Create a Discord Server for Your Writing Group — 5 steps
Want to learn how to set up a Discord space for your writing group? This video offers you a step by step process (five steps) to walk your way through setting up a Discord server you’re hosting. It’s designed to be for people brand new to Discord, and who are focused on writing community work. It overviews starting a new server, naming it, setting up categories and channels, posting to a channel, responding to a post, setting the roles for participants, and inviting new participants .
Thanks to Danielle Koepke for offering resources and a presentation on using Discord with a course at ATTW, and for creating a server to facilitate the associated workshop experience; while I couldn’t attend the workshop, I appreciated the chance to see how one might set up a workshop space to help demonstrate the app’s usefulness in a writing classroom.
Login address for discord: / discord
0.0 Introduction
0.12 Step One — Setting up your workspace
0.39 Log in address for Discord.
2:03 Step Two — Creating a server.
2:19 Outlining Topics: Decide on the organization of content for conversations
4:07 Overviewing the layout of Discord for a new user
4:59 Creating a server
6:23 Categories and Channels
6:37 New Category
7:12 New Channel
7:28 Reordering Categories/Renaming Categories and Channels
9:36 Step Three — Posting within a channel
11:07 Share example
12:27 How to respond/react to a post
12:50 Step Four — Setting up roles / parameters for users
13:39 Setting up roles on the screen
17:47 Step Five — Inviting people.
18:28. Conclusion and Next video: how I invite users to enter the discord “server” / group / community
In this video, I walk through five steps:
Step one: deciding where you’ll work with this app — choose your device or two, familiarize yourself with the app, load the program on a browser or two as well so that you can see the kinds of interfaces people encounter when logging in on their preferred device.
Step Two: Think about how you want to sequence conversations, and outline the kinds of categories and channels you would like to have — if you’re familiar with discussion boards, this can feel similar, at least at an organizational layout level. Learn how to create, rename, and reorder headers (categories) and channels (discussion topic areas).
Step Three: Learn how to post to the discussion channels. If you jump into a browser at this stage, and compare it to the App, you’ll see that the browser allows you to attach files; the app doesn’t (or it’s hidden from me!). The workaround for the app — find the document you want to add into the group; use the share button to bring it into the app.
Step Four: In the video, I talk about setting up only one specific identity—naming it administrator which might be a bit confusing. I could have said co-leader. That would work as well and avoid confusion. So in this section, I overview what a general user can do in my writing community (@everyone); if I then wanted to set the parameters differently for that co-leader, I would then go into that role, and open up as many of these as were useful for that person. If I have a server I’m done hosting, I can transfer it over by setting the permissions, at the bottom of “everyone” to someone else. That’s a big final decision for the server.
Step Five: Invite people. This is a fairly straightforward process—you find the invite in the settings, choose your method of sharing or linking, and invite participants.