 In this video, we're not going to be taking a deep dive into the world of discord by any means, but rather skimming across the surface as I share my personal journey as both a discord user and server owner. I'll be revealing the five key lessons that I've learned from each perspective. You'll discover the five new features that you may not be aware of as well that have been rolled out in discord over the past 12 months. So why am I doing this now? Well, I had a bit of a realization the other day. You see, I launched my Take One Tech Academy recently and as part of that, I've been going through my server doing a bit of a sort of spring cleaning and organization. And I realized that my first sort of official member, if you want, was basically the 31st of March last year. That's when I officially announced it. There were some familiar faces in there before that. I actually set up the server around sort of early January, something like that. So, yeah, but then I took a little bit of a while to sort of figure out what I was doing and get more up to speed with discord. And yeah, so it's been a year effectively since the Take One Tech server has been kind of public really, I guess. So that's what I'm going to do today, go through some of those little lightball moments because there have been probably more than 5 or 10. But yeah, certainly there's some key things here that I think I wish I'd known sooner that might have made my usage of discord that little bit better. Hey everyone in the chat, hey Parker, hey Richard and lovely people in the backstage area as well, Peter and Geoff. And so I'll get cracking then with basically some of the sort of user features. And one of the things that really sets discord apart as a community platform compared to some other platforms that shall remain nameless beginning with face and ending in book is the search functionality. And it really is a powerful thing because I don't know if you've ever been in a Facebook group and you feel like you want to find some posts that somebody, you remember that somebody posted about something and you want to find it. It's now an impossible to actually find what you're looking for in there. Never mind the fact that there's no organization or anything like that, but that's that part aside. Let's have a look at the search functionality in Discord. And I'm in my server over here, by the way, if you haven't joined already, take one tech.io slash family, you'll find a link in the description. But up here we've got this search box and let me just enlarge this slightly. What makes this search really great is as well as being able to search just for terms and the search itself is really good. You've got all of these other search options. So that example that I mentioned of, you know, I remember that someone mentioned something you can actually search for a specific user. And same with if somebody was mentioned in the post or if it had an embed link or a file, maybe if it was before a specific date or after a specific date or if it was in a particular channel. But let me give you an example. Let's say teleprompters is something that I know that Dan in the server was talking about. So if I type in teleprompters or type in teleprompter like that, and then I can use that extra thing from F-R-O-M colon and you can see it sort of highlighted that a little bit. And now if I start typing a name, I'll use his handle, PONBALL. So if I type that in and then click on that user, now what it's going to return is all of the times that teleprompter was mentioned by Dan. So it's a really great way to find that. It might be that I want the older one so I could use that sort of date search function in there as well. So here you can see the date, you know, before or after. So it could really be quite refined about it. Let's look for something else, compression for example. So I know that I've certainly talked about that. It might be better if I actually just zoom out a little bit of this, even though I've made it big enough so that you can see. But you'll see what's going on in here. If I type in compression, you can see when that was mentioned. So I mentioned it in the Roadcaster channel there. So it'll give you all the results out here. You can obviously click into any one of these results. And if I click into it, then it's going to keep the results down the side here, but it's going to open up the actual search result that it's linking to over in this column. By the way, I suppose this is somewhat linked to as well. This is the desktop app. And I would recommend using the desktop app over the browser in any case, although the browser does look very similar on a desktop, the browser interface. But certainly it's a lot better than mobile. I know that there have been people who have been on Discord on mobile. They've joined communities on that, and then they found it a little bit hard to navigate because the way that it looks on the mobile is you don't actually see all the different channels down this side and the main column and then this potential third column here with extra information or whatever in it. So when you're on the mobile, it kind of feels like you're constantly shifting left to right and stuff like that. And you don't have that sort of higher level visibility. So if you have only ever tried Discord on mobile, definitely take a look at the desktop app. I think it works a lot better. I'll be talking about sort of organization of all this stuff a little bit later. But that is the first one then. That is search. I highly recommend that you just give it a go. Just try it out. And certainly those things have been able to add those extra parameters of date and person and all of that kind of stuff. It really means that it's quite easy to go ahead and find the things that you are looking for. Another thing then that I think has been a thing that I wish that I had discovered earlier was notifications and how you can control notifications not just on a global basis, but also on a server by server basis as well. So if I just come into my settings for a minute, I'll just go past my general account settings and I'll find the notifications. So this is in the, I probably should have shown you where I was clicking though, shouldn't I? If you go into your user settings, which is just down here. And then when you go into there, you'll find that you've got a little sidebar that you can go into lots of different specific settings. But over here down in this app settings section, you'll see that you've got notifications there. And in notifications, here is where you can enable global settings for you as a user. So you may want to enable desktop notifications. If you want to have these sort of coming through whilst you've got the desktop open, enable unread message badge. I have that on, but I don't tend to have anything open in my dock. That's so that you get those little annoying little things telling you that you've missed something. Push notifications. You can set those in here and sounds and all of this kind of stuff. So this is all fairly sort of general and by all means go ahead and look through all of this. This is all the different. In fact, this down here is more the sounds that you've got for the different notifications. So that is somewhere that you may well, may well see and may well look, you know, when you're going through your settings. But where it really is helpful is if you are in servers where you find that you're constantly being pinged by a channel that you're not interested in. And it can actually sort of turn you off the entire server because you're finding you're getting frustrated by getting notifications about things that you're perhaps just not interested in. Well, there's a number of ways you can control the settings for a particular server and what you are actually getting notified for. So this can be done on a channel by channel basis. So here we've got all categories. In fact, so just to sort of step back a little bit, these things down the side here in this sidebar. This one here is a category. So at the top, which is a kind of grouping of topics of channels. And then all of these things down here are channels. So if you right click on any of these, you'll see that you've got these options here. So first of all, you can mute the category. So if you just feel like I don't want to hear anything from this particular category, you can just go down and hit mute for whatever period of time it is or until you turn it back on. And you're not going to get pinged by any of that stuff. Then you've got notification settings and there's a few options you've got in here. So the user default is going to be whatever the default is for the server and we'll come on to server settings in a moment. But that's what default that you have set for the server. But on an individual channel basis, you can also come in here and say, OK, I want to be notified of all messages. So if there's one particular channel that you are really, you know, it's really important to you. You may also want to have only app mentions. And that mentions may be somebody using your actual name or it could be where you have a, you know, the particular role that you've got, which is a way of sort of grouping people together or how should we say basically tagging users. You know, people can use this to basically get the attention of an entire sort of group of people within the server. So you may want to leave that on so that then if there's something specifically directed at you, then you will receive it or you've also got nothing in here as well. So that is on a sort of channel by channel basis. Now it mentioned the server default and that's because if you come into the actual server up at the top here. So you've got settings down here for yourself. So this will be your user settings. Whenever you're in a server, you'll see the server name at the top and then you've got this little down arrow here. And then this has got some different things. So if you are the server owner, you'll see a lot more stuff in here as I'm seeing right now. Whereas if you are not the server owner, you will still see things in here such as the server settings is specifically for me as the server owner. But in here you will see notification settings, for example. So if you click on notification settings, you're going to get the same sort of options that we've just seen. So all messages only at message only at mentions and nothing. So that's the same ones that we just looked at in the individual channels. You can also mute the entire server as well if you just don't want to get anything from it at all. So you can toggle that one on and off there. Obviously you won't be doing that with a take one tech server. But one thing that you might want to also consider suppressing is these two here. So there's one that is suppressing the at everyone and at here. I find it quite annoying when somebody's got a server and they use the at everyone, for example, every time they post a YouTube video. Because if you are following somebody on YouTube and you've got ahead and joined their server, you are in control of whether you want to get notified of YouTube videos because you can hit the little bell on YouTube to get notified by it. And I kind of feel like using at everyone every time you go live on YouTube or something like that is basically forcing that notification on people. And I find it really annoying and it's the quickest way to get me to just mute an entire server to be honest. So that's something that you may want to actually just mute. I don't want to go into anyone in particular's server to sort of show how this works. But if you see somebody is written at everyone, basically anyone, everyone in the server is going to get sort of notified about it. So if you are in servers like that and you find it annoying, you can always come in here and remove that. I do still use the at everyone sign in my or shortcut or whatever you want to call it. I'm losing the term now. I do use that in my server, but it's more like when I've got a notification that I actually do want to notify everyone about as opposed to just general. I've posted another video guys, that kind of thing. So anyway, but you as the user are in control of that as well. So you can come and just undo that one there. You may also want to suppress roles. So if you have got a particular role on I'll talk about roles a little bit later, but it's basically how you can, as I say, sort of effectively tag different users in the in the server and give them different permissions and things like that. But you may find that you're in a server where even not just this one, but you're also getting hassle, shall we say by at mentions of of yourself or the specific role. So you may want to just hide those in here as well. And there's also here suppressed highlights. So suppressed notifications for noteworthy content like messages, friend activity, events and more. So you can turn those off as well. New events, if there's a server that's posting new events that you're not interested in, you can turn that off. Mobile push notifications so you can decide whether you want to have those on or off. So those different settings then in terms of notifications can really actually help so that you're not constantly getting bombarded and pinged all the time about various different things. So yeah, I think it's it's useful to just sort of get those sorts of things under control. Incidentally, speaking of notifications, you will notice that in this server down here, I've grouped my servers that I'm a member of. You can create a folder and sorry, you can if you've got multiple servers, just drag one onto another. As if I drag that on top of that one, it's then going to put those two in a little folder so you can see that they're now nicely organized. So I do group my servers into what are to me reasonable groupings. One thing you can do is if you are in a server and there's lots of messages, you can always right click and use the mark as red. It's not showing up here right now or at least it's grayed out because I've read everything. But if you just feel like you've got loads of little icons here and you just want to clear it all out because there's too much that you haven't read and you want to start over. You can always right click on an entire server or sorry, an entire server or folder and just hit mark folder as red. And then that will just clear away that annoying little dot to say that there's something you've missed because sometimes it is hard to keep up with everything that's going on in every server. And sometimes you might feel that you just want to have a completely, completely fresh, fresh start at all. But in terms of sort of managing those things, that has been something that I wish I'd realized a lot sooner because I didn't realize you had quite that granularity in terms of notifications on a sort of server by server basis, nor on the specific notifications within that server that you can get as well. So, yeah, moving on, the next one that I'll come to is the top bar that is in Discord. I think I kind of overlooked that for a long time, but it's got a lot of useful functionality. I'll just note your question, James, I'll come to that in just a minute. The top bar on the top has actually got quite a lot of good stuff in it. So let me come into a channel maybe where there's likely to be a number of different threads and things like that. I'll just talk about my organization a bit later. Let me come into roadcaster. I think there's likely to be something in there. So up in the top here, you've got these different icons. And the first one here is threads. So if you have started a threaded conversation in the text, you will usually see that they appear just below the text channel. Let me show you what it looks like in a... This isn't quite the same. This is a forum. But if you've got a thread going in a particular channel, you'll see something that looks like this where there's this little tree that comes down with those conversations. But they disappear after a certain time. They don't remain persistent underneath your channel. You can set the limit of how long basically before those hide themselves. But you can always come back to here and click on this one and you'll see all of the threads that are available or that are present in that particular channel. So here you can see I can come down to this. I'm in the roadcaster channel and you can see these different threads that are there. So that's just a good way to be able to get back to threaded conversations after they've effectively kind of timed out for want of a better word. And if you were to go and pick up one of those conversations, then it would just jump straight back into the thing here. In fact, let me just do that just as a quick example. I'll just put a test here and you'll see that that thread now, Dory's going to wonder what I'm talking about. But you can see that that thread now has appeared back here. And you can also see in the thread icon up at the top here has now just changed to be a one there. So it's showing that there's one sort of active thread. So that's the first little thing up there that I find quite useful. You've also got access to the notification settings in here. This is exactly the same notification settings that we've just looked at to be able to mute and manage things this way. Another one that's really useful is the pinned messages. So if you're in somebody's server and there is particular sections, it's always worth just having a look what the pinned messages are in that particular channel. Now, as it happens, there aren't any in here. But if I was to go to, for example, the help channel and then go to the little pinned message at the top, it's going to show you what the pinned message is in there. So usually if you're in a server, then the server manager, server owner, if they've pinned something, then it means it's something that is relevant to whatever the topic is. So yeah, that's just a nice little thing up there. The other one is this member list. Now, for a long time, I had this member list sticking out like this. So you can see all of the members in whichever server you're in. Oh, thank you very much, Rich. That's very kind of you. Much appreciated. Thanks a lot, Rich. Yeah, the member list down the right side, I kind of assumed for a long time that this was the server member list. So I thought it was just generally for the server. But actually, this is specifically for the channel you're in. We'll talk about permissions a little bit later. But if I go to, for example, one of the sort of members areas, so I'll come into this one, then you'll see that the list is actually a lot smaller because it's only showing academy members in there because they're the ones that have permission. So it's a good way of seeing who is active that is actually able to see that particular channel. But conversely, if you do actually want to see an overall member list of a particular server, assuming that it's made sort of public that people can see it, you'll need to make sure that you are in a channel on the left-hand side that is viewable by everyone. The usual obvious one here to use is most servers will have some kind of introductions channel. So clicking on the introductions channel will usually yield like everyone who is officially in the server. So yeah, that is another little thing just up in here that I find quite useful. You can just show and hide that like this. You can get that in the mobile as well. You'll see that in the mobile app to be able to see that. But just bear in mind that you need to do that little bit of back and forth navigation to know which particular channel you're in before you reveal your channel members. We've already looked at the search, obviously, but the other one that's useful in here is the inbox. So this is a great way to just see anywhere you've been mentioned and also your inbox for messages and stuff like that. So that's quite handy as well. Now, there was a question just a moment ago from James and I will touch on that. In fact, let me just get something up here for a second. Nitro boosting. I'll talk about the different levels because I always forget what the actual cutoff is. In fact, now I don't. I can remember it. I think I might have remembered it. So about boosting servers, what is boosting a server? Well, Discord is a free platform. So you can start off with a free Discord account as a user and also as a server owner as well. But there are some restrictions in place on that. And if you have a look in my server, you'll see that I've got something over here which says level 3. Sorry, the goal is level 3. It is currently on level 2, obviously. And you have these things called server boosts and you can have up to 14. And if you've got 2, you move up to level 1 boosted server. 7 moves up to the level 2 and 14 obviously is the goal and that is level 3. I say it's the goal. It's not my personal goal actually because the main benefits you get if you are on level 1, the main thing that I'm interested in is it levels up your video quality that you can have and audio quality in your streams, which is, you know, I'm currently streaming into my server right now for my backstage area, backstage guests. And yeah, it's level 1, it's 720. And the audio rate is I think something like 1 to 8 kilobit per second or something like that or 1, I forget the exact number. But when you're on level 2, you have 1080p and 60 frames per second up to 60 frames per second. And also the audio sample rate is greater in there again to 256 or whatever it is. If you go up to level 3, you do technically get a higher, well, you do get a higher audio bit rate. But the other benefits that you're getting in level 3 are things like increased file upload size. So you've got an increased file upload size on level 2 as it is. Maybe I should get the comparison because this is going to just read rattling off stuff that might not be making total sense. Let me just pull this up a second. Nitro levels, this is called Nitro levels is what I want. In fact, it probably is in the results there, but let me just bring this up. Nitro features and benefits. Actually, it's not this one, it's boosting servers. But I'll just tell you how users can boost your server going off on a couple of tangents here, a tangent on a tangent. You have this thing called Nitro. So as I mentioned as a user, it's free to use Discord, but you can upgrade your account with Nitro, which basically gives you, Nitro basic is 50 megabyte uploads as the user. You can also use custom emojis. So a Discord server can have emojis and you can then use them in other servers if that's important to you. I went with the Nitro for my personal account because it gives you 500 megabyte uploads. So that's the first thing, regardless of what the server is set to. Custom emojis, so that thing have been able to use a server's emoji in another server. But this one here, HD video streaming, and then it gives you two server boosts. So that means that you've got two server boosts that you can use to boost someone else's server. And perhaps I haven't been clear there, these boosts that we're talking about, anybody can buy them and anybody can boost anybody's server. So technically, it could be your users that are boosting your server. Personally, I've just gone ahead and boosted it myself to the level that I want it. So I'm not out here sort of fishing for people to boost my server because I'm happy actually with the level that it is at. But then you can also, as a user, you can actually purchase additional boosts to then, you know, if you want to boost other people's servers, or like I say, in my case, I've just fully boosted mine to the level that I want it. Now, let me just try and find the actual server boost levels. I'll just come out of here for a second. I'll come to Discord server boosts. I think it's in here. This is probably the right article where it will tell me, here you go. So this is the level one, two and three. And as I said, it's two server boosts for level one, seven for two and 14 for three. And this is the benefits that you're getting. So it's this live streaming video in the Discord 720p 60 frames per second. You do get extra emojis. I've only got about five custom emojis on my channel. So having an extra 50 going up to 200 was not really a big motivator for me. Then level two here, as I say, the big ones for me was this, the higher audio quality and the higher video quality on live streams and also a 50 megabyte limit for all users in that server to upload files and things like that. But there's not a whole lot of uploading of files go on in my server, to be honest with you, or certainly not large files anyway. So to go up to level three is another 100 megabyte upload limit. So it's increasing that increasing audio quality and then more emojis and stuff. So for me, the level two was kind of like the sweet spot as is often the case with these things. So to answer the question, coming back to it, I got there in the end. What are my thoughts on server boosts? Personally, I've boosted my server to level two. I don't necessarily ask other people to do it for me, because if you're in a situation where somebody else is boosting your server and then they decide, you know, they drop out or they move their boost to somewhere else, you could find yourself in a situation where you've got a server that's got these functions and features that you want and then suddenly somebody just withdraws their boosts and moves them somewhere else and then you've just lost that functionality. So I would say, and I'm just passing on the advice that Keely gave me, Keely done, the Discord coach was to just boost your server to the level that you want it at and then just leave it that way then and you're not reliant on anyone else to do it. So that was a bit of a diversion, but it's a really good point about boosting because I think a lot of people hear about it and are not really sure what it is or how to do it or what even the point of it is. So in terms of other things that I've learnt and wish I knew sooner in Discord, another big one would be the ability to link to pretty much anything in Discord. So I'll show you what I mean by that. Let's say, for example, that somebody was asking me about something and there was a previous message about it. You can come into any message in Discord, click on the little three dots just down here and then here you'll see Copy Message Link and now if you copy that message link and just paste it, it's going to give you a link which will link directly back to that specific post. So I'm not going to post this in here, but you get the idea. So it means that if you've mentioned something before as well, often I've answered a question and I've written a big long description or replied to something and an answer and then a week, a month, whatever it is later, somebody asked me a very similar question and I can then just come in here, copy the link to my previous answer and say, oh, you can find it here. So it's a great way to do cross-referencing basically and this is just all another reason that I find that Discord is really good for information sharing and conversation as well, this ability to link to things. Incidentally, in terms of these different channels, I'll talk about organization a little bit later, but if you want to link to a channel, you can always use, if I just type the little pound sign, hashtag, you can see it pops up with a list of different channels. So if I wanted to just put a link into the... I've got a channel all about Instagram, so if I wanted to put a link into that, I could post that as a message like this. I'll delete this in a minute and then if somebody's in here and they click on the link, it's just going to take them straight to that channel. So it's another great way to just sort of be able to add in these little links between stuff and it's so easy to do just because you literally just type the hashtag. It will bring up the list of channels and then you're just going to pick a channel out of there. If you want to delete a message at any time, as I do now, just right-click, you can delete your own message or if you're the server owner, you can delete other people's or you can obviously go in and edit and stuff like that. So I'll just delete that. I mentioned pin messages early on, just incidentally. If you are the server owner or you have the ability to do this, you can always click on here and just click pin message and then that's how it's going to get pinned. That's just as a little aside there. So, yeah, this ability to link to things and by the way, that doesn't just apply in your server. So if you've sent somebody a direct message, for example, and by the way, direct messages, you can get to direct messages from up at the top here but also in a server, assuming it's allowed in the server, you can always just click on the person and then you'll see the little message thing here and it's kind of like a shortcut to message them. Either if you're not connected, then this will send the connection request or if you are already connected, then just coming in here is a quick way to just fire off a message if you've just seen something that they've said and you want to send them a message about it or whatever, then it's a quick way to get to that. But one of the point I was leading onto here was that this hyperlinking to particular channels or particular messages, you can post those in direct messages as well. So assuming that they're in the server and they have access to it, then that's also another great way to say, hey, I've posted this thing you might be interested in or check out this channel or whatever it is. So the use of linking is another thing that, yeah, I really sort of caught onto quite late on, I will say, but it's been really valuable since then. So the fifth thing then that I want to talk about as a thing that I've been using this from the start on the advice of Keely as so many things that I do in Discord have come from Keely, but it's voice channels and should really be called voice and video channels, I guess, but they started out as just voice and now they're voice and video. And think of that as a bit like a Zoom call within Discord effectively, so it's a conferencing or chatting thing with video and audio, and I've got one going right now in my Discord with Jeff and Peter sitting in there, so that's where I'm basically streaming into there as well as to YouTube. But one thing I really like about the voice channels and why it is so different to Zoom is because when you are in a Discord server, assuming that people have the right permissions to see whichever area you've got them in, but here you can see that there is this at the moment in the members area of my server, there's a number of different things in there, but I've got this on-air backstage channel and there you can see there are, you can see who's in there. This has been really great for the Creators pod, the masterminding group and podcast, obviously that we've got to go with this, but we started as a masterminding group actually in Dock server as I nearly said our top secret code word for what we call it, but we've got a channel, we've got a dedicated channel in there which is where we would sort of meet and mastermind and so on, but because we had a dedicated voice channel, or have a dedicated voice channel, when you're just sort of working away or whatever and then you see that there is somebody in there, you can just pop in. So it's got a much more, much less formal approach than doing this with a Zoom call. Like if we're going to do co-working on Zoom and somebody would say, right, okay, then who's going to send out the link? Okay, it's going to be at this time or whatever. Then it's not quite the same as just being able to literally see that here are the people that are in there right now and it makes it, as I say, a lot more informal and it makes for a really great way to sort of interact with people. So it's one of the features that it's not something I've realized. I mean, I've been using it from the beginning because this was part of the benefit of using it that Keeley mentioned to us all at the time, but it's something that I've really grown to really appreciate the value of it. So if you have got a Discord server or if you're in a Discord server and are not using the voice channels as a way to communicate, then I highly recommend you look into it because it is a great feature and I think an under, not undersold, but under discussed feature of Discord. So those are basically my five sort of top things that I just wanted to mention about being a user on Discord. There is obviously so much more than that, but that's where I'll leave it for the time being. I could go on all day about it, honestly. But then as a server owner, I just wanted to talk about a few things there and one of the things that I'm really glad that I did at the beginning, I mentioned that I started the server in January but only really officially launched in March and I spent that time kind of thinking about the structure of it and playing about in other servers and seeing what I liked from where I was consulting with Keely to get some insights from her into the best practices and best approaches and so on. And I think it's really useful to do that to actually spend some time first before you launch it to have a plan of what you're going to do. And there's a famous quote, I forget who to attribute it to now, but it is something like to do with Ice Hockey and something about you've got a skate to where the puck is travelling to rather than where it's being at that point. And it's an analogy often used in business about basically having some idea of what you're trying to build in the future and then putting the infrastructure in place from the outset to enable that to all happen smoothly. And I did spend quite a long time thinking about the Discord server and what I wanted to build afterwards. And as I mentioned right at the beginning of this livestream, part of what's prompt me to do this right now is because I have been doing a bit of organisation and spring cleaning for having bought in academy members and stuff like that. But actually the structure of it has been there since almost March last year I would say because I was already thinking ahead to that. And so as a server owner, if you're setting up your server, rather than just sort of setting something up and using the default settings or whatever, take some time to think about what it is you're ultimately trying to build and make sure you've got that infrastructure in place so that when people do sign up to whatever it happens to be, a course or a membership or something like that, that it does just all sort of flow and function as it should. I'll give you an example in my server of how I've got things set up. And just to talk a little bit about organisation. So I'll just collapse a lot of these things. Let me just leave this one, this one starts here. So you have, I won't go into a full sort of Discord 101 here, but you do have in the sidebar here, you've got categories which think of those as like groupings of different channels and think of channels as topics. And then within the category, as I've just said, you've got different channels and these can be basically text-based. They can be like announcement channels that you just want to announce things in or have them for things that you want to make people aware of. They can be the voice and video channels, which is the ones I've just mentioned that are kind of like a Zoom call within there. There's also forum channels which operate more like a forum. I'll talk about those a little bit later. But think about the sort of structure. So the way that I structured mine, and this is obviously very specific to me, but some of this stuff carries over, is always have some area which is kind of like a general welcome area where people can sort of find initial information, maybe have the rules in there, a place for people to welcome each other, maybe a help section or something like that. So that's very much what I've got in here. So that's the start here section. For me, obviously my Discord server is built around and in support of, or maybe a little bit the other way around now, but in support of my YouTube channel. And so I wanted a place in here as well just to collect all of my content on other platforms as well. So it does have all of my videos in here. It also has my Instagram just feeds into here as well. Any guest appearances, so obviously people might be subscribed on YouTube, but might not then know when I'm appearing on some other show or something like that that they might be interested in. So one of the experiences here has, you know, every time that I'm on something else, like I was on Strix show last week, DJ Strix, and then all of the ECAM Advanced stuff on Andrew Jenkins show just last week as well. So having that place that, you know, people can find more of your stuff if you're setting up a content creator Discord. Referrals is obviously all of my referrals for products and services. So all of my affiliate links essentially. And then there is my Merch area for talking about my Merch. I've put more of my own Merch than anybody else has. So that's just where I'm with that. But anyway, so I grouped that into Alex content because it's obviously my content, but it means that people can just close these things down so you can expand and contract. So yeah, that means that, you know, these groupings, maybe they don't want the intro stuff after they've joined, but the main body of my server is in this Tech Talk section. And this is all like free to access. So takeonetech.io family to join the Discord. And then in here, this is where I've got all different channels on different subjects, the sorts of things that I cover on my channel. So lots in here about Ecamm, stream deck, loop deck, all of that kind of stuff. So this organization to me is what made sense, but also be open to, you know, anyone suggesting other things. So there's been things in here that I've added in, you know, at the request of other people that are, you know, for specific conversations. So yeah, be flexible in that sense, but it's good to have an initial framework for people to work in. And also don't have too many channels. It's very easy to get really, really specific about channel names. There is a Discord server that shall remain nameless that has like well over 200 channels in it, and it's just ridiculous that you're scrolling through and I think, I guess, you know, you can say, oh, well, you could just use the search function, but if you're going to use the search function anyway to split it all up into so many different really closely related channels is just a real turn off. So I would say, yeah, just don't go overboard with the channels, but at the same time, think about adding some structuring. And that's kind of what I did here. So this stuff is all basically tech talk is accessible for anybody, but then I've also got a section for affiliates. So I've got an affiliate scheme, so I wanted to have a specific grouping just for things related to that. I've also got a members area. So this started off as my members area for my YouTube channel members. So I've got three different levels there. Whereas I've also now got the Academy and I did have this infrastructure set up previously, but I've just sort of expanded on it. This was what I was doing last week as I've adding in Academy members here. And yeah, so this has got, again, start here. There's some Academy announcements in here. This is course ideas. I've got some channel. I'll be talking about those a little bit later. And then a classroom for my weekly Q&As and so on. And then I've also got a server management area. So down here, I've got stuff that's all related to just general server management. So as an admin, having your own stuff grouped somewhere where it makes sense to you and it's sort of tucked out of the way from that point of view, I like the organizational abilities in here. Now I'm talking about all of these different sections. The fact is I can obviously see everything as my server, but actually somebody coming in as a new user or a new member is not going to see all of that. And that's because of roles and permissions. And that's another big takeaway really from the past year, is this ability to add these roles and permissions to really control people's access. So if I come into my server settings in here, then if I go to roles, here I've got a whole series of different roles for, basically when somebody comes into the server and they accept the rules, then they come in as techie. And then I've got different roles for different courses that people might be doing for my membership area and then also for the, whoops, moving the wrong thing there, and also for my academy. And then I've got roles for moderator and so on. But what you can do with this is you can then give access to certain areas based on the role that someone has. And by roles, by the way, I mean if I right click on somebody or click on somebody's name, sorry, you'll see the roles that they have down here. And as the server owner, I can go and assign new roles. So that means that Dory here will have access to everything that front row members can have access to and then also techie. So that's just general server access. So the way that that works is on a channel-by-channel basis or on a category basis, if I come into this members area, for example, this exclusive content section, if I go to edit that particular channel and then I go to permissions, you can see that only channel members have access to that and the rest of the folks in the server don't because they're not at that membership level. You can also view the channel members, view the roles, sorry, view the server as if you are that role. So if I come into my server settings once again and I'll go into my roles, if I go to this techie, there's an option here, more you can say view server as role. So when I click on view server as role, what I'm seeing now is, what I'm seeing is basically what someone would see if they were a techie. And the way that I structured this is, so you can see how pretty much they can still see all of the main information. But when you come down to the affiliates section, for example, if they're not signed up as an affiliate, I do still make the actual category visible because I wanted to, as the owner of the server, I wanted to make people aware that there was more to see, but it was just kind of locked off at the moment. So I did make the affiliates category visible and they also made the affiliates sign up visible. So it says that once you sign up to become an affiliate, you basically see more of the server. Same with the members area as well. It's still showing me this on their backstage just because I'm in that at the moment, but generally people will see the members area and then they'll see the option to become a member. So I think that if you are setting up a server, having something like that, if you've got some extra areas that are behind, a membership or something like that, or they require a product to get access, make sure that they are aware of that because otherwise they may come into a server and think that what they can see is all there is. So that's why I did that. Same with the Academy. The Academy channel here. Sorry, whoops a daisy, wrong button. The Academy category is visible. The start learning where I talk about all of my courses and things like that, that is also visible. And then also the Academy announcements is visible and I left that there just so that people can see kind of what's going on in the Academy and so full disclosure, that's intended to be a little bit of a teaser for what is actually happening in the Academy so that people know that there is stuff happening in there and it is active. So once I have finished looking at the server, you can see that it's telling me that I can go back to role settings or I can just disable this. This means disable this view as role function. So if I click on disable, it'll go back to show me everything as I can see with my full role and can see that that has now opened up more in the members area and so on. So roles and permissions is a really useful way to manage access to different things and also when we talk about monetization a little bit later, it's a way to add perks to people who monetize. Another thing then about just general server setup is you go into some servers and I'll go into this little test server that I set up the other day. Here you can see what a general server might look like with a text channel and there is an explanation for this. This was to explain, I'll talk about it later, but I made a course, the Discord Beginners Guide and this was just to highlight how annoying stickers are. So step one is banned stickers in your server. But the point I'm trying to show here is if you look at these channel lists down the side where it's just a list of hashtags and for the channel names and so on, I find that this can look quite dull and boring and I'm not usually to, don't normally go to overboard on emojis, but I do actually find that having emojis in the channel names does help to sort of differentiate things a little bit more and it certainly helps you sort of, as you're going down them, just glance at the little picture. I'm all for books with little pictures in, so being able to sort of glance at what you're looking at and it just makes it a little bit warmer and friendlier as much as it can be. In terms of it being a sort of fairly dark environment, I will talk about changing colours and stuff a little bit later as well because you can do more with that now. But yeah, that would be another thing too that I would say is the use of emojis in your channel names and things like that to give it a little bit more character, make it a little bit more friendly perhaps is another thing that I think can certainly help. I've mentioned several times today the Take One Tech Academy, so I should probably just mention a little bit more about that because it is open. And actually it's the last date. I'm going to just sort of roll over to make sure I cover in all of the date lines. But yeah, the Take One Tech Academy is basically your online resource to elevate your online presence whether you are content creator or for online meetings. Maybe you're a coach or an entrepreneur looking to use all the sort of tech tools that I talk about in my channel. Well, the Take One Tech Academy is the place to learn them all. The Beginner's Guides that I'm releasing are intended to be enough to get you up and running and up to speed with something without being a full-blown masterclass because I do make masterclasses as you're probably aware. And yeah, some people find that they don't want to learn absolutely everything that there is to know about something. They'd rather just get what they need to get them up and running and then they'll run with it and figure out the rest of themselves or get up to speed and then do a further course or whatever. So that's why I'm creating all of these Beginner's Guides and I've got a release schedule for them and the Discord one was scheduled to release in March and it did just yesterday so just in the nick of time. And then I've got other ones coming out about YouTube, Kajabi, E-Calm and so on. So those are the Beginner's Guides. I have also got obviously my masterclasses so the existing E-Calm Zoom and Rocaster Masterclass. The Stream Deck Masterclass will be coming out in April and then I've got a whole release schedule for other courses there as well. As well as the courses though, there'll be also monthly workshops. The Accelerator courses are basically cohort-based courses so there'll be one of those a month sort of rotating through these different topics and that's where basically rather than learning at your own pace with a pre-recorded course they have sort of in-person and learning with a group, with a cohort basically. So those are in the Academy as well. Obviously I offer one-to-one coaching which I've been offering since I started the channel and in fact specifically about the stuff I cover on Take One Tech. So that is sort of all part of it. There's different levels and different tiers that include one-to-one coaching but then also group coaching and mastermind sessions as well. So that's the idea behind the Academy. There's four different tiers and you can basically decide which one is right for you and your learning style and those vary depending on what access they're giving you to which of those different things in terms of the courses and so on. But basically every level covers all of my beginner's guides and my masterclasses. So given that the quantity of them that are coming out it is a great way to get access to all of these for a monthly subscription cost. So I was going to say I highly recommend it but of course I recommend it. I'll leave a link in the description. There's up to 30% off through March and I'm technically already in April but I'm going to keep this open to make sure it's open for everyone following in behind. But yeah, as I say, the first of the beginner's guides is the Discord guide, beginner's guide and the reason why I created that one first is because obviously my Academy is a lot of it is going on in Discord so I wanted to make sure that Academy members had the right information that they need to get the most out of Discord. So that is the roles and permissions, emojis and the architecture that I've talked about so far. A couple of other things then that I'll talk about and the other, the finals too on my things that I've learned or I've appreciated with Discord is actually the amount of time that it takes and I think that some people when they're thinking about setting up a community for their YouTube channel or something like that maybe it may be one of two ways maybe they worry about the amount of time that it's going to take to actually set it up and manage it, it actually can be really quick to do to get something up and running and then in terms of the managing it and so on I don't think there's necessarily an expectation that you're going to be there sort of 24 hours a day manning it as if it's some customer support centre. My main reason for starting the Discord was because I was getting frustrated with YouTube comments in particular and the fact that first of all when I go into my YouTube studio I'll see when a comment comes in and I can reply to that comment but then it almost just gets lost into the nothingness because I don't really get any sort of follow on in terms of they've replied to it or not I could turn on all notifications for YouTube totally and get all of those things in my email inbox but that would just become totally unworkable very quickly the other thing about it though is the fact that when you answer somebody in a YouTube comment there is a chance that other people will watch the video and go down and read all the comments and they will get the benefit from the answer that you've given them but actually more often than not I think people don't do that so having all of the conversations in the Discord makes a lot more sense so by all means leave comments on my YouTube video in fact leave a comment on this one why not but a much better place to have an actual meaningful conversation is in Discord and there you get also like because of my channel the nature of my channel I get a lot of questions which are you know specific about how do I do this, how do I do that this thing is not working and it becomes more of a sort of tech support thing and I really don't mind that kind of stuff at all but obviously it can become unworkable in terms of time required to write the sort of detailed responses that I want to write to these comments in terms of you know troubleshooting a problem that they've got but to do all of that for one person as opposed to bring the conversation in Discord and do it in there where other people can benefit from it as well it's just a no-brainer for me to just try and direct it all to Discord as much as possible but the other benefit then is not just that you're sharing that knowledge with you know other people but also you've got their opinions as well they're more likely to be able to add into it and so in terms of the time required it's not just all about you as the speaking as the you know the server owner if you are setting up a server it's the other people that are in there that are you know helping out as well in terms of offering their opinions and thoughts and feedback and stuff like that and I learn as much from all of that stuff as I do from you know the me answering questions so it is about building a community and a supportive community and you get to you really get to sort of know people in there as opposed to again you know with comments where certainly there's people who have commented frequently and I get to you know understand who they are and know them better but yeah Discord is just a much better place for all of that so then I'll come on to I mentioned it already in what I appreciate as a user in terms of the voice channels but as a server owner I've just got a stress again don't don't overlook voice channels because and I say voice their voice and video again but yeah I mean I've really enjoyed since I set up my backstage pass area or on air backstage area for channel members this ability to come in there 15 minutes before I start the live stream have a chat with whoever's in there and then when we finish the live stream I'm still just going into Discord and then we just have a good old chat and I say things in there that I wouldn't say on my channel but yeah it's just a really nice way to actually have even more of a meaningful connection with people you know to be able to actually speak to people instead of just you know chatting back and forth and you're just seeing a little avatar or something like that I think it really helps another little side thing here I'd say if you are in somebody's server depending on you know sensitivities and stuff like that using an actual name in your your profile I think really helps because I find that there's I just naturally have more of a connection with somebody if it's got an actual name rather than you know I'm not going to call out anyone but you know some weird weird non-name not their real name I think it's good to have that sort of connection there may be reasons why you don't want to do that but I think it certainly helps so just using voice channels as a way to foster community and have that deeper connection I think is something that's really useful I'm intending to do a lot more with them so at the moment I'm doing my as I say the on-air backstage thing which is during my live streams but I am looking to do a lot more sort of events and things like that with them as well so yes they're definitely a great feature before I get into some special or not special some new features that have been rolled out let me just check in on the comments and I'll see where we're up to so can a participant in a video or voice channel also share his screen and can other participants highlight things on the screen of the participant who is sharing did you know what that's a great question I don't think that they can annotate on the screen I wonder if you can do a I'm just going to do it now I wonder if I share my screen I wonder if it can actually you can give somebody control because like in zoom for example when you do a screen share you can give somebody control of your thing let me just share my stream stream deck and I'm just going to go live and I'll just see if what other controls I've got I'm doing this live as we speak stop streaming show non-video participants I don't think we've got that level of control actually so no that would be that would be a plus one for Slack a plus one for Slack rather than discord there so yeah you can't annotate or draw anything on the on the screen of another person or yourself I say of another person because I would just use my e-cam and do it that way so no is the answer to that one let me see what else oh yeah yes command shift a is a handy shortcut for opening and collapsing channels it is there's actually quite a few handy shortcuts and I'll tell you another handy shortcut which is let me just check if I've got it right it is command slash if I can show you what this looks like if you're in discord and then you hit the command depending on your keyboard the question mark slash it actually pops up all of the keyboard shortcuts so it's a really quick way if you're just trying to trying to learn the keyboard shortcuts then just popping them up like this and then you can scroll down you can see this quite quite a lot of them in there I've got another app for my Mac in general which is just you hold down the command key what's this app called I always forget it I think it might be just called shortcuts but it's basically hold down the command key and it will show you the keyboard shortcuts for whatever app you're in but this one here in discord specifically is great just command slash and then it will it will pop up with the keyboard shortcuts and you can see them all but yeah that's a great one that one is rich I'm quite sad I get excited by shortcuts let me see oh hello Michael great to see you hope all is well I'm glad you're getting excited about discord it is yeah it certainly is one of those things that when you start getting into it and especially as we start getting more active in the community Michael being one of my academy members or the academy members yeah it's a great going to be a great way to sort of collaborate and and all have that sort of closest closest connection I was I'll just give you a little bit more of a backstory about discord because I've been talking about this like one year on discord and me setting up my server a year ago I actually joined discord about three and a half years ago something like that and I was totally put off by the servers that was in and this is something to bear in mind if you've felt like first of all you might have this thought that discord is for gamers and therefore it's not for you I'll just address that right now I should have addressed that at the top but it did start as a gaming platform or a platform sorry it did start as a communication platform for gamers but it has certainly developed over recent years to be a lot more of a general community platform and ideal for you know businesses as well as in my case the take one tech community so yeah it's not just all about gamers for the time being but also if you have been into other people's servers before you may have been really put off by the look of them I mean that one that I mentioned that's got you know well over 200 plus channels if that was my only experience of discord I would kind of feel like this is just too much I'm not interested so bear in mind that the experience you have in discord is very much dictated by the server that you're in and how it's been run and organized I've been in also trading servers stock trading servers that have got you know like 40 50 60,000 people in them and then then you've got issues of moderation and managing it and all of that kind of stuff so you've got to bear that in mind if you've had some previous experience of discord that hasn't been the greatest because it does depend which server you're in Hey Michelle, great to see you Hey Michael, great to see you too as well Mr weird, weird Al Jankovic I haven't heard of him for a while actually you've always been confused by discord to be honest thank you very much for these rundowns, yeah like I say as well there's two things that I find can be really confusing about discord if your initial avenue into it is the mobile I know a lot of people will sign up on mobile and then you don't get that sort of higher level view of it so if I come into here it's easier to see in this structure oh these are the channels this is the content whereas if you're a mobile you're only ever either looking either at the content or this and so you don't get that sort of quite as higher level view of it but then also the other thing that's confusing is if you go into a server that isn't well organized and it's just got a massive long list of channels and you think where am I supposed to start here so there's a few things that can affect that so anyway first of all I should have said welcome welcome to the stream and your name in the chat great to see you here so I want to share also some of the changes that have happened with discord in the past year there's been some new features that have been rolled out that you may not be aware of and they may not have sort of filled down into some of the servers you're into or your servers you are in incidentally I should also just mention I mentioned the take one tech academy and as part of that you get access to the discord beginners guide that is also available as a standalone course as well so the discord beginners guide is live you can find the link for that in the description but also I'll just drop it into the chat as well hopefully if I drop it into here there we go so yeah the discord beginners guide though is 50 plus lessons and it basically covers everything as a user but then also as a server manager as well or server owner so the first half of it is as I say just sort of getting up to speed with discord if you're confused by discord not understanding how things work then this is certainly going to answer all of those questions and it's a beginners guide so it's not an all-encompassing masterclass but you'll certainly be good to go and hit the ground running with this lots of different sections in it and then within those obviously there are more lessons so server organization talking about the different types of categories and channels text channels conversation threads forum channels voice channels all of that kind of stuff how to use them best practices and so on and then the sort of second half of the course then moves on into actually building your own community in discord and talking about you know server settings so why use a discord server all of that kind of stuff just a few in there but then when you come into your server settings then in there I talk more about the actual setting up of roles and permissions emojis apps and integration server moderation and all of that kind of stuff so it's really as I say for both users and people like me I guess people who use discord but are also setting up their community and I've shared more in there of you know what I've learned from doing building my community normally in my courses I will have a little thing to book a call with me if people want advice but you'll see here I've booked the one and only put the one and only keely because if you need one-to-one guidance with setting up your own discord server I can't recommend keely highly enough she is just yeah she can get she's got such insights and she can get really down to the the the crux of what it is you're trying to do and what you're trying to build and then she will give you the you know the guidance to basically build the server right from the outset so you'll find a link to that in the description of this video as well but also that's why that's why if you sign up to the discord course you can always book calls with me as well but for yeah general discord stuff and discord server setup I will always divert to to keely so I wouldn't be on discord without her help and advice and that certainly her ongoing support is just it's just price priceless frankly so highly highly recommended anyway I'll move on to the the the five new features which were added in there's probably been a few more but I've been sort of five headline features I'll just pop this one up and I think I might have forgotten to say welcome to you as well new name in the chat so great to see you here now that's true I experienced this in lots of open source developer communities too noisy and not really structured congrats oh thank you very much appreciate that yeah they can be it can be a bit lacking of structure I think it's hard as well I mean my my server's only got 250 ish members and a few of those are bots so it's it is quite manageable but when you get into I think the mid-journey server I was just looking at that the earlier and yet the mid-journey server is something like let me see how many is because it's ridiculous number where's it in here one 14 million members and 1.2 million members online in the mid-journey mid-journey AI server so yeah when you get to a certain size it does become difficult to manage and I find the really big noisy ones are a bit tricky so yeah I'm totally with you on that that thought in terms of new features then that have been added in one of the big ones I guess I kind of wish that this had been there at the outset when I started my server is a new type of channel called forum channels and I always thought of discord as being a bit like a forum in any case you know the old school forums on a website or whatever web forum where you have different messages and different threads and so on discord was very much like that and so the threads in a server there is just the mid-journey server there but the way you've got channels set up in here I always felt like you know well that's kind of like operating as a forum you know you've got overarching topics and then you've got threads within that well discord went and launched actual forum channels as well so that came out I think six months ago five months ago something like that and this is what a forum channel looks like if I just highlight this it's this one here so you can see it's got this little speech bubble next to it and this works if you go into there it does look a lot more like a forum so whereas any of these other channels you go straight into the text so let me just go back to this studio gear one for example you can see it's just like a stream of text whereas the forum is actually already starting with a lot more organization and so here's just one that I set up for the academy monthly workshop ideas and that kind of stuff and course ideas so those are then topics and then you can go into the topic and you'll see you know the sort of notes associated with it so basically if you know what a forum is it's exactly operating just like a forum so I'm not sure whether with hindsight now setting up a server from the start I would probably try to use more forum channels rather than you know all these individual text channels but what you'll find is that there's a lot of servers that maybe aren't using these because they've already got a pre-existing structure in space in place so just think about that if you are setting up a new server is just to think about whether there are some things where forums would make more sense and so certainly for this thing here where I used it now with my take one tech academy I wanted to have a place for basically conversations around ideas for how to improve it so I've started things off with a couple of ideas there for you know monthly workshop ideas new course ideas and so on but having a way to have a space for organized conversations you know related I think is great so you may not be aware of forums because they haven't necessarily filtered down into many servers yet but if you have got a server definitely play around with them and see how you like those and it would be a bit of a task to just completely reorganize this but I may look in the future at how to sort of migrate certain things over to forums where it makes a lot more sense especially if it's a topic that tends to be really busy so some of these you know don't have a lot of traction or traffic in them whereas other ones are very much you know conversational and lots going on so it might be that some of these more active channels are the ones that I replace with the forum channels the other thing that was added in another type of channel that was added in is what they call stages and this is very much like Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse so these things look like this I've got one here test stage and basically it's audio only so that means that you can have it if you're familiar with Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces it's almost exactly like that so you can have a speaker or a number of speakers and then you have other people who come in to listen that are not it's only one way they're only listening they can't speak unless they raise their hand and you bring them up on the sort of metaphorical stage as it were so this is an interesting concept I haven't really used this too much because I prefer the video it's side of it but if you are somebody who's already used to using Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse and so on that may be something you're interested in one thing to bear in mind though is obviously part of the benefit of Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse if you are into those is the fact that they're more public you know you can people can find your space your Clubhouse or whatever they can find them by you know people sharing and so on this obviously does require people to be in your server so these aren't publicly broadcasting for other people to find people have to come into your server first and then you give them access but if you're thinking about putting on events and so on then this could be a great way to do that you know audio events to replace any sort of private Twitter Spaces that you might be hosting another thing that was added in the third one is activities in the voice channels and this is allows you to do things like for example have a watch party maybe if you're watching something on YouTube or you're watching a live stream on YouTube you can stream it directly into the Discord and maybe if I just move this up here what you can see here now happening you just have to ignore this thing going to infinity but this is the voice channel here of my backstage area so what I'm streaming to YouTube is going in there but you also have down at the bottom these activities so I can click on activity and then there's a few different ones you can do in here but YouTube is one so if you do want something where you want to stream a live event or something then you could have that going into a voice channel and then and then yeah everyone would be able to see in there just as in another window and all the audio goes in so as the person who's organized the the activity you are in control of that but then other people can choose whether or not they want to listen to it or see it or not so yeah or maybe for co-working to have some background music or something like that going in so that's something that came out I think that was a bit longer ago I think maybe eight months or more ago maybe I'm losing the time there but yeah something like that so if you're not aware of that then check that one out another big addition was monetization now this is being rolled out it's not actually available for me here in Thailand but if I go up to the top here go to your channel or server settings I should say and then come down to where's it gone monetization so server subscriptions so in here it tells me here that I don't currently have support for that in my area but if you're in the US I'm not sure which other areas is in at the moment but basically you can add in membership levels in here so that people can get access to different areas of your server exactly the sorts of things that I've just been talking about you know restricting it based on whether people are a member or not then yeah having that all embedded in discord is it's quite nice really and I think that the commission is 10% that yeah 10% so you as the creator retain 90% of that I have got as well as my take one tech academy where you get access to everything in the server basically but I also have YouTube channel members memberships set up and that grants access to certain areas and they also have the same membership levels as I do on YouTube on buying me a coffee just because I started out on with those on buying me a coffee so I've just still kept those too the thing about that though is YouTube is taking 30% or something like that of the revenue so setting up in discord would actually give you a much better rate in terms of you know commissions and it's all fully integrated so there's no no extra work to do there one of the things about that though is you are reliant on having the people in your server to begin with to know about it or you've got to do your own promotion externally obviously with YouTube then you know the the join button if you want to join my YouTube channel the little join buttons just down below but that means that you know you've got that that it's first of all it's easy if people are if the route that people are coming into your community is by your content on YouTube then having that little button right below the video makes it very easy and sort of frictionless to say okay I'm going to join and then it automatically grants them access to the discord and you know you follow up to let them know how to go and join that whereas if you've got something in discord you've got to do that promotion yourself I mean I found that my buying me a coffee memberships versus my YouTube memberships as soon as I turn the YouTube memberships on I got more people signing up that way than it ever signed up with buying me a coffee just because it's so much easier for them to just click it they don't need to go to a you know another service or another platform or anything so that is just something to bear in mind in terms of subscriptions in discord but that said it's a great addition and that you know thinking ahead to the way that you might want to monetize it's just another little option that you've got there in my discord beginners guide I do cover monetization with discord also you can do it with me six which is a common bot talk about bots in the course as well and then also the YouTube and buy me a coffee so I run through exactly how to go through and set all those up as well if anyone's got any questions happy to answer them here too so that was another thing that was added in the monetization and a little new feature that I want to mention which I think is actually only available if you have got nitro but one of the things that one of the comments that I had from somebody whose opinion I really respect they they were setting up their own community and they said that they felt that discord looked a little bit creepy and you know what when they said it I can kind of see that you know because you come into here and especially if you're in a discord channel like this little test one here it kind of looks a little bit maybe not entirely welcoming does it you know it's not it's certainly not if you think about the kind of like web 2.0 thing where everything went all you know ultra minimal and all you know lots of white space and stuff like that because of the dark mode that I've got it in the moment and because there's so much heavy text I can see why people might not feel it's you know overly welcoming initially I've mentioned obviously that you know using things like emojis and the way that you onboard people is I can't help with that but I can see what they meant by you know by the way that it looks there is now some ways to change the color so if I go into the my personal settings I'll come into here and then go into appearance so as well as the the themes you can change between light and dark I'm a totally a dark mode all the way so you can have the light white mode you know just look brighter in any case but they have also now added in appearance they've also added in these ones so this is beta it is a nitro so this thing that's got this little symbol here that is exclusive for people who are on nitro which means but I don't think I mentioned the prices but the highest nitro level or the regular if you want is I think 999 a month $9.99 and so this is one of the things you get for that but they have now got these different colors so you can change the appearance of it so if you do like something a bit more light and airy you can see this is how it affects the sidebar and stuff like that so it just adds a little bit more customization to it first of all you may still like the sort of dark darker look as well but it should a different color so it's added a little bit of extra customization this thing only really came out in the past I've got to say it was about a month ago or something like that but lots of different colors to choose from in here to make it look a little bit a little bit more friendly and welcoming perhaps I should say as well that you also have in your profiles you can change these and who was it I tell you it was Dory had got really nice color scheme going on if I just set this back in here I'll go to appearance I'll just change this to my boring old totally dark mode but if I go into roadcaster you can change your own profile as well so if I click on Janice you see that she's added a bit of color to hers if I go to Dory down here somewhere where is she I know that she added a nice vibrant color so there you go you can change the look of that and that is in your user settings I'll go to user settings I'll tell you a lie actually if you want to change your profile I mentioned about changing your name but I didn't really tell you how to do it which was a bit cheeky you can edit your server profile so if you come into this one this is your specific profile but in that specific server so you don't have to have the same profile in every server you know if I've said it would be great to have your first name or at least in your profile you could always just come in and change it in my server and then in everyone else's you could leave a really cryptic name and you can come up to the top here click on this little arrow and you can choose from any of the other servers I'm not going to show you what I'm called in the creators pod server but I've got a different name in there so and that's the the creators pod podcast that I do with my other fellow creator creator mastermind group so yeah you can edit it on a server by server basis and then change the color so I could make this bright red if I wanted so you just sort of come in there and customize that I'm still boring and keeping it all dark though aren't I so it's just me and it's just notify me to make some changes so I'll just save that so that was really the final thing then is yeah just that idea of being able to adjust your your profile color I should say and also just the interface in general so if you are not a fan of either the dark mode or the really bright white mode you can also go and choose one of those other colors as well if anyone's got any other questions about discord or anything related then happy to answer those but if not I will leave it there I've left links obviously in the description and in the chat to where you can find out more about the discord beginners guide and also the take one tech academy just bear in mind that that launch offer that I've got up to 30% off the take one tech academy does expire at the end of March I'm not going to pass for me but I'm going to leave it open and make sure I get all of the tail end for the background the other way round the world I hope that has been useful though any other questions feel free to join the take one tech server link in the description and ask away in there and we can all benefit from the answers to those thanks very much for watching I'll leave a link over on the right hand side for anyone watching on the replay to some other discord content soon as I get round to remembering to add that little video in my youtube channel members as well and everyone who has joined the take one tech academy look forward to seeing a lot more of you very soon have a wonderful day bye bye