Top 5 features of Discord’s “Community Server”

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Game Community Management | Resources

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September 16, 2020

For game developers, community managers, and fans who are building a community, Discord has recently released a BIG update allowing access to additional administrative tools that can help you moderate, run, and grow your server effectively. The new feature makes use of Server Insights, Announcement channels, Rich Presence, and more.

While a lot of social platforms are still struggling to aid community growth and member retention due to system limitations, Discord is slowly addressing the issues by improving some of its server functions to provide a first-class experience for both administrators and members of the community. From Discord’s official announcement, they are gearing towards the provision of specialized resources to administrators who are directly building their communities and shepherding their growth. Enabling your community server is super quick and easy.

Administrators of the server will have access to server insights and data so they can use what they learn and make informed decisions to improve the community’s engagement. Because of the server insights, Discord Bots can be effectively used to add more variety, personality, and features such as auto-moderation to your Discord Server.

As a company that builds gaming communities, GamerSpeak utilizes and takes advantage of this feature to help us gather reliable information that will direct us towards our goal in gathering authentic sentiments, writing masterful gameplay guides, high-fidelity bug reporting, and providing new gameplay recommendations to publishers using the “GamerSpeak Method“.

Let’s start by going through the details of the Community Server and discuss the top features and what they could mean for you.

1. Server Insights

Server Insights provide information about your server that can let you know how your community is doing. Learn how active your community is, what your user retention looks like, where new members are coming from, and much more.

GamerSpeak uses this feature to keep track of the community engagements, especially after publishing gameplay guides and important announcements. We can see how many members have visited and communicated about a certain topic, which leads us to our next action for a possible increase in audience impact.

*This is a sample image. Server Insights is hosted on a separate website so that it’s easier to share links and browse cross platforms.

Server Insights include:

Growth and Activation
- Key Metrics – New Members, New Communicators, New Member Retention, All-time Joins
- How many new members are joining and where they come from
- Total membership over time
- How many people leave the server over time
- New member activation (exploring the server beyond the first few channels)
- How many new members retain the next week
- Most popular invites/referrers
Engagement
- Key Metrics – Visitors, Communicators, Total Messages Sent, Total Voice Minutes
- How many members visited and communicated
- Message/voice/mute activity
- Which text/voice channels do people use the most
Audience
- Which countries are my members from
- What devices do they use
- How long have they been a member of the server
- Are my new members also new to Discord
Announcement Channels
- Key Metric – Total Servers Following
- How many new servers are following
- Following/Unfollowing over time
- Sizes of servers following
- Published messages
Welcome Screen
- Key Metric – People Who Saw the Welcome Screen
- What are new members clicking and do they activate afterward

2. Announcement Channels

Unlike a regular text channel, Announcement channels come with a “Follow” button that allows server members to hook and connect the channel into other servers. Now, select messages in your Announcement channels can be “published”, allowing your community to get the latest updates from your server in their other servers.

This feature allowed our members to conveniently stay in touch without the trouble of browsing our server’s text channels. Instead, they can just follow the announcement channel without having to miss any of the important game updates and guides.

Text channels can easily be changed into an announcement channel by hovering over the channel name and toggling it in your Settings.

The rate limit is 10 publishes per hour. From #patch-updates #tips #events to #giveaways, you can use multiple Announcement channels to share information with your community followers.

3. Discovery

Enabling Server Discovery will bring people with common interests to your server. The purpose of adding this feature is for people to easily find new communities with ease when they explore the public servers.

This feature allowed GamerSpeak-led communities to be visible throughout the whole Discord community. For example, the Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross server made its presence known to users who are also interested in Gacha games, or users who have searched for similar keywords like the Seven Deadly Sins Anime/Manga.

If you’re an administrator of a Discord Community Server, you can turn it on via the Show in server discovery option. This puts your server into a searchable directory of approved public servers so interested users can find you.

4. Welcome Screen

Community Server Welcome Screen allows the administrator of your server to set up a custom Welcome Screen that appears when new members join. This can help them discover all the cool things they can do on your server. Servers that have set up a Welcome Screen see improvements in more people sticking around and engaging.

Large communities tend to have many channels, users, and large walls of text can be a bit too confusing for newcomers that want a clear direction of where to go. To combat this, the Welcome Screen provides ease of access and less friction for new Discord users and long time users alike.

Recommended channels to add to your Welcome Screen are:

#general or #discussion – a channel where new users can interact freely
#rules – a channel explaining the server rules and regulations to make sure of safe engagements from users
#announcements – a channel to get the latest news specific to your community activities
And #recruitment – a channel dedicated to users looking for guild/clan/group

5. Direct Community Updates from the Official Discord

This feature provides admins and moderators official updates and messages from Discord about new moderation features and the server’s eligibility in Discovery. GamerSpeak administrators are always ahead of the game whenever new features are ready to be implemented.

Recommended Discord Bots for Your Community Server

Discord Bots not only add style and vanity on your server but also perform several useful automated tasks such as moderating content, information assistance, and assigning roles. It also helps community members to stay longer if the server provides many useful and interesting features.

MEE6

MEE6 is an easy-to-use Discord Bot with custom commands for moderation and role creation, leveling, music, social media alerts, and more. You can easily set-up a welcome message and auto-role to inform newcomers about the server rules, hot topics, announcements, or ongoing events. Learn more about MEE6 Bot here.

Welcome message and auto-role

We give our members a warm welcome where they can also assign one or multiple roles to signify their server identity or gain channel access. For example, users have to select which game server they belong to before gaining access to all our Discord channels.

Levels and XP in your Discord Server

GamerSpeak uses a leveling system on our community server to identify and reward the most active members of our community! MEE6 Bot is also able to customize a member’s rank role.

Highly customizable moderation

The Internet can be a dangerous place so you need to protect your server from trolls. MEE6 can control ads, spam, swearing, excessive emojis, and much more. The bot can also set-up automated actions such as banning and giving penalties with timers.

Twitch, YouTube, and Reddit Discord Alerts

The bot automatically sends alerts to your community when the featured YouTube, Twitch streamer goes live or when a new post is written in a subreddit. Now your members get to enjoy their favorite content without ever leaving the server.

Dyno Bot

GamerSpeak uses Dyno Bot on our community server to create custom text commands for easier access to information. Dyno Bot can run text commands and responds with a custom message that helps us connect with our members easily.

When our members have inquiries regarding a specific hero or gameplay guide, they can just type a hero name in the #bot-commands channel and the bot automatically responds with a hero overview with links to its full page on our website.

Dyno Bot also features auto-moderation, anti-spam, role management, custom commands, music bot, and much more that can help simplify server management. Learn more about Dyno Bot here.

Tatsu Bot

Tatsu Bot specializes in enhancing engagement in your community. It can create a member loyalty system that engages your members XP, Levels & Reputation, and incentivize activity on your Discord server. Learn more about Tatsu Bot here.

Dank Memer

We all need a lighthearted chatter in the community to relieve stress. Dank Memer is a multipurpose bot that generates chat responses with “memes” in mind. It has a meme bot, music bot, currency bot, moderation bot, image manipulation bot, and so much more with over 260 commands. Learn more about Dank Memer here.

ProBot

ProBot lets you customize your server’s welcome image and in-depth logs, perform server management, and respond to social commands to any trigger words.

Designing Welcome Images

You can design your welcome images that include a user avatar and user name to welcome your users for you!

Bot Moderation

GamerSpeak uses ProBot to help manage our community with plenty of useful moderation commands.

To learn more about ProBot’s full features, check out their site here.

Final Thoughts

In the Gaming industry’s competitive age, more revenue opportunities can only be unlocked by utilizing appropriate tools and strategies that support the community. While there are various social media platforms that can grant these tools, only one stood out the most; Discord. Recently, Discord’s big update in adding a “Community Server” feature has been providing server administrators with data insights that can lead to an increase in community engagement, ultimately increasing their lifetime value (LTV).

This Discord feature not only helps in improving player retention but also paves a way for more people with common interests to join the community. With the data insights provided, the administrator can redirect and customize how Bots function so it can be used to help gather authentic sentiments, giving your community the confidence to engage more in the game. Administrators will also have leads on what the community wants and what strategy guides to work on next. Ultimately, they can submit proper recommendations so game publishers can implement better changes for the game and its community.

Let GamerSpeak Build Your Community

GamerSpeak creates and manages Discord servers for top gaming companies like Netmarble (7 Deadly Sins). We create your game’s Discord community quickly and efficiently without additional software or headcount for you to manage. GamerSpeak communities are fully managed by our team, which means you save valuable time and maintain a low overhead.

Click here to learn more about our method that increases revenue and retention up to 30%. Or, pick a date and time below that works for you to talk with us about your game and its community: