Discord is a growing platform with over 150 million monthly active users. Due to its design and community norms, many Discord users remain anonymous. Unfortunately, this has led to problems with anonymous “users” who are bots acting maliciously.

An influx of malicious bots can make it difficult for server owners to maintain a safe space for their members and can even compromise the security of the server. It is crucial for server owners to take proactive measures to keep them out.

Fortunately, there are many ways to prevent bots from invading your server. One of the most effective methods is to ask users to verify themselves before allowing them to join the server. This is done by implementing a verification system that requires new users to provide information or complete a task before gaining access to the server.

Why you should add verification to Discord.

Creating a Discord server free of malicious bots is essential to building a trusted and intimate community. But, the benefits of adding a verification system don’t end there!

The verification process ensures that the members who join your server are committed and interested in being part of the community. By creating slight friction in the onboarding process, it ensures that drop-ins are less likely to engage, which is good for maintaining the quality of the server. In our experience, having a Discord server of 100 highly engaged members is more beneficial than a server of 1000 disengaged members.

The verification process also gives server owners a chance to ask their members questions, creating valuable data. You can ask members about their interests, their contact details or how they came across you server. This data can then be used to improve the server's content and to target specific user groups for promotions, events, and other marketing activities. Keep reading to see how we enable this with Bind!

The verification options

1. Captcha

Ask users to complete a Captcha task, which ensures people who are joining are real and can pass the test. This is a very common technique that we see across the internet, it is simple and works well. However, it can be frustrating and take time, especially if you get it wrong (which people do 33% of the time!). Captcha.bot is a popular option to deploy this.

2. Click emoji

Asks users to react to a message, typically the server rules or community guidelines. This has the added benefit of asking people to read a message. It is very quick and easy to do, so potentially it doesn’t provide the friction or bot protection benefits that we mentioned. Dyno and MEE6 are popular bots that provide this.

3. Email-based

Ask users to verify through a Discord authentication flow, where they have the option to share an email address. Users read a message and click the verify button. Below you see our powerful Bind bot, which enables this.

Bind is an email-based Discord verification bot. When users verify through Bind:

• Bind assigns a verified role, allowing you to give special permissions to users who verify.

• Bind can assign other special roles, by matching the email provided in verification to customer data that you connect to Bind. For example, paid users of your product. See how we use this in our Bind Discord server.

• Bind collects the email address of people who verify and allows admins to access this data. A CSV of emails matched to Discord user IDs can be downloaded on our dashboard. This allows you to connect with Discord users across email and target them with specific campaigns.

• You can automatically direct users to a survey tool, such as Google Forms, so that you can ask users questions about their interests and goals.

Get started using Bind or book time with one our our Discord experts here!