Playbook

Overview

For many, the anonymous nature of Discord is more of a feature than a bug.

In some cases (like the leakage of classified documents), the anonymity of users has caused Discord and server owners to catch heat from government officials.

It's not the fault of server owners, just a by-product of anonymous bad actors.

While the stakes are not so high for DevRels, anonymity presents hurdles to tying effort to business value. If that's you, a Discord verification bot is just what you need.

This playbook will show you how to use Common Room to quickly set up a Discord verification bot to protect your server. As a bonus, member verification will make it a lot easier to show direct business value. Here it goes.

What you’ll need

Step 1: Connect a Discord server to Common Room

We'll first want to connect your Discord server to Common Room, where we'll set up our verification system. To do that, you’ll need to log in to your Common Room account, head over to the source settings menu, and select Connect Discord.

You’ll then be prompted to confirm which Discord channels to import.

Click Looks good to begin importing messages, threaded replies, and reactions from any channel you select. Once the import begins, Common Room will create a member for every user joining your server and allow you to filter members by Discord role.

That’s it for this step. Congrats on connecting your Discord source!

Step 2: Configure "Unverified" and "Verified" Discord role permissions

For this step, we'll be primarily working from our Discord server. When you hop back into Discord, you'll see the Common Room verification bot is now added.

Next, we'll need to configure the roles of users and verified users. To do that, we can go into your server settings.

From here, we’ll click on Roles to set up new roles for unverified and verified users.

We can then click on the Roles menu item and select Default Permissions. We'll use this default for our unverified role. And it's up to you which permissions to choose for unverified members.

Next, we’ll create a new role. This will act as our verified role.

We can simply click New Role. We’ll name this something like Verified Members, choose a color or other customizations, and click Save Changes.

We’ll want to set permissions for our newly created Verified Members role. Since these members will be verified through email, we’ll give them more permissions, like viewing public channels and sending messages (whatever permissions you’re comfortable with).

Next, we can create new categories or channels for the Verified Member role. We can right-click in the left pane and select Create Channel. And we can name that channel #verify-here (or whatever you like).

And now, we want to hide our existing channels from new members who have yet to be verified. So we’ll right-click on the channel category (TEXT CHANNELS, in this case) and click to edit the category. Then set permissions to be a 🔒Private Category with our new Verified Members role selected.

Phew! That was a bit tedious, but we now have all of the settings we need to automate Discord verification via Common Room.

Step 3: Automate member verification with Common Room

Our last step is to turn on a workflow in Common Room to automate verification.

We can head over to the Workflows menu and create a new workflow to automate our verification communications to members.

We’ll set up our workflow in Common Room, and our verification bot will be live!

Workflow

Discord role assignment

Assign a Discord role to a member depending on the answer to a survey question.

Try workflow

As new members join your Discord server, they’ll see an automated message that nudges them to verify their membership.

As new members click to verify their identity, they’ll be directed to a verification confirmation page and able to return to your Discord server with a click.

As unverified members become verified, Common Room’s AI and ML identity resolution system will automatically fill in available information about the member—taking them from anonymous to known. See the comparisons of the same user from unverified to verified (below).

Wrapping up

This tutorial showed you how to verify Discord members and add protective measures to your Discord server.

But we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible. From here, the world’s your oyster to automate welcome messages to verified members, identify advocates and champions in your community, track different stages of your funnel, and a lot more.

Drop us a note to unlock access to our Discord verification workflow. You can also sign-up for a free Common Room account and kick the tires.