Schools, businesses, gamers, and many other communities prefer Discord to other VoIP platforms thanks to its simple UI, reliable servers, and another unique feature: the ability for server admins/owners to assign custom roles to members.
If you have established a server or intend to construct a community in the future, it’s crucial to comprehend the advantages of this valuable characteristic.
There are numerous settings related to user roles, so it can seem complicated at first glance.
To help you better understand, we have provided a quick guide on adding and assigning roles in Discord.
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Adding Roles
To begin adding roles to your Discord server, go to Server Options. You can find Server Options by clicking with your right-hand button on your server’s logo to the left of your display.
Once you’ve opened your settings, select the Roles tab. You will see a lot of different settings but don’t panic! We will take a closer look at each one later. First, let’s look at how to add a new role.
Despite being one of Discord’s most notable features, roles are one of the more complicated parts of the platform. It won’t take long to get the hang of it. To add a new role, you first need to click the small plus icon.
Customizing Discord Roles
Once you have successfully added a new role, you need to customize it. Here is an explanation of the different options:
General Settings And Permissions
- Role Name – As the name suggests, assigns names to your roles to distinguish them from each other. They make it easier for members in your server to recognize the different roles, such as mods, admins, owners, etc.
- Color – Assigns a color to the role. This helps signify the role a server member holds without needing to view their profile.
- View Server As Role – This is useful when customizing a role and allows you to preview your server as though you have that role assigned. If something isn’t working how you intend, you can make changes to the role settings.
- Display role members separately from online members – A useful setting that should usually be enabled. This groups users by their role on the member list. It helps users find owners, admins, or other types of members that they are looking for.
- Allow Anyone to @mention this role – @mention is a command that pings particular users. If you want to prevent people from spamming groups with notifications, disable it for the relevant role.
- View Channels – Should be left enabled unless you don’t want a particular role to see certain text or voice channels.
- Manage Channels – This grants members the ability to delete, create, and edit channels. This should be enabled only for your moderation staff or you alone.
- Manage Roles – Grants permission to delete, create or edit roles. This should always be disabled for most roles and reserved for your most trusted users.
- Manage Emojis – Allows users to remove or add emojis to the server. Not particularly important, as long as you keep an eye on what is being added.
- View Audit Log – Useful for you and other admins to see the server changes your mods have made. Includes a log of invited, kicked, and banned members, bots, name changes, region changes, deleted messages, etc.
- Manage Server – Users with this role can add bots to a server, switch voice channel regions and even change the server’s name.
Text Channel Permissions
- Send Messages, Embed Links, Attach Files, Add Reactions – These should be left enabled for most roles because they allow the most basic communication on the server.
- Use External Emoji – Specifically for users with a Nitro subscription, this allows them to use emojis from different servers.
- Mention @everyone, @here, and All Roles – Permission for users to ping everyone on the server or members of a certain channel. It should be disabled for basic members to reduce spam and enabled for mods, admins, etc.
- Manage Messages – Should be disabled for most members.
- Read Message History – Allows members to view all of the previous messages sent in text channels. If disabled, new members won’t be able to access any messages posted before they joined the server or channel.
- Send Text-to-Speech Messages – Useful for admins and mods to send announcements, but should be disabled for all other users. It can be annoying if everyone starts spamming text-to-speech messages.
- Use Slash Commands – Should be left enabled. It allows members to send gifs from Giphy and Tenor, spoiler tag text, and change their nicknames.
Voice Channel Permissions
- Connect, Speak – Grants permission for members to connect to and speak in voice channels. If Speak is disabled, every user that joins a voice channel will be automatically muted by the server. Only users with admin privileges will be able to unmute them.
- Video – The ability to screen share, stream games, and also stream a camera feed.
- Use Voice Activity – This can be disabled if you want to reduce background noise as much as possible. This forces users to use the push-to-talk function.
- Priority Speaker – Enable it for mods/admins. This gives audio priority to a certain user, making them louder and clearer than others when they speak.
- Mute/Deafen/Move Members – The privilege to mute, deafen or move other members. Should be enabled only for server staff.
Advanced Permissions
- Administrator – This overrides all of the other permissions, allowing a user to have full control over your server. Be very cautious before granting this permission.
Finally, you have the option to Clear Role Permissions. This resets all the above permissions to their defaults.
If you can’t decide which permissions are appropriate for certain roles, consider checking out our comprehensive guide on creating a good Discord server.
How To Assign Roles In Discord
Once you have customized all of the roles on your server, it’s time to assign them.
Go to your server and click the icon on the top right of your screen. This opens the member list.
Once the member list is open, right-click a user’s name, hover over roles, and select which one you want to assign to them.
You can alter a user’s role at any time. You can also assign multiple roles to a single user.
Deleting Roles
If you want to delete a particular role, you need to head back to Server Settings and the Roles tab.
From here, hover over a certain role and click on the three dots to expand a dropdown menu. On this menu, you will see the option to delete a role.
With a thorough understanding of the different settings for customizing roles and how to assign and delete them, you will be able to create a far more personalized Discord experience for your server members.