How to Set Up Your Server’s Roles for Members, Mods & Admins

Setting up your server’s permissions can be the key difference between a hectic time in the wild west and building a welcoming community where your server members want to hang out with each other all the time! 

There are a LOT of Role permissions to comb through and learn what they do, and every community is unique, each with its own different needs. Some are small spaces for your closest friends, while others are BIG and have hundreds, if not thousands, of members. 

In this blog, we’ll be organizing Role permissions by three recommended categories: 

• Role permissions for all members 
• Role permissions for your moderators
• Role permissions for your superpowerful server admins 

All listed permissions are currently in-app as of June 6, 2025. 

Important Permissions for All Server Members

The following permissions let your server members do the most important stuff on Discord, such as talking, streaming, and playing games together — the whole reason they joined the server!  

Consider keeping these on… or at least the ones that make sense for your server’s scale. 

Recommended General Permissions for Most Server Members

• View Channels: Well, you see… if you can’t see any channels… you can’t do anything. 
• Send Messages: See those channels? This’ll let you post in them. 
• Create Public Threads: If your conversation gets off topic, Threads can help keep your tangents in temporary chat spaces. 
  
  • Send Messages in Threads: Keep this on if you can create Threads, otherwise you can make them, but you wouldn’t be able to talk in them. Awkward. 
• Create Invite: Let others join the server by making a new invite for them! 
• Change Nickname: Let your member set a unique nickname just for your community.

Recommended Voice Channel Permissions for Most Server Members

• Connect: Determines whether or not people can even join the VC from the start! 
• Speak: When this is on, someone can actually talk in the voice channel. If it’s off, they can just sit there and listen.
• Video: If on, someone can use a webcam, share their screen, or stream a game to the voice channel.
• Use External Sounds: Lets Nitro members play sounds from other servers they’re in.  
• Use Voice Activity: Lets users activate their mic and talk whenever the mic hears their voice… or anything else that their mic might pick up. 
  
  • If this is disabled, users will have to press their Push to Talk key to speak, even if they normally use Voice Activity to use their mic. 
• Set Voice Channel Status: Tell the server what’s happenin’ in the call by setting a status! 

Recommended App Permissions for Most Server Members

• Use Application Commands: Let your members use apps in conversations, including slash commands. 
• Use Activities: Let your members have a bit of fun and play some Activities. Who doesn’t love Checkers? ‍
• Use External Apps: Allows your members to use apps they have saved on their account to post messages. If disabled, external apps can still be used, but the messages they make will only be shown to the app user.

Starting Permissions for Server Moderators

Next up: your moderators. As your small server grows, it’ll be helpful to designate a few members to keep things under control. 

The following permissions keep your community running smoothly. Most actions that can be taken using these permissions can be easily reversed, but a few of them are a bit more powerful than others. 

Recommended General Permissions for Server Moderators

• Manage Messages: Allows mods to pin, unpin, or delete messages.
• Manage Threads:  Lets users rename, archive, and delete Threads. 
• Create Expressions: Allows mods to upload custom emoji, stickers, and soundboard sounds. 
• Mention @everyone, @here, and All Roles:  Allows using mentions that notify large groups of users. If you’ve ever joined a server before, you know what an @everyone ping feels like. 
• Kick, Approve, and Reject Members: All are tied to one permission. 
  
  • Kick removes users but lets them reenter at any time if they receive an invite. 
  • Approve and Reject are used for servers that require an application to join.
• Ban Members: Removes someone from the server permanently and prevents them from rejoining. You can always lift a ban in Server Settings. 
• Timeout Members: Prevent someone from posting, joining voice channels, and generally interacting with the community for a specified time. 
• Manage Nicknames: Change the nicknames of other users. This overrides any nickname someone may have already given themselves. 
  
  • Helpful in case someone gets a bit unruly with nicknames, or your community wants to have a more structured naming system for its members. 
• View Audit Log: Lets you see a history of all the actions taken on your server, such as creating threads, deleting messages, renaming an emoji, and a bunch more. 

Recommended Voice Channel Permissions for Server Moderators

• Priority Speaker: When you hold down your “Push to Talk” button, this adjusts the volume of everyone’s voice so you can be heard more easily during a hectic call. 
• Mute Members: Lets your moderator mute someone’s microphone so they can’t talk, but they can still listen. 
• Deafen Members: This both mutes someone’s microphone and blocks them from listening to the conversation, essentially making them “leave” without disconnecting from the call. 
• Move Members: Drag-and-drop a VC participant to and from different voice channels. They’ll still need permission to be in the channel you want to move them to in order to connect. 

Recommended Event Permissions for Discord Moderators

• Create Events: Schedule an Event for your community! You can’t edit it after it’s been created.
• Manage Events: With this, you CAN edit an event after it’s been created. You can even delete it if you’ve decided to call it off. 

Advanced Permissions for Server Admins

These are the powerful ones. 

The following permissions allow someone to edit and delete a LOT of important stuff on your server, including messages, emojis, channels, and even some parts of the server itself.

Turn on only the ones that make sense for your community, and be extremely picky about who you give ‘em to. 

• Manage Server: “Wait, isn’t that my job anyway?” Well, *yes*, but this specific permission lets you do a lot of stuff, including: 
  
  • Change the server’s name (to Server McServerFace ideally)
  • Switch voice regions 
  • View all active invites to your server
  • Add new apps to your server
  • Create and update AutoMod rules
• Manage Channels: Create, edit, or delete text, voice, and other types of channels. 
• Manage Roles: Create, edit, or delete roles. They can only adjust the roles that are ranked lower than their current role. 
• Manage Expressions: Edit or remove emoji, stickers, and soundboard sounds already on the server.
• Manage Webhooks: Create, edit, or delete webhooks, which help post content from outside of Discord to your server. 

And the big red button that you should avoid giving unless absolutely necessary… 

• Administrator: Give someone the power to do anything. And, with the exception of straight-up deleting the server, we mean everything. It’s a very dangerous permission to grant. Toggle this on only if you’re absolutely, positively 100% certain that it’s the right thing to do. 

Whew! That was… a lot. But there’s no need to rush things. Every community is different and has its own needs. Remember: it’s more enjoyable for your members to grant them new permissions over time than it is to remove a permission they’ve gotten used to already. 

For example, if you’re unsure if your server needs to let your members “Use External Sounds” from their soundboard when in a call, consider keeping it off at the start. If you decide to enable it later, your members will be excited to try it out in your server! If you have “Use External Sounds” enabled and then decide to remove access to it, your members might get bummed out that something they were enjoying was taken away.

If you’re ever looking for more ways to improve your community moderation skills, our Safety Library has a dedicated section for Moderation that can help you brush up on your mod abilities, and if you have more questions, poke us on Twitter!