The Best Discord Bots (and How to Use Them)
If you’ve ever played video games online, you’ve probably heard of Discord, the free voice, video, and text chat platform that many gamers use to communicate. The platform is split into separate servers with their own members, rules, topics, and channels, but one underused feature is the ability to create and code unique AI bots.
What are Discord bots?
Discord bots are AI-powered tools that automate tasks and add music, games, welcome messages, memes, and other interesting content to your server. These bots make it easy to interact with the audience, create a community, and moderate the server.
There are an army of bots to choose from, each serving specific purposes – one can automatically welcome new users, while others use webhooks to integrate with other applications – and it can be difficult for new users to figure out which ones will provide the best results for your needs.
Luckily, there is a ton of information on the internet to help you understand the value of Discord bots to your server.
The Best Discord Bots (And Their Uses)
Unless you join dozens of Discord servers, you may not have come across the bots you want to add to yours. Below are some of the best Discord bots along with some information about what they serve.
MEE6 – universal bot
Some Discord users feel that MEE6 should be included on every Discord server, and it’s certainly popular with over 16 million people using it. MEE6 can scan chats for violations, play music, and assign membership levels to users. It can be configured to mute, boot, or permanently block users if they commit a certain number of violations within a specified period. MEE6 also works with YouTube and Twitch.
TacoBot – project management bot
Not to be confused with Taco Bot by Taco Bell. TacoBot is a project management bot that integrates Trello into Discord. It can automatically post updates from your Trello board to Discord for users to view directly, and it’s a great way to keep team members or other users up to date without having to stay in Trello.
EasyPoll – voting bot
EasyPoll offers an easy and customizable way for server owners to set up polls and allow users to vote. Users vote with emotional reactions, which adds to the fun.
Dank Memer – meme-bot
If you are one of the millions of meme lovers on Discord, Dank Memer is a great bot to add to your server. It automatically posts memes from Reddit to the channels you choose. Dank Memer also has a currency feature and bills itself as “Discord’s biggest funny economic bot”.
Hydra – music bot
Hydra is a Discord bot that allows you to play music from various platforms such as Spotify, Bandcamp, YouTube, Soundcloud, and Deezer. You can view song information and lyrics and select settings such as loop, move, repeat, skip, and shuffle.
Epic RPG – game bot
The Epic RPG Discord bot allows users to participate in various role playing games. They can hunt monsters, buy and sell goods, upgrade their armor, and level up with text commands.
Captcha.bot – security bot
This bot forced users to verify their accounts. People joining the server with a captcha bot will be redirected to the Captcha.bot website, where they will have to log into Discord again and complete a captcha check to make sure they are human. This is a good way to reduce spam on your server.
How to Code a Discord Bot
You can enable a Discord bot that serves a specific purpose, but can’t seem to find one that suits your needs. Fortunately, if you have programming know-how, you can create your own bots that can do whatever you want.
There are several Github threads that will instruct you on how to get started building your own bots and troubleshooting. People with advanced programming skills will find plenty of online tutorials to guide them through the process of creating a bot. It usually takes about 30 minutes to create, but the time and effort required depends on your programming skills.