Discord Welcome Bot Setup

Discord's own system message posts a short randomised greeting to a chosen channel on each join. It cannot be customised, cannot include an image, and cannot be conditional - it is on or off.

A bot replaces that with an embed, a mention, channel links and whatever else you configure. The trade-off is another bot with permissions in your server, so for a small community the built-in message is often enough.

The two are independent, so it is easy to end up with both firing and every join producing two messages. Disabling the system message in server settings is the step most often forgotten after adding a bot.

With Rules Screening enabled, a new member is in a pending state until they accept, and cannot talk or see much. Whether a welcome fires on join or on acceptance depends on the bot, and greeting someone who has not yet accepted usually reaches nobody.

Most welcome bots can be configured to wait for the pending flag to clear. On a public server that is almost always the behaviour you want, since it also avoids greeting raid accounts that never make it through the gate.

Greet the user by name, mention your rules channel, and offer a starting point. Most bots support placeholders like {user} and {membercount} to personalize it.