How to list your Discord server on JoinGG

Getting a Discord community onto this site takes one click and no form. There is no application to write, no invite to paste, and nobody waiting to approve it — which needs explaining, because every other directory works the other way round.

What actually happens

You add our bot to your server. That is the whole submission.

Discord will not let anyone add a bot to a server unless they hold Manage Server on it, and it enforces that itself: the picker on the authorisation screen only shows servers where you have that permission. So the act of installing already proves the thing a submission form spends a verification code trying to establish, and it proves it to Discord rather than to us.

The other half matters more. Remove the bot and the listing goes with it, within fifteen minutes. Nothing has to be cancelled and nobody has to be emailed.

The steps

1. Open the Discord communities page and press Add the bot to your server. There is the same button partway down the advertising page if you arrived there instead.

2. Discord shows you its own authorisation screen with a dropdown of your servers. Only servers where you hold Manage Server appear in it. Pick one and confirm.

3. You land back here and the listing is live. Name, icon, member count and how many were online — all of it read from Discord in the second after you confirmed.

There is no step four. If you were expecting a form, that is the part we removed.

What the bot can see

One permission: Create Invite. Nothing else.

It cannot read messages, cannot see your member list, cannot kick or ban, cannot change a channel, cannot post. The counts on your listing come from the guild object itself, which any member can read — the permission exists only so it can make the invite link your listing needs, rather than asking you to paste one that expires two weeks later without you noticing.

If that still sounds like too much, the honest answer is that it is a real ask and you should check it. Discord shows the exact permission list on the authorisation screen before you confirm, and you can revoke it at any time from Server Settings → Integrations.

What appears, and where the numbers come from

Your listing shows four things:

Online and Members are not the same kind of number and the page keeps them apart. Online is a reading with a timestamp on it. Members is a figure Discord approximates and hands over; it is better than an owner's claim and still not something we measured. Neither is comparable to the player counts on a game server, which come from asking the server how many people are connected.

If your name or icon changes in Discord, the listing follows on the next check. You never edit anything here.

How the order works

The list is ranked on votes in the last seven days, then by how many were online.

Seven days rather than all time, deliberately. An all-time board is a monument to whoever showed up first and is unreachable by definition for anyone who joins later — a community of thirty could never overtake one of three hundred no matter what it did, which makes the list a table rather than a ranking. A rolling week is a board you can enter this week.

Each listing has a vote button. One vote per person per day, and there is a proof-of-work check behind it, so a script that posts straight at the endpoint gets nothing. The same argument applies here as to a game server: votes come from asking people who already like the place, not from a bot.

Getting to the top faster

Two routes, and they are different things.

Earn it. Votes decay, so a week of people actually turning up moves you and a week of nothing moves you back. That is the intended path.

Buy it. A featured slot puts you above the ranking for seven or thirty days, and it is labelled Featured on the row so nobody mistakes it for a position that was won. The link is on your own row — Feature this — or pick your community from the dropdown on the advertising page. A community placement costs the same as a server one; the thing being sold is a position, and which list it sits in does not change the price.

Vote packs work too, and they behave the way you would want rather than the way that would be easier for us: a pack becomes real votes in the rolling week, which means it moves the order and ages out after seven days like every other vote. You are buying a push that fades, not a permanent place.

If you are weighing whether to spend anything at all, the economics of running a community is worth reading first — the same reasoning applies to promotion as to hosting.

Things that go wrong

"Discord says the bot is not in that server." The install did not finish, or the bot was removed between confirming and the page loading. Add it again.

"The bot could not create an invite." It needs Create Invite in at least one text channel. A server where every channel denies it to the bot role will fail here — check the channel permission overrides.

Your listing vanished. Somebody removed the bot. The sweep runs every fifteen minutes and takes the row down when Discord tells us the bot is gone; a network failure does not do this, only an actual removal.

Members shows a dash. Discord did not report a total on that check. It usually appears on the next one.

Should your community be here at all

A Discord is not a substitute for a game server and the two get listed separately for a reason. If you run both, list both — they answer different questions for the person looking, and what belongs in Discord versus on the server itself is worth thinking about before you point people at either.

If you run only a Discord — a clan, a scene, a game with no self-hosted servers — this is the right list and there is nothing else you need.

One reason to be somewhere outside Discord at all: discovery inside it keeps moving. Discord's own community features have changed shape more than once, and a server that was findable through one of them is not necessarily findable through the next. A listing you control, on a page that does not rearrange itself, is cheap insurance against that.

The short version

Add the bot, and you are listed. Remove it, and you are not. It holds one permission, it reads no messages, and every number on your listing came from Discord rather than from a form somebody filled in.

Rank by getting people to vote in a given week, or buy a slot that says it was bought. Both are visible on the page, which is the point.