Hey Discord folks, what was the process you followed when setting up your Discord community?

Question

Any bots you would highly recommend?

ODG · Accepted Answer

@jerome_lefebre I would respectfully disagree with @chris_sarca above. It is true that engagement is hard on Discord and other multi-community platforms, but I think it is kind of missing the point. A dedicated forum will bring less retention for the same effort, in fact in most cases your users will never join a dedicated forum due to added friction (registering, creating profile etc).  Most product communities do not even need permanent engagement - people have a life, and your product will not be at the center of it (notable exceptions maybe for developers working full-time with a particular niche software). Your product community is there when you need support, to make suggestions/provide support, and sometimes for special events. The fact that all of this is available to you in your Discord client in just one click is what makes it powerful. My recommendation is to avoid abusing 'everyone' pings and plan regular events/giveaways to ensure regular check-ins. I'm still on the fence about XP systems. Most are just counting messages, which is fine if just tied to levels. But I'm a bit afraid of tying it to actual perks. I may experience with them in the near future though.

Chris Sarca · Answer

Create a Welcome Screen, and let people know what's there to do.

Rules Screening, at first I set it to the Lowest setting, and later on, I switched to the Highest one (new members should verify their phone number).
The reason behind this is simple, I want if possible only real people, don't care for fake users and curious eyes that don't say a word.

I don't recommend Discord, Slack, Reddit, or any platform that allows its users to be on multiple communities in the same place.

Here is why and the things I noticed in my server and other really "popular" servers as well:

- They will mute your server and forget about it.
At first, it's all fine, they do engage in conversations, but that won't last long, in a matter of days or weeks, you will notice a decline in conversations and even if you do your best to keep them engaged, the number will go down anyway.

- They are on multiple servers at once, which only divides the feel of a community.
Since they are on multiple servers, some even on more than 50 or 100, it's just not worth trying to get anyone's attention.

- Even big communities, at least from my experience, since I'm on a few servers related to web dev, art, design, and animation, they all feel really empty, the number of users is just for looks.

For the community, we decided to go with our own modern forum where people can discuss, report bugs, and so on.
Discord is still there, but it's inactive, and it was inactive for quite a while.

I was using a bot called Arcane, but kicked it and deleted all authorized apps, I don't trust them anymore, I'd suggest creating your own bot.

Jerome Lefebre · Answer

@chris_sarca @ogaudemar Thanks both for the input. 
We're actually a community data intelligence platform and are able to measure the impact of the community on business outcomes. We recently moved from free Slack to Discord and especially onboarding new premium customers to private Discord channels seems particularly difficult. But overall, the entire history fetching not being hidden behind a paywall (like for Slack) is making the use of Discord very efficient.

It's just a question of improving the onboarding sequence.

Jerome Lefebre · Answer

@chris_sarca thanks so much for all the valuable feedback.
As you said, getting them into the community is easy but keeping them engaged is the hard part.

Did you have any success with some kind of reward program? XP for content as an example?

Chris Sarca · Answer

@jerome_lefebre Unfortunately, it doesn't really work on Discord (or Slack and Reddit), the reason is that the feel of being part of a community is divided when they have so many choices and being in way too many servers at once.

Something like that only works on unique platform communities, like Product Hunt, here we have badges and K points if we're active and interact with the community and platform.

I would suggest creating your own forum, that way there is only one place where people would focus their attention on, and they will be much more motivated to post and be active.

Edit: You can have Discord for general chit-chatting, a place where people who like similar stuff can just be off-topic and meet each other and maybe even hold casual events and such.

Chris Sarca · Answer

@jerome_lefebre @ogaudemar This is just what I noticed from my experience being an ex-mod/admin of a few big communities, people eventually will just stop engaging with your server no matter what, and the reason for that is that they have too many options and just one platform.

Having a forum will not magically keep them there, but the quality of the discussions will be higher and the feeling of being part of a real community will be present, since there is just 1 community on that one platform.

Another thing is that you want your content to be indexable, so people might stumble upon whatever they need, but can't do that on Discord or Slack.

Discord and Slack are fine for chit-chat, and gaming communities, but even in gaming communities this is a real thing, the number of people is there just for looks, they were once active, and they slowly died.

If there are hundreds of thousands of members and only max 10 people interacting with each other, that's really a problem to look into. Take a look at a few Adobe servers, and other popular communities to see that.

Hey Discord folks, what was the process you followed when setting up your Discord community?

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