Discord Role Ideas Generator

A role is a label you give a member. It carries permissions, a color, and a place in a list. Members can hold several, and Discord adds up the permissions of all of them.

The list order is the part people get wrong. It decides 3 things:

• •Who can manage whom. You only edit roles below your highest one.
• •What color a member shows in. The highest colored role wins.
• •What a bot can hand out. Only roles below the bot's own.

That last one is why a leveling bot placed too low does nothing at all. It reports no error. It just never gives anybody a level.

Discord allows 250 roles per server. Almost nobody needs more than 20. Every role belongs to one of 8 bands: Ownership, Administration, Moderation, Bots and integrations, Contributors, Special recognition, Progression, Community. The tool above shows the bands your settings use, and numbers every role, so you can copy the order across.

Roles are the only thing between a stranger and your channels. Get them wrong in one of these 4 ways and you find out late:

• •One person holds every permission, so one bad night ends the server.
• •A mod cannot mute anyone at 3am, because the power sits above them.
• •A bot has Administrator, so a bug in it is a bug with full rights.
• •Nobody can tell staff from members, so reports go nowhere.

Roles do a second job as well: recognition. A role is the cheapest reward a community has. It costs you nothing, and it sits next to somebody's name every time they speak.

The third job is clarity. When a new member can see who runs the place, they ask the right person instead of guessing.

1. 1.Pick a preset, or set it yourself. A preset sets every control on the left at once, colors included. Everything stays editable after.
2. 2.Say how it gets moderated. The setting decides which mod roles are on offer. A small mod team puts a head mod, a support role, and a moderation bot within reach. A mod team with shifts and appeals adds an appeals reviewer. It adds a trial rank too, unless you have one already. A server over 1,000 members has the trial rank at any setting. How many of them reach your list is down to the role count. A short list stops at the head mod.
3. 3.Tick who else is in there. Each box adds the roles that group needs and nothing else. Members level up is the one that needs room: a leveling bot and two ranks. Without space for both, the tool leaves it out and says so. If any box seems to change nothing, the role count is the limit, and the panel says so.
4. 4.Read each card. It gives you the name, what the role is for, and the permissions to tick. Then whether to show it separately in the member list. And whether to make it mentionable, which means anyone can ping everybody who has it. A colored role also shows its color on both Discord themes. The utility roles are uncolored on purpose, and each one says why. A Careful tag marks a permission that can do real damage, and says what the damage is.
5. 5.Rename anything you like. Where a band holds more than one role, the arrows move it inside that band. Then copy the whole list, or one role at a time, and build it in Server Settings yourself.

Most servers that get wrecked were not hacked. Somebody was given more than they needed, and then lost their account or their temper. Work down this list:

• •Administrator stays on the owner. It ignores every per-channel rule you set.
• •Manage Roles is not a mod permission. It hands out every role below it.
• •Manage Server renames and re-links the place. 2 people, at most.
• •Ban Members is hard to undo. Kick Members and Timeout cover most of it.
• •Mention Everyone reaches people who muted you. Use a ping role instead.
• •Manage Channels can delete a channel and every message ever in it.
• •Manage Webhooks lets anything post as anybody. A webhook is a URL that writes into a channel.

Most bots ask for Administrator at setup, because it is easier than listing what they actually need. Almost none require it. Grant the short list instead.

Then check these 4 things before you call it done:

• •Every staff role sits above the members it is meant to moderate.
• •Your leveling bot sits above every level role it gives out.
• •The base member role has no color, so the roles above it show.
• •Two-factor authentication is on, for you and for every admin.

Color is the last job, and the easiest to get wrong. Discord draws a role name in its own color, on a background you do not control. Plenty of your members are on the theme you are not. The tool above measures every color it suggests against Discord's dark and light backgrounds. It flags anything under 3 to 1, which is where a name stops being easy to read at a glance.