What is Onboarding?

Onboarding is a community feature that lets you create a customized welcome experience for new members by letting them choose the roles and channels they want to have and by helping them navigate through the server.

How does it work?

After its completely set up, New members are greeted with a welcome screen, followed by a few pre-join questions that let the members choose from a number of roles and channels for themselves. These questions can be about their interests, their purpose for joining the server, for them to select any number of ping roles, color roles or just simple self roles. The questions can also be a way to let members choose what channels they want to have on their list.

After the onboarding experience, members will have the option to add/remove their channels and change the answers to the question through #Channels & Roles. You can also add more post-join questions for more self roles and channel options. Server guide can also be set up under the same section, which houses a Welcome Message, To Do tasks and Resources.

How do I set it up?

Onboarding can be found in Server Settings > Community > Onboarding (Desktop only). Onboarding is a feature for Community servers, which means it won't be available until Community is enabled for the server in Server Settings > Enable Community. It is highly recommended to completely set up Onboarding when first setting up the server as changes to it later only take effect on new members and not existing ones (for example adding new default channels).

  1. Safety Setup: Before onboarding setup, it is promopted and recommended to set up your safety parameters such as AutoMod and Verification Level.
  2. Default Channels: Select all the channels you want your members to have in their list by default. Atleast one channel where the @everyone role is allowed to view and send messages in is required but you may add as many as all the public channels in your server (⚠️ Members will still have the option to remove the default channels from their list after the onboarding process)
  3. Questions: Next up, you can set up pre-join and post-join questions for members to grab roles and channels.
    • Pre-join questions (limit=4) show up during the welcome process and is recommended for the more important roles that you may absolutely want the new members to choose from/know about.
    • Post-join questions (limit=15) show up after the welcome process in #Channels & Roles and can be for any number of non-important roles.
    • Each question can have either single choice or multi choice options and can be set to be required or skippable.
  4. Server Guide:-
    • Welcome Sign can be set up to show the author (owner/admin/mod with manage server and roles permissions) welcoming the members with a custom message.
    • To Do tasks (minimum=0 or 3, maximum=5) can be set up so members can be guided through the first few channels (either to simply view, or to send a message) that they should visit, such as reading through rules, sending a message in general and checking the announcements.
    • Resource channels (limit=7) can be set up to turn read-only channels into resource pages that sit no where else but the Server Guide. What makes them unique is the fact that members start at the top of the channel content instead of bottom & chat bar, author avatar/name and timestamps are removed for a cleaner look.
    • A custom Server Guide Banner can also be set (boost level 2 required)

The other side of the coin

While onboarding is a great way to greet new members, it also has its cons. Down below you'll see the common issues that we face, alongside the solutions to those issues.

  1. Channels being hidden: While the channel list is great for users who want to have the freedom to choose what channels they want to have in their list, there are times when some important channels are hidden from users. Maybe its a new channel you just created and added to defaults, or its a channel users thought was not important but turns out to be.
    • During onboarding setup, Discord does prompt us to select all public channels in either the questionnaire or default channels so that users have a way to add those channels right at the beginning, but it still doesn't warrant newly created channels.
    • In the questionnaire, we can set one pre-join question with either just one option to add all channel and categories to the new member's list or set an option for each category. That way when selected, all the channels get added and it automatically enabled "Show All Channels" which ensures that any existing and new channels always show in the members' lists.
  2. Resource channels not showing up in Channels & Roles: When resource channels are enabled and selected, those channels show up neither in Channels & Roles, nor anywhere else but Server Guide. While that is intended behavior and you may already be aware of it, new and existing members may not be. You'll often see questions like "where is this channel?" and even upon explaining, it may leave the users slightly confused and understandably frustrated.
    • Members who have "Show All Channels" enabled will still see those resource channels in their channel list, whether they enable it themselves or get it automatically enabled via the method mentioned above.
    • You can set up duplicate channels, one set sitting in Server Guide and another in a categoy that may or may not be set as default. Although that creates more problems than it solves such as maintaining two channels with the same content, cross linking, members with show all channels enabled seeing duplicate channels and so on.
  3. Default channel being a requirement: One of the first steps of onboarding is setting up at least on viewable and typeable channel as default and while this makes sense for most servers, there are many that find it frustrating to have to select one such as any application based or verification gated servers.
    • The channel only needs to be viewable and typeable by @everyone role. Which means if your server has a "community" or "member" role that everyone already has, you can select any one channel > set the @everyone role to view and type in > add the community role to not be able to type in. That way, the channel is a default cthat everyone has but cannot type in. This can be a rules or welcome channel or really anything you want.
    • If you have no such roles or don't want to use that, you can use that one channel as "Honeypot" channel aimed at catching spam bots. Learn More
    • Using the sync category bypass method: Enable onboarding > make sure the category perms are all in neutral/unchanged > select the one channel as default > sync the channels to category that includes the default channel > deny view perms in category. (Note: you'll have to revert view perms to neutral in the future if you want to edit Onboarding)

Did you know?

  1. You can set up rules to be displayed to all new members by adding each rule you want displayed in Server Settings > Access.
  2. You can set up YouTube and Twitch integrations by heading over to Server Settings > Integrations, so that all new members joining are automatically prompted to connect their accounts to get the integration benefits (only available for Twitch or YouTube Partners. Learn More)
  3. Onboarding is actually the successor to Welcome Screening feature that is now unavailable to be enabled or edited, but is still used in many communities. Traces of it still exist in Server Insights.
  4. The onboarding process is served to users that leave/get removed and come back, but the answers to the questions are pre-selected so users can quickly skip through it.
  5. For any pre-join or post-join questions, if the amount of options go past 13, they turn into a dropdown menu.
  6. Onboarding has an effect on the server's verification and how members are verified in the server.
  7. Default channels cannot be deleted by anyone until they're removed from the selection.
  8. One of the most common yet confusing errors that suddenly break Onboarding is the result of an emoji(s) that is used in Onboarding not being available anymore. So if yours stops working, that should be the first thing you should check.
  9. You can choose to not have any pre-join questions set at all, in case you want the new members to just read the rules and/or connect their accounts with YouTube/Twitch as part of the onboarding process.
  10. The special tabs such as Server Guide and Channels & Roles that show up after Community/Onboarding is enabled, although clearly visible, can be hard to find for any users new to Discord. So its good practice to mention them in any welcome message or for general guidance:
    • <id:quote> - Server Guide
    • <id:customize> - Channels & Roles
    • <id:browse> - Browse Channels (replaces the Channels & Roles in case there are no pre-join and post-join questions set)
    • https://discord.com/channels/{server_id}/boosts - Server Boosts tab (Bonus)
    • Sadly there isn't a way to mention the Events tab in messages