How to Create A Welcome Channel on Discord?

Discord is a popular app for creating online groups, communities, and discussion boards. It has a modern design and supports text and voice chatting. The invite-only online place where all the group communication happens is a "Discord Server". Inside the Discord Server, you can have many topic-based sections called "Discord Channels". After you set up your new Discord Server for your book club, gaming team, or any other community, you create invite links to send to potential members. When a new user joins your Discord Server, you need a way to welcome and onboard them to your group. You can do this by automating your welcome messages using third-party Discord Bots. Every new user who joins using your invite link will automatically enter the Welcome Channel and see your welcome message. You can explain the community purpose, rules, organization of channels, and other FAQs inside the welcome message.

Now let us walk you step-by-step through the process of setting up your Welcome Channel on Discord. In a nutshell, these are the five steps you must perform to make a welcome channel for your Discord Server:

1. Create a New Discord Server

2. Create a New Channel inside your Discord Server

3. Connect the MEE6 Discord Bot to your Discord Server

4. Create an Automated Welcome Message using MEE6

5. Invite New Users or Members to your Discord Server

How to Setup Automatic Welcome Messages in Discord?

Step 1: Create a New Discord Server

These are instructions on how you can make a fresh Discord Server. If you already have a Discord Server, you can skip to Step 2.

1. Go to Discord website. Click on the button "Open Discord in your browser".
2. If you have a Discord account already, login to it. If you don't have a Discord account, you will be asked to "Enter a username".
3. After you enter a username, a Captcha verification check will be done to ensure that you are human and not a bot. This helps to prevent spam and misuse of Discord.
4. Now you will see the "Welcome to Discord" dialogue box. It will ask you to enter your birthday. Discord is available only for users above 13 years of age. Also, for users under 18 years, no age-restricted content will be shown.
5. Next, you will be shown the box "Create your first Discord Server". You can start from scratch, or select from a template of popular community types on Discord. These templates are Gaming, School Club, Study Group, Friends, Artists & Creators, and Local Community.
6. But if you have already been using Discord for some time, you can simply click the + button on the left sidebar which is for "Add a Server". And you will see "Create a server" with the same options to start from scratch or use a template like in the previous step.
7. Provide a Server Name and Icon to give your Discord Server or group it's own identity and personality. You can always change the name, icon, and other details later. When you proceed from this, you will see the "Take me to my server" button.
8. At this point, if you don't already have a Discord account with email and password, it will show you the "Finish Signing Up" step. Here you will need to enter your email and password to make a new account and start using the Discord Server you just set up.

Step 2: Create a New Channel inside your Discord Server

Discord has two types of channels, Text channel, and Voice channel. For the welcome or onboarding channel, you will use a Text channel. Here's how to create one:

1. Your Discord Server has a sidebar menu on the left. It shows the names of existing channels. It divides the channels into Text Channels and Voice Channels sections. We need to create a new Text Channel. So look for the + icon to the right of the "TEXT CHANNELS" section header. When you hover your mouse cursor over this + icon, the tooltip says "Create Channel". Click this + icon.
2. Select Channel Type as "Text", give a channel name as "Welcome" or any other information name ("Intro" or "Onboarding" or "FAQ" can be suitable too).
3. Let the channel's privacy remain as "Public" as it is by default. This is so that all new members can see it. For this, keep the Private Channel setting toggled to "OFF".
4. Click on the "Create Channel" button.

Step 3: Connect the MEE6 Discord Bot to your Discord Server

Now we will use a popular and trusted third-party bot app called MEE6 to automate our welcome messages for new users in our group.

1. Go to the MEE6 website.
2. Click on the Login button on the top right, and use your Discord account to sign in to MEE6.
3. MEE6 will ask for permissions to access your Discord data and settings. Click on the "Authorize" button to proceed.
4. Now you have logged in to the MEE6 dashboard. Here you will see the names of all Discord Servers that you own or admin.
5. Spot the Discord Server you want to create a new Welcome channel. Click the "Setup" button under it.
6. Again, it will ask for your permission. In the "Add to Server" dropdown, select the Discord Server of your choice and click on the "Continue" button. You will now see a long list of permissions that the MEE6 bot has to control your Discord Server. You can go ahead with all permissions and click on "Authorize".
7. You will be shown a Captcha verification challenge to ensure you are human.
8. The MEE6 bot gets integrated into your selected Discord Server. Now you are inside the MEE6 dashboard, where there are many settings that you can customize. We are ready to create automated welcome messages.

Step 4: Create an Automated Welcome Message using MEE6

We have set up our Discord Server, a new Welcome channel, and connected the MEE6 bot with our server. Now, using the features of MEE6 for server management, we will create a welcome message.

1. You are logged into the MEE6 website. If you are on the main MEE6 dashboard, spot the server you want to create the welcome messages for. Click on the "Go" button.
2. If you are already inside the MEE6 dashboard for a particular server, you will see a left sidebar with different settings pages like Dashboard, Leaderboard, Settings etc. At the top of this sidebar, you see your Server's name, and a dropdown containing names of all other Discord Servers that you have connected to MEE6. Select the server you want to setup the Welcome channel for.
3. Once you are on the MEE6 Dashboard for your server of choice, look for the "Server Management" section and the "Welcome" module inside it. You will find this both on the left sidebar and on the dashboard workspace. Click on the "Welcome" link or card.
4. Let the "Welcome" option be toggled ON or Active.
5. You will also see the option "Send a message when a user joins the server". Toggle it ON.
6. This will expand the "Welcome" option with more settings. In the section "Welcome Message Channel", from the dropdown select your "Welcome" channel (or "Intro" or "Onboarding" or whatever name you gave to this channel.)
7. Next section has the actual content for "welcome text message".  By default, it says "Hey {user}, welcome to **{server}**!" By using these variables in curly brackets, the bot can show personalized messages to the users, with their username and server name inserted automatically.
8. You can add more description and welcome instructions in this message, up to 2000 characters. It also supports emojis.
9. Below this setting, there is also the option of "Send a private message to new users". If you activate this, MEE6 bot will send a private message into the inbox of every new user when they join your server. This is an optional feature that you can go for. However, for the onboarding message shown in the Welcome channel, the previous setting is enough.
10. With this "Welcome Text Message" setting, you have created a custom welcome message. Every new user will get this message inside the "Welcome" channel of your Discord Server.

Step 5: Invite New Users or Members to your Discord Server

You are almost done! To see your automatic welcome messages working, you simply need to invite new members to your Discord community. When they join using your invite link, they will receive the welcome message addressed to them inside the "Welcome" channel.

1. Back inside the Discord app, select your Discord Server of choice from the left sidebar.
2. Right-click on the icon or name of the server, and select "Invite People" from the dropdown.
3. You will be given an Invitation Link. Simply copy this and message it to anyone you want to invite to your Discord Server.
4. When they use this link, they will be added to your group. They must provide their username and date of birth. They can create a new Discord Account using email and password, or log in to their existing account.
5. Once they are inside your Discord Server, they will see that they have a welcome message for their username inside the Welcome channel of your server. If you added any more information to this welcome message, like purpose, FAQs, and rules of the community, they will read it. With this, they will feel ready to explore the rest of the channels inside your group and start engaging actively with other members.

Summary

We have seen how it is simple and straightforward to create a Welcome channel on Discord. Using our instructions, you can setup a Discord Server, create a Welcome channel, connect it to the MEE6 Discord Bot, and customize your welcome message for all your new members. All the new members who join your Discord Server will receive a welcome message automatically for their username inside the Welcome channel. This is really helpful to introduce new members to your community, let them feel at home, and ready to explore and start contributing to the group. Thus, you can use the automation of welcoming new members as a fertile foundation for cultivating an awesome and thriving community using Discord and MEE6.