How to Set Up a Discord Server

This guide will assume that you have already installed Discord and have created an account with them. This will also cover preliminary steps to getting your server up and running including inviting people and setting roles.

Creating a server in Discord is actually quite simple. First, open up Discord and then look to the pane on the left. You will see a collection of servers of which you are a part (if you are new to Discord, this will be empty, obviously), and at the bottom of the list of servers, you will se a circle with a + on it: go ahead and click on that.

There will be a few windows that pop up asking if you would like to choose a template and who the intended audience is for this server. Just click on "Create My Own" and then "Skip for now." The last box pop up will ask you to name your server. Once you have done that, click on "Create."

There are two places that you can click to invite people, but they will both bring up the same menu. In the body of the menu you will find friends whom you can invite, but we are going to make an invite link for people who are not on our Discord friend's list.

At the bottom of this pop up you can see that it says that the link will expire after seven days. If this is ok for you, then simply copy the link, but we are going to address how to make the link permanent. Simply click on "Edit Invite Link," which will bring up a menu. We are only going to change the option under "Expire After," and we are going to set that to "Never." After that, click on generate new link, and it will bring you back to the pop up, where you can copy your new, permanent link.

Now that we can invite people, we are going to first set up a text channel and then add permissions so that only certain people can view the channel. Click on the little "+" next to "Text Channels" and you will be prompted to name the channel, decide if it is text or voice and also whether or not it will be a private channel. For this guide, we are going to create a private channel.

When you make the channel, make sure the toggle for "Private Channel" is toggled on. When you click "Next" it will bring up a menu to add roles or members to this server. It will most likely say that you don't have any roles set, so we will skip this step for now. You now have a private channel!

We are now going to set up roles for this channel that we have created. First, in the upper right-hand corner, you will see a little carrot. Click on it, and a drop-down menu will appear, and from there, click on "Server Settings."

Once you are in the server settings, click on "Roles" in the upper left-hand side of the screen, and then click on "Create Role." In this new menu you can name the role, choose the color of the role (if you have the role, your name in the Discord server will change colors), among a plethora of other permissions for the role. Feel free to explore the various options, but for simplicity, I am going to keep the defaults.

While still editing this role, click on the "Manage Members" option near the top, and then click "Add members to this role" in the "Manage Members" subsection. This will bring up a list of all the members in your server (mine is empty because this is a tutorial server I made). Simply click on the name of the person, and then click add. Now they have the role!

Now we want to make it so that only people with this new role can access our private channel. To do that, we need to change the settings of the channel. Click on the gear icon next to your channel name (the icon only appears when you have the channel selected or are hovering over the name).

In the channel settings panel that pops up, click on "Permissions" in the upper left-hand side of the screen, then click on "Add members or roles." On the pop up, click on the role you created (make sure the box is checked), then click "Done." Now only people with that role can view and post in the channel. The same process can be followed for voice channels.

Now go invite some friends and give them roles and permissions and make private channels! There is much more that can be done, and if you're feeling up to it, you can look into inviting Discord Bots to help with management and add QoL changes to a server.