Post by Dancing Puffball on Jan 19, 2020 10:14:26 GMT
5 tips to improve the activity of your server
Here are my tips on keeping your server active. Keep in mind that activity is rarely a constant thing. It is extremely difficult for a server to be active all day, every day, and 'dead' periods are only natural. As someone who has grown many active servers, I can attest to this. Below are 5 of my tips that can work alongside advertising that can help your server increase its activity. If you read this, and are confused about anything, feel free to ping me in Growth Questions.
Tip 1: Be very active and engage with your members
Growing an active Discord server is an enormous responsibility to the founders of the server, and it is up to you as the leader to be an active and enjoyable personality capable of providing content for your members. You cannot rely on other people to provide this content for you. Leading a successful and active server requires a lot of your time greeting members with your friends, and providing them with quality conversations. When I start a community server, I usually bring at least one charismatic and outgoing friend to help make the server friendly, fun and active.
If you are unable to extend multiple hours a day to attend to your server, it may not be the best time for you to start one. You are the star of your server, and it is your responsibility to be very active, and to hire active staff. Your members are not responsible for your server's activity. Findng active members who plan to stay regularly active is a tough task, but if your server is unique, interesting, fun, and has welcoming engaging members, your chances of earning these members is much greater.
Tip 2: Stay true to focus
Example: Don't be a Pokemon server that rarely talks about Pokemon in the main channel
The focus of your server matters, because certain server types are far more in demand than others. One mistake that many people make is that they fail to grasp the supply and demand aspect involved in Discord server advertising. It is also extremely necessary that your server stays true to and emphasizes on its main points. This means that if your server is advertised as active and laid back, it should actually be. If the server isn't as advertised, people will leave faster.
You will also wish to capitalize on what makes your server unique and stand out. Cookie cutter servers that don't offer anything interesting: for instance, no unique theme, very few emotes, members that aren't very social or friendly, very few interactive bots etc, are less likely to survive. Interesting servers tend to have a lot of work put into them in order for them to stand out above the rest. Being nitro boosted can also help, as this can allot your server with certain perks that can't be achieved otherwise.
Tip 3: Don't be afraid to take action on active regulars who divide the chat.
Lack of poor moderation and special treatment can harm a server in a big way. If members are being disruptive, how active they are should not be a priority. Punish members who disrupt the chat and make it uncomfortable for other users. Many people running active servers often find themselves in a situation where gaining new active members is difficult, and this is often due to servers appearing unwelcoming. A friendly, clean, high quality chat is more likely to keep new members in, while a chat filled with rude behavior, spam and unwelcoming members is much less likely to do so.
Tip 4: Have a 'dead chat' ping, which users can assign through self-assign roles.
Use a bot like Yagpdb to create a 'dead chat' self assignable role in your server's role menu. You can find a tutorial for setting up self-assign roles with Yagpdb here.
This is a role that your members can self assign, and its purpose would be to 'wake the chat up'. Because users would be assigning this role voluntarily, it's much less favorable to risk than pinging @everyone or @here. To prevent the role from being abused, a bot such as Dyno must be used to turn the ping's accessibility on and off. Dyno has a command called [prefix] mentionable, which can be used to toggle any role on and off like a switch, which would prevent users from being able to abuse the role.
Tip 5: Make server fun and engaging
A couple of strategies to make your server fun and engaging are:
1: Include some really fun bots to keep members engaged. Being capable of coding your own custom bots can also help with server activity as it makes your server unique.
2: Having a server that clearly has a lot of effort put into its setup, from the category and channel layouts, to the emote selection, the graphics, well set up rules, and more.
3: Have level-up roles, and offer extra perks to talkative members. Include a 'server currency' system with a bot such as Unbelievaboat.
4: Be VC friendly. Many people enjoy VC, but have trouble finding servers they enjoy where VC is frequently active.
5: Include channel games such as one word story or hurt and heal. Consider a daily questions channel, or a fact of the day channel.
6: Have a meme channel and include the bot 'Dank Memer' so people can generate dank memes on your server.
For emotes you can find many at discordemoji.com/
All sorts of strategies can work depending on your server, and these are just a few. These are many of the strategies I use to keep my social servers active. Use these suggestions for ideas, and continue to search for what works best for you.
