Understanding Guilded — Flow Bots
On Guilded, all servers have access to a feature called “Flow Bots” — a trigger-based automation system. Flow Bots allow you to automate things such as welcome messages when new users join, role rewards for doing specific actions, logging for when someone uploads media, and a whole lot more! In this article, we’ll go over how to set up a Flow Bot and some things you can do with it. Make sure to read all the way to the end for an example of setting up a fun little word game for your community!
What is trigger-based automation?
Trigger-based automation can be explained with “If/When this (happens), then that (happens)”. A simple example we’ll explore in this article is “When a user joins the server, then send a message welcoming that user.” People familiar with Discord bots already know the concept of something triggering an action in a bot. Guilded’s Flow Bots are much simpler and require no coding knowledge, but they are limited to the triggers and actions that Guilded have made available to us.
- Trigger — What causes an action to happen. e.g. A user joins the server.
- Action — What happens when a trigger occurs. e.g. A welcome message is posted in a channel.
Guilded calls these trigger-based automations “Flows”, because the trigger flows to the action. A Flow Bot may have multiple Flows, so the “Bot” portion acts like the folder and face of the Flows it contains.
How to setup a Flow Bot
Before we can make triggers and actions, we need to create a bot. You can do this by going to the Settings of your server and clicking on the Bots tab. If your server is brand-new, you should already have two bots created, Howdy Bot and XP Bot.
- Howdy Bot will welcome new users to the server when they join by any means.
- XP Bot gives XP points for performing certain actions such as sending messages or joining a voice channel. By the way, Guilded has built-in XP tracking and levelling rewards. We’ll discuss those in a later article.
There are also two other Flow Bots that Guilded provides as presets, Twitch Bot and Patreon Bot.
- Twitch Bot will announce when someone goes live and will announce Follows and Subscribers. It can also be set up to give and take roles to those who Follow or Subscribe to your Twitch channel.
- Patreon Bot will announce when someone pledges to any tier of your Patreon creator page, and it can also be set up to give and take roles to any tier subscription or to a specific tier.
You do not have to use the built-in Flow Bots that Guilded provides, you can create your own by clicking on “Create a bot” which will open the Flow Bot menu. From here, you can give it an avatar and a name and start adding Flows. When you’re done setting up your bot, remember to click Save Changes. This will add your Flow Bot to your server.
Deleting a bot
You can easily delete bots from the Bots tab. Keep in mind that this action is permanent, so we recommend using the toggle to turn off a bot until you are absolutely certain you want to delete it. The GIF below shows how to turn off a bot and how to delete it.
Setting up your first Flow
After you create your own Flow Bot, it’s time to make it do things. We will set up 2 different types of flows: A welcome message into a specific channel, and a role that assigns when a new user joins via a specific invite link. These Flows should give a general idea of what you can do with the built-in bots. There are a lot of different triggers and actions, so we recommend creating a test server and playing around with the system to see what you can create.
Flow #1: Welcome Message
One important part of running a community is making sure new users are informed of what they need to know, this is where a welcome message can be very handy. With Flows, you can easily make your bot send a message when a new user joins. In this message, you can inform them of what is important and notify other members that someone new has joined. Let’s look at how to set up a welcome message.
Firstly, you need to navigate back to the Bots tab of your server Settings and click on the three dots next to the bot you created. Click on Edit and you should be back in the bot’s settings page.
From here, click on Add to start creating a Flow. We’ll be creating the Trigger first. Next, click on the Add button next to Trigger. Find the “Member Joined” trigger and click Select. Now you will be able to change the Trigger Details for the trigger. Some triggers have a lot of different options you can enable or edit according to how you want the respective action to be triggered, such as choosing by which method a member joined the server. For this example, we will leave the setting on “Any means” and click Next.
Now we’ll create the Action. Click on the Add button next to Action and select “Send a custom message”. Just like with triggers, you can change different settings for actions such as choosing the channel where the message will be sent. For this example, we have created a channel called Welcome and will send our Flow’s message to it.
When sending any kind of content using a Flow, there are variables you can use in the message. You can access these variables by typing “$” which will bring up the Templating Menu. For this example, we are using the “$TriggeringUser” template variable to mention the user that joined. Below is an example of how we set up our action with our message.
Once you’re done setting up your action, click on Next. Review your Flow and if you’re happy with the settings, click Save. Congratulations, you just created your first Flow!
Make sure to click Save Changes so that you don’t lose your progress.
Flow #2: Join Role
Another great use of Flows is giving a role when a user joins using a specific invite link. This could allow you to give someone access to a specific section on your server or reward them with a hoist, because they joined via that invite.
For this Flow you will need to create a role you want to assign to new users and an invite link. Please do this before continuing with the setup.
First, let’s create a Flow with the “Member Joined” trigger again, but instead of leaving it on “Any means”, change it to “An invite (with no application)”. The GIF below shows how to do this.
Next, let’s set up an action to assign a role to a user who joins with this invite link. In our example, we have created a test role to use. Click the Add button next to Action like before, and then find the “Assign Role” option. Now you can select the role you want to use and click Next.
Review your Flow and then click Save. You have successfully created a Flow that will assign a role to someone who joins with a specific invite!
Bonus Flow: Creating a Word Game
One of the great things about Flow Bots is being able to create new fun ways to engage your community. One way I found is a Word Game that I like to call “Monster Word Battle”. In this game, members of a server have to say a specific word to trigger a monster battle. (I used the word “monster” in my example below, but the word can be anything you like).
If you want to learn how to create this game yourself, come on over to our Guilded community where I’ve listed the full instructions!
Conclusion
In this article we have explored Guilded’s Flow Bots and how to create them to help automate important tasks in your server. You should now also have an idea of how powerful these built-in bots can be. With these bots, you can give your server its own customized touch without needing to know any code or pay any premium fees to access it. The only thing it’s missing now is triggers that allow for moderation actions like deleting messages, removing the need for simple third-party moderation bots when the Bot API goes public.
Have you made any interesting Flow Bots or are looking for ideas? Come and tell us on our Guilded server!
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