just it's something that has served me well. So anyway, come up with your own set of rules. There is something else I want to mention, and that's when you want to start inviting people to your server, I would recommend identifying the channel you want people to land on when they first get to your server. This can be your rules one, or this can be the general chat, and then click this little create instant invite icon. Um, and I would always edit the invite link. And the reason why you do that is because by default it's set to expire after a day. You don't want that to happen. Change this to never and no limit if you want this just to be an open server that anyone can join. And then click create— generate new link. And then when you copy this, this is the server link you can use that will never expire, that will always get people to join your server. So this is the link you can use, and then you can send this in a Discord DM. Or wherever you'd like. And, um, yes, that's how that works. The other thing I would mention too is that when, when someone joins your server for the first time, this message will come up. Messages like this will come up. You can disable those if you want. If you go to server settings and then on this option where it says new member messages channel, you can scroll, you can scroll up to say no new member messages channel. That way when someone joins, there's not a message for them to join, they just join. And all in all, that's really the basics for creating and managing your own Discord server. Uh, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please give it a like and please subscribe. I am interested in making more videos like this. So, uh, yeah, again, thank you for watching and I'll see you guys next time.