If you’ve done any gaming before at all, you’ve no doubt heard of Discord. If you haven’t, Discord is the successor to many messaging platforms based around gaming — Xfire, Teamspeak, Ventrillo, and more. Discord has been so successful, that it was recently announced that they were gaining around $2.5B in funding.
That said, more and more gamers are flocking to the platform everyday. There are tons of groups and unique servers, all based around different games and topics. However, there’s also a lot of management that goes into keeping a Discord server up and running. Luckily, a lot of that can easily be automated by adding Discord “bots” to your server.
Not sure how you can add Discord bots to your server? Follow along below, and we’ll show you how you can do that step-by-step.
What are Discord Bots?
If you’ve never operated a Discord server before — or been in one with bots — you may not be entirely sure what they do. Like we mentioned, they’re usually there to automate different aspects of server management, as well as social sharing. For example, you can add a bot that will play music, post amusing memes or gifs to the channel, and more. There are some more serious bots out there for fetching game stats out of supported games. The types of bots available are endless, and the ones that you add to your own personal server all depend on what features you’re looking to add to the server. Here are just a few ideas that you can do with Discord bots. Carbonite has some more productive options available for you to use as well, such as a bot for watching Steam sales, or a bot for watching when all your friends are online.
How to add Discord bots
At first, it might sound complicated to add bots to your Discord server; however, Discord keeps it pretty straightforward. The only thing you’ll need is your own Discord server, or a Discord server that you have admin privileges to.
To add a bot, you’ll actually have to do it through the Discord website. Here are the steps to adding a bot to your server:
- Log into the Discord website with your account information.
- Next, head on over to your profile, find the General Permissions section, and then make sure that Manage Server is enabled. Now we can add a bot to your server!
- Now, you can click on the ‘Add Bot to Server’ button, or you can use the ‘Invite bot’, depending on what you’re using for adding a bot to your server.
- Next, we’ll need to select the specific server we’re adding the bot to. Just select the server to add the bot to from the prompt, and then you can authorize the bot in the pop up window that appears next.
- Finally, you can open up the Discord app on your computer, head to the server you added the bot to, and then you should see your added bot in the sidebar.
As you can see, it’s really easy to add a bot to a Discord server that you have admin privileges to. In just a couple of clicks, you can have some new features up and running on your own server. If you are a little more experienced with Discord, you can add bots via a URL.
It works essentially the same way as the above steps, requiring you to be logged into your Discord server.
- Open your browser.
- A Discord Bot URL is going to look like this: https://discordapp.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=<Bot_Client_ID>&scope=bot&permissions=0.
- Next, you’re going to want to find your Bot Client ID. Once you find it, look for the “Bot_Client_ID” in the URL above. You’ll want to chose those characters with the actual Client ID of the bot that you want to add. Then, just press enter.
- Next, you will need to authorize the bot. The command uses OAuth2 to already verify that; however, it may require some extra authorization, as Discord is very careful about the bots that you allow on the platform.
Verdict
As you can see, it’s actually quite easy to add a bot to your Discord server. If you already have your bot picked out that you want to add, you can have it setup and in use in just a couple of minutes.
Do you have a favorite bot that you add to your Discord servers? Let us know in the comments section below — we’d love to hear from you!