How To Add Bots To Your Discord Server

 If you run a Discord server, you have a wide variety of options to provide neat features for your players. One of those features is the addition of bots. Customizing your server is simple once you learn how to add these bots.

In this article, I’ll go over how to set up a Discord server, introduce you to the world of bots, and explain how to add bots to your Discord server (and why you might want to).

What Are Discord Bots?

Bots are simply computer programs that interact with human beings (and sometimes with other bots) to perform certain functions automatically. A website that has a helpful chat window immediately opens up offering to talk with you about their product or service; that’s a bot. If you use Reddit, you see bot interactions (beep! boop!) all the time.

Bots can be helpful or infuriating, depending on their purpose, their design, and how they are deployed. On Discord, bots provide a variety of productive and not-so-productive features to the community on the server where they “live.” You can add bots to your Discord server that help you to moderate members or make your server a little more unique and fun.

For example, there are bots that play music, bots that offer amusing memes on request, bots that fetch your game stats for you, and bots that play a loud air horn noise on the channel when prompted to do so.

Finding Good Bots

The Discord world is full of bots; there are thousands of freely-available bots out there. There’s a list of some silly and semi-useful bots here if you like, but more serious bots can be found on the Carbonitex website, which is regarded as one of the best repositories of Discord bots around. Another reputable repository for Discord bots is called, simply enough, Discord Bots. For the truly hardcore, a GitHub search for Discord bots will find just about everything that it is in the public view.

Adding Bots To Your Discord Server

Adding Bots to your Discord server can be a lengthy process the first time around. Once you get a hang of it, it’s actually quite simple.

Step 1 – Turn On Administrator Access

To add bots to your Discord Server you will have to be an Administrator of that server. If you don’t own the server it’s probably a good idea to check with the owner before adding anything to it.

1. From your Discord home page select the server you’d like to add the bot to (on the left-hand side of the Discord Website)
2. Once Selected; Choose the drop-down menu (The server name in the top left-hand of the screen with a small down arrow next to it)
3. Tap “Server Settings”
4. Tap “Roles”
5. Scroll down to the General Permissions setting and toggle “Administrator” on
6. Click “Save Changes”

Step 2 – Get the Bots You Want

It’s important to note that depending on your Bots’ source website you may see “Invite” or “Add Bots.” For this example, we’ll use Dyno, but the instructions may vary slightly if you’re adding another Bot.

Find the Bot that you’ll add to your server and login using your Discord credentials.

Tap “Invite” or “Add Bot” whichever is listed, then tap on the server you’d like to add the Bot to.

Follow the prompts – This will take you through a series of permissions and will ask for Administrator access which is why Step 1 is so important

Authorize the Bot and complete the Captcha

There are several options for bots available; some may differ in their process but following the prompts will make the installation successful.

If you have trouble with finding your server make sure that you are logged into Discord in the same browser you’re using for the Bots’ website. Also, verify that you are signed into the correct account.

If you want to add someone as an administrator on your server, check out this TechJunkie on adding a new administrator.

One popular Bot is Dyno; a full-featured bot with moderation features, music playing abilities, CleverBot integration, and a lot of other features outside the scope of this article. It’s been added to more than 1.4 million Discord servers, so it’s kind of popular.

You can get Dyno from the Carbonitex website.

1. Click the green “Add Bot to Server” button. This will bring up a confirming dialog from Discord asking you to choose which server you want to add Dyno to. You’ll need to be logged in to your server for Discord to know that it’s you trying to add something.
2. Select your server and click “Authorize.”

You may have to fill in an “I’m not a robot” captcha, but after that, the bot will be automatically added to your server, and you’ll be taken to the administration page for managing Dyno on your server.

Easy peasy!

If you’re more hardcore and want to add bots without bothering with the pretty interface, you can also add them directly. You’ll need to know the client ID of the bot, and you’ll need to be logged into your Discord server. (This is the method you’ll need to use for most GitHub bots, which don’t have a web interface.)

1. Open your browser and paste the following URL: https://discordapp.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=<Bot_Client_ID>&scope=bot&permissions=0.
2. Change ‘Bot_Client_ID’ in the above URL with the actual client ID of the bot you want to add.
3. You may still have to authorize the bot even though the command uses Oauth2 to do that very thing.

Authorizing Your Discord Bot

Discord is very careful with bots and sometimes requires multiple authorizations to enable one to work. Even though the platform uses Oauth2 to enable a permitted bot to access and interact, you may still be asked to authorize it within the channel.

Some Popular Discord Bots

Now that you know how to add bots, what are some of the bots you should add? Well, only you know what kind of environment you want your server to have. Here is a list of some of the more popular Discord bots and why you might want to add them.

Dank Member displays memes and has a variety of other meme-related features.

Pancake is a basic multi-featured bot with moderation features and music playing.

Nadeko plays games, offers gambling, and has administration tools.

MedalBot lets your users record clips.

RickBot offers more than 4500 custom soundboards.

Groovy is a music bot that supports Spotify, YouTube, and Soundcloud.

Rythm is a fully-functional music bot that is very stable.

Mantaro is a customizable “fun” bot.

A translator is a multilingual bot that provides instant translation between more than 100 languages.

More Bot Resources

There are a lot of resources out there to help you choose, customize, and even create your own Discord bots. Here are some of the most popular and useful bot-oriented resources available on the Web to help you get the most out of your bot experience.

Discord.me is a large Discord community where users can add and promote servers, but the site’s overall mission is to “help people find online communities they love.” The site has 33 categories of servers, ranging from Military to Mature, Anime to Art, and Fitness to Furry.

An active blog keeps community members up to date, and the site features an NSFW toggle that lets you avoid (or seek out) the “after dark” servers that are out there.

Discordbots.org is a bot-themed Discord community with a vast array of resources for bot users. The site has thousands of bots categorized and rated, and also publishes and supports its own bot creation API, available in JavaScript, Java, Python, C#/.NET, and Go variations.

For bot developers, this site is a goldmine of great resources and examples.

Bastionbot.org takes an interesting philosophical position for the bot world – rather than having a dozen bots each running their own functions; Bastion attempts to be an all-in-one bot that can handle literally everything a server might need.

Bastion’s feature list includes music, games, giveaways and promotions, a suggestions channel, voting, user profiles, virtual currencies, leveling systems, a server shop, filters, searches, game stats, messaging, moderation features, emojis, “fun” features like airhorns and quotes, starboard, scheduled commands, and triggers and reaction events. Bastion is a full-featured bot that can do just about anything you want it to do, and it adds features regularly.

Carbonitex is a statistics-collecting website devoted to Discord servers and bots and is an amazing resource for those who want to see where the action is in the server and bot playing field. You can invite Carbonitex to monitor your own server and collect statistics to show where you are in the great server ecosystem..