Maximizing Your Crypto Discord’s Potential

6 min readJul 12, 2020

Wumpus — Discord’s Spirit Animal (enjoying some popcorn)

Updated for 2022! 🎉

As a Discord user for over five years, its recent rise in popularity has been quite satisfying because of what it can provide in comparison to Telegram and other platforms, but the customizability it offers can sometimes be complex and frustrating, as well as time consuming.

The main problem that I see with a lot of crypto projects and their Discord servers is that they often don’t know how to properly manage it, whether it’s not using permissions properly or not utilizing bots in their server that would make everyone’s life a whole lot easier. Not only does this make the experience worse for your users, but it can also lead to people leaving, or just not wanting to be there in the first place.

In this article, I’m going to cover a few of the things I’ve found very important when it comes to managing a Discord server, and why they might be beneficial for yours.

Lockdown The Permissions

If you’ve created a Discord and haven’t gone through all of the permissions, you may be in trouble. Usually , anyone that joins the server is able to ping @everyone and @here (some people really hate useless pings, and I mean really).

To disable this, right-click your server’s icon on the left sidebar. Hover over “Server Settings”, and click “Roles”. Note that this process will look different on mobile.

Now — all you have to do is find the role called “@everyone” and disable the permission called “Mention @everyone, @here, and All Roles”.

A great example of what can go wrong if you forget to manage permissions correctly.

So unless you want all your members to be flooded with notifications, potentially at 3 AM— it’s probably best to disable this.

Disable Notifications for Every Message

By default, every server automatically notifies every member in the server every time a new message is sent. Anywhere in the server.

Of course the user can manually mute the server themselves, but some people aren’t Discord savvy. This leads to their mobile device being spammed, or their ears being destroyed as they hear a ping every time any user in your server sends a single message, every time.

To stop this, you can right-click your server icon, hover over “Server Settings” and click “Overview”. Scroll down to the “Default Notification Settings” section and change it to “Only @mentions”.

Once you’ve changed this, users will only receive a notification when they are specifically pinged by tagging their handle, or when an admin tags @everyone or @here. Note that if you are late to enable this, those who are already in the server will still have it set to “All Messages” unless they manually change(d) it.

Set Up A Bot Guard

What a bot guard does is it essentially stops anyone (bots/scammers included) from seeing everyone in your server until they prove they’re a human. A simple overview of how it often works is as follows:

User joins your Discord server, and can only see one channel which prompts them to confirm they’re a human. Note, the user cannot see any members online, except ones that still have not proven they’re a human.
After confirming they’re a human, they’re given a separate role.
This role has access to see the entire server, but does not have access to view the bot guard channel they previously were in since they’ve already proved humanness.
Because they can’t view the bot guard channel, they don’t show in the member list for that channel, preventing unverified users from messaging them, and spamming them.

Here’s how it looks in practice in the Alphaday Discord:

After joining, Wick bot asks me to verify with a captcha before I can access the entire server.

There are many verification bots you can use — for the most customizability and best security in other places (like raid prevention, anti-spam, and other various utilities), I recommend using:

Wick Bot

There are many other forms of verification bots you can also utilize, like:

Carl Bot (I created a setup guide for this a while back here)
Captcha Bot
Verifier Bot

Utilize IFTTT or Zapier for Information Access

Something I’ve found very useful for both users as well as teams internally, is using Discord’s webhooks feature and IFTTT (or Zapier) for pushing Tweets directly into Discord (and other supported services).

For internal use, this is very beneficial to teams who have a lot of team members or multiple social handles that are difficult to stay on top of. With IFTTT, you can have a channel that pushes all tweets that mention your project’s handle or keyword directly into a channel only viewable to your team.

It also works great if you want to create a crypto news channel or even just a channel for your own project and put it into a public channel:

Keep It Clean

Another mistake a lot of projects make is by adding way too many channels in their server, usually hand in hand with inconsistent formatting, over-using emojis, and other various things.

When a Discord server is overly cluttered, users are often put off from posting anywhere — they don’t know the best place to post, and they have a difficult time staying up to date with everything. Therefore, it’s best you keep the Discord as clean as possible and condense the channels as neatly as possible.

One tip is to keep certain channels role based, and utilize Carl Bot or another similar bot above that allows users to obtain the role they want. For example, you can have a “role access” channel where users can react with the emoji corresponding to the channels they want. Let’s say you run a crypto news channel covering tons of topics. If a user only wants DeFi related stuff, they can give themselves the DeFi role only, so they don’t need to see all the other channels they don’t care about.

Need Help?

Unfortunately there’s only so much I can include into a Medium post. If you still are looking for ways to make your crypto Discord a positive community and experience, a good way to get some ideas is to just join a bunch of crypto Discords and start taking note as to what they do.