How to welcome new members on Discord: built-in tools, welcome bots and member approval

New members decide in the first minutes whether they stay. On Discord, you have three tools to make those minutes count, and they work best in order: Discord's built-in features (a welcome message and, on Community servers, Onboarding), then a welcome bot for your own message, image and starter role, and finally, for servers that screen newcomers, an approval step before the welcome.

This guide covers the three, on desktop and mobile, compares five welcome bots, and gives you welcome message templates to copy for several kinds of communities. Discord menus and bot server counts were checked on 23 October 2026.

Disclosure: Toscio is our bot. It isn't a welcome bot, so it appears only in the section about approving members before they join. Nobody paid to be in this guide.

Quick answer in 3 steps

1. Turn on Discord's welcome message: Server Settings > Overview > System Messages Channel. Free, one minute, but you can't write the text.
2. Add a welcome bot for your own message, a welcome image or a starter role: MEE6, Carl-bot, ProBot, Dyno or Welcomer.
3. If you approve people first, add the approval step before the welcome, with Discord's Apply to Join or an application bot, and greet members once they're accepted.

On a Community server, also set up Onboarding: it lets newcomers pick their roles and channels before they even see the chat.

Discord's built-in welcome message

Every server can post a message when someone joins, without any bot. You need a role with the Manage Server permission.

1. Click your server's name, then Server Settings.
2. In Overview, find System Messages Channel and pick the channel where greetings should appear.
3. Keep Send a random welcome message when someone joins this server switched on. The option just below lets members reply to the greeting with a sticker, a nice one-click "hi".

The same settings are in the mobile app, under the server's settings, in Overview.

The limits are real. Discord picks the greeting from a list of random lines, and you can't write your own: no rules link, no "start here", no role. The same channel also receives other system messages, such as server boosts, unless you switch them off. For a small group of friends, that's enough. For a community, it's where a welcome bot comes in.

Server Onboarding and Server Guide

If your server has Community turned on, Discord offers a full welcome flow called Onboarding, in Server Settings > Onboarding.

• Default channels. The channels every newcomer sees. Discord requires at least 7, and at least 5 of them must let @everyone view and send messages.
• Questions. "What brings you here?", "Which games do you play?", "Which topics interest you?" Each answer can give roles and add channels. A question can be asked before the member joins, allow several answers, and be required.
• Server Guide. A page new members see after joining, with a welcome sign written by the admins, 3 to 5 new member to-dos (introduce yourself, read the rules, pick your roles) and resource pages made from read-only channels.

Two things the other guides leave out. Onboarding can only be configured and enabled from the desktop app, even though members go through it on any device. And members who leave and come back go through it again.

About the Welcome Screen: many older guides still tell you to set up the Welcome Screen. It's a legacy feature: Discord no longer lets you edit it and points admins to Onboarding instead, and once the Server Guide is on, new members don't see a Welcome Screen at all.

Onboarding guides people to the right channels, but it doesn't post a message in your chat or greet anyone by name. Many servers use both: Onboarding for roles and channels, a welcome bot for the public "welcome, {user}".

Rules screening

Discord's old Membership Screening is now called Rules Screening. On Community servers, new members must accept your rules before they can talk, react or DM other members. Set it up in Server Settings > Safety Setup: edit DM and Spam Protection and turn on Members must accept rules before they can talk or DM. You can add up to 16 rules.

It's a click-through, not a review: anyone who accepts gets in. Discord itself warns that each extra step can make some people give up on joining, so keep the rules short. Our Discord server rules template gives you a version to copy.

How to set up a welcome bot

Every welcome bot works the same way, with a web dashboard or slash commands. Here are the steps, whichever bot you pick.

Add the bot, on desktop or mobile

Add it from its official website or Discord's App Directory, never from a link sent in DMs. On your phone, open the bot's website in your browser, log in with Discord and pick your server: bot dashboards are websites, so the whole setup works on mobile too. Read the permissions it asks for and untick the ones it doesn't need.

Choose where the message goes

Pick a channel: a dedicated #welcome, or your main chat if the server is small and you want regulars to say hi. Most bots can also send a DM. Use it as an extra, not as the only welcome: members who turned off DMs from server members never receive it, and some see unexpected DMs as spam.

Write the message with variables

Bots replace variables with real values when they post: the member's mention, the server's name, the member count. The idea is always the same, but each bot spells them its own way ({user}, {user.mention}, {server}, {membercount}…), so check the list in your bot's dashboard. For a channel link that people can click, write the channel's mention format, <#channel ID>: turn on Developer Mode in Discord's Advanced settings, then right-click the channel and choose Copy Channel ID.

Give a starter role (optional)

Most welcome bots can give a role on join, often called auto role or autorole. It's handy to show a "New member" color or unlock basic channels. Two rules: the bot's role must sit above that role in Server Settings > Roles (see the role order rule), and don't use an auto role that unlocks the server if you want to approve people first, or it skips your approval.

Test it

Join with a second account or ask a friend. Check that the message appears in the right channel, the name is filled in, the links work, the role is given, and that nothing breaks when DMs are closed.

Welcome bots compared

Server counts are those top.gg showed on 23 October 2026, except Welcomer's, which comes from its own site.

How to choose. If you already have MEE6, Carl-bot or Dyno for moderation, use its welcome module: one bot fewer to manage. If a welcome image matters to you, look at ProBot or Welcomer. Other welcome bots exist, Koya for example; whatever you pick, test it before announcing it. For the rest of your bot setup (moderation, tickets, leveling), see our best Discord bots.

Welcome message templates to copy

Each template has a Copy button: it copies the lines without the numbers, ready to paste into your bot's welcome message field. Replace {user} and {server} with your bot's variables, and #rules, #roles and the other channels with your own, using the <#channel ID> format for clickable links.

General community

Study group or class

Creator community

Esports team or competitive community

Gaming community

Support or help community

What to put in a welcome channel

A welcome bot greets people one by one. Your welcome channel is what they read next. Keep it read-only and short:

• One line on what the server is and who it's for.
• The rules, or a link to them. Our rules template is ready to paste.
• Where to start: the two or three channels that matter, not all of them.
• How to get roles: Onboarding, a roles channel or reaction roles.
• How to get help and who the staff are.
• What's coming: the next event, a recurring session, how to join the team.

On a Community server, the Server Guide's resource pages are a cleaner place for this: they open at the top instead of the bottom of a chat, without avatars or a message bar.

If you approve members first: Apply to Join vs an application bot

Some servers don't let everyone in: private communities, study groups with limited places, creator programs, team servers, communities that were raided. Then the order changes: approve first, welcome after. A welcome bot that greets everyone on join would greet people you haven't accepted yet.

Discord's Apply to Join. In Server Settings > Access, choose Apply to Join and write custom questions. Applicants see nothing of your server until they're accepted. Admins and members with Kick Members review each application from the Members page and can approve, reject or interview the person in DMs. Members with Kick Members can also create invites that skip the application. It's free and built in, but still rolling out, and you can only turn it on from the desktop app (reviewing works on mobile). It gives no role on approval, has one questionnaire, and no team vote.

An application bot like Toscio (our bot). Toscio doesn't greet everyone who joins: it handles the approval. New members see one channel with an Apply button; they fill in a form inside Discord, the application arrives in a staff channel, your team decides, and acceptance gives the roles that unlock the server and messages the accepted member. Compared with Apply to Join, it adds roles given on acceptance, several forms (2 on the free plan), and, with Premium, team votes that decide on their own and a web form that people can fill in before joining your server.

Where the welcome bot fits. Welcome bots post when someone joins, not when they're accepted. If people apply before joining (Apply to Join, or Toscio's web form), they join once accepted, so the welcome bot greets the right people. If they apply from inside your server, make the welcome bot's message point to the Apply channel, and let the acceptance do the real welcome: Toscio's acceptance message is yours to write, so paste one of the templates above into it.

See how it works for member applications, what a Discord form bot does, and how to make a Discord application form with every option compared.

Common mistakes

• The bot's role is too low. A bot can only give roles below its own. If the auto role or the accepted role isn't given, move the bot's role up in Server Settings > Roles. See the role order rule.
• Counting on DMs. Welcome DMs fail silently when a member has DMs from server members turned off. The channel welcome is the one that always arrives.
• Ping spam. Mentioning the newcomer is fine. Pinging @everyone or a whole role at each join wears your members out fast, especially on a busy server.
• Two welcomes at once. Discord's random greeting plus a bot's message in the same channel looks messy. Keep one, or put them in different channels.
• Too many steps. Onboarding, rules screening, a captcha bot and an application on top: each step loses people. Keep the ones that protect your server and drop the rest.
• An auto role that skips your approval. If acceptance is what unlocks the server, don't let the welcome bot give that same role on join.