Discord Forum Channels: Setup, Tags and Moderation

A forum channel holds discussions as separate posts instead of one running chat. Each post has a title and its own replies, so a new question does not get buried under a conversation that is already going on.

Discord puts the difference like this: text channels are for in-the-moment discussion, forum channels are for longer discussion around specific topics. Forums are a type of channel, while threads are a type of message, and forum posts are the more persistent of the two.

That makes forums a good fit wherever the same kinds of questions come up again and again, or where an answer stays useful for later readers: support questions, feedback and suggestions, build or art showcases, guides.

Forum channels only exist on servers with Community enabled. If your server is not a Community server yet, turn that on in Server Settings first. Enabling Community also asks you to set a few safety requirements.

To create the channel, hover over the category where it should live, press the plus sign, choose Forum as the channel type, enter a name and press Create Channel.

Permissions. The setup offers a Set recommended permissions button. From there you can limit the forum to certain roles or open it to @everyone. In permission terms, Send Messages lets a member create posts in a forum, and Send Messages in Threads lets them send messages in threads. Forum posts are threads, so replying inside a post falls under the second permission.

Post guidelines. Create post guidelines opens a page where you write what a good post looks like and which tags to use. Keep it short: what belongs in this forum, what a useful title looks like, what information a post should contain.

Tags. Tags label posts, and you can make a tag a requirement before a member can post. A tag can also be marked as moderated, which means only members with the Manage Threads permission can add it to or remove it from a post. That suits status tags such as Solved or Planned, which should not be set by the person who asked.

Layout and sorting. The default layout is either List View, which suits text discussions, or Gallery View, which suits media posts. Posts can be sorted by latest activity or by creation date.

Hide after inactivity. Posts without activity move to an Older Posts section after 1 hour, 24 hours, 3 days or 1 week. 3 days is the default.

Discord names three kinds of moderation support for forums: AutoMod works in forum channels, slow mode limits activity, and the API lets bots and other tools support forums. Slow mode in a forum also covers post creation: a member can send one message and create one post during each slow mode interval.

When a discussion is finished, right-click the post and choose Close Post. The post leaves the new posts list and is locked so that only moderators can reopen it. A post that is closed but not locked can be reopened at any time.

A forum supports exactly one pinned post, and it stays pinned until you unpin it or pin another post. Use it for the thing every new poster should read, usually the rules and an example of a good post.

Deleting and archiving posts is governed by the Manage Threads permission, so give that to the people who look after the forum. For moderation beyond the forum itself, see how to moderate a Discord server.

Each forum has its own search bar that matches words in post titles. That is the strongest argument for asking members, in the post guidelines, to write titles that describe the actual problem instead of "help" or "question".

Members can filter posts by selecting one or several tags. Tags only help with filtering if they are used consistently, so keep the list short and specific. A member who forgot to tag a post can add tags later by right-clicking the post and choosing Edit Tags.

Discord recommends introducing forums gradually. Its suggested order: create a private forum for you and your moderators to test, identify text channels where a forum would fit and replace them, create the new forums with guidelines and tags, announce the change and ask for feedback, and only then move larger core channels.

Two things to plan for. Server templates do not include Community channel types such as forums, so a forum has to be created by hand on every server (see Discord server templates). And a forum works best as one part of a clear channel layout; channel organization covers where forums sit next to regular text channels.