As one of the top advertising servers for the various communities on Discord, the popular communication platform, you may realize we talk A LOT about fostering a strong community. 

To quickly recap this, we focus on the element of building a community so heavily because communities are what makes your community a community instead of an empty server, so it’s essential that you have one, and you have a positive community. Anyways, background info aside, what do reaction roles and introductions have to do with this. Well both of them help to introduce new and old members of the community to other new and old members of the community. If implemented properly you can also use them to help manage your community and create a more intuitive sever design. Now let’s address everything I just mentioned

Reaction Roles

How do I get Reaction Roles in my server?

Well, there are many bots that create some form of reaction roles, however, they all have a similar process, first, you have to make the roles themselves, and then you have to program them into a bot. Some bots still use the older reactions system, while many more updated bots use buttons. Both accomplish the same task. Now, what reaction roles would you want? In AYS we have a mix. We have some introductory roles, that help to give information about the member, such as the languages they speak, their age, etc.

These are very useful to quickly learn some details about someone you are speaking with, and are generally used pretty heavily within communities. Now about that intuitive server design, how does all that work? Well, we also have some access and ping roles, that help our members-only get notified about things they care about or only access things that are relevant to what they wish to do within the server.

As you can see Reaction Roles are an excellent way to help facilitate the connections between members, and also help your members to better enjoy your server.

Introductions

Introduce yourself or introductions channels serve many of the same purposes, and have the same effect, of better-introducing members to the community. However, they tend to include more detail. Generally, introductions are long and include lots of information about someone, whatever they wish to share. Within communities, many new and old members will publish introductions, and it is a good conversation starter, however, due to the fact that instead of clicking the username and looking at the roles, you have to search the channel for messages from the user, then find and read it, it’s not good for in the moment usage, and briefly talking to some of our staff, they don’t seem to be read too often. However, for the purpose of a conversation starter, they are pretty good as they help your members identify common interests and connections.

So which should you use?

Both benefit your community! So we recommend implementing both and seeing what gets used, if introductions never get used and reaction roles do (or vice versa) then you can easily remove the introductions. It’s always good to experiment and see what works, what works for our community may not work for yours!