Roles and permissions

Permissions in a server come from two places: what everybody can do, and what a role adds on top. Getting the first one right is most of the work, and it is the part people skip.

Both live in Server Settings → Roles.

Start with the default

At the top of that screen is Default Permissions, and it affects all roles and users — everybody in the server, including you. This is the floor.

Set it to what an ordinary member should be able to do: read the channels, send messages, join voice. Anything a member should not be able to do by default belongs off here, not switched off later per person.

Doing this first matters, because a permission granted at the floor cannot be taken away by a role. If everyone can delete messages, adding a “moderator” role does not make deleting messages a moderator thing — it makes it a nothing.

Then add roles

Choose Create a new role, give it a name, and open it. A role carries:

• A name, which is what members see.
• A colour, which tints the name of everyone holding the role.
• Hoist Role — Display this role above others — which lifts its holders into their own group in the member list. Useful for the handful of roles people need to find on purpose, such as moderators, and noise on the rest.
• Its permissions, edited underneath, on top of the default.

Each role also has an ID you can copy, which is what bots and integrations refer to it by.

The order to do this in

1. Set Default Permissions to what a member gets.
2. Make the roles that add something: moderator, whatever your community needs.
3. Give the roles out.

Do it in the other order and you spend the evening working out why somebody can still do the thing you just took away from them.

Deleting a role

Delete Role removes it from everyone holding it at once. Their names lose the colour and they lose whatever the role granted — which, if the role was the only thing letting the moderators moderate, is noticed quickly.

There is no undo. On a server with people in it, it is worth taking the permissions off a role and watching for a day before deleting it.