When you’re meeting someone on a Discord server, sometimes it’s helpful to have some of your other accounts on-hand to share some info about yourself. It’s like being a loving father with dozens of pictures of his family shoved inside his wallet, but instead of photos of extended family, it’s all you and your dozens of strangely-popular meme video Twitter accounts. 

Last October, we told you we were working on evolving Connections with a brand-new experience. Starting today, we’re excited to share that we’re giving Connections a huge functionality boost for Discord users and developers with Linked Roles: a new type of role that’s created by authenticating your profile with an account outside of Discord. 

Over twenty official Connections are rolling out with new functionality across the next few weeks, from categories such as gaming, social, marketplaces, fitness, finance, and art. You can connect a multitude of your passions and interests to your Discord profile including eBay, PayPal, Crunchyroll, Epic Games Store, Twitter, Reddit, Steam, Jefit, DeviantArt, Bloxlink, and plenty more. 

You’ll be able to show off (or not show off if you prefer) all these official Connections directly on your profile and even certain details from certain connected accounts, such as follower count and site activity. These Connections can then be utilized by community moderators and admins to build or grant new Linked Roles that can provide access to special channels and added safety within their server.

Check out the following image to take a peek at the official Connection offerings, all upgraded to support Linked Roles: 

How Linked Roles Can Help Make Communities Safer

Discord is a home away from home for many, and we’re always looking for ways to improve the overall experience and safety for all of our users and communities. These updates will make it even easier for you to build trust in the interactions you’re having so you can feel confident that the person you’re chatting with is the real deal: a DeviantArt artist you’re commissioning, a highly-rated eBay seller, a Redditor in your DMs, your Jefit workout buddy, a legit Dota 2 player verified by Steam, the right Destiny raid group via Charlemagne, your favorite Robloxian verified by Bloxlink, and tons more. 

In addition, people across hundreds of communities already sell or trade things regularly on Discord. Buffing up Connections helps reduce the chance of falling for scams and false identities — you’ll know that the channel you’ve just joined is full of like-minded folks who also linked an external account or payment method like PayPal so you can feel more confident in their legitimacy.
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Connect Accounts to Gain Linked Roles

Let’s get the basics down first: A Connection is a way to display account information on your Discord by linking to it. You link your accounts by signing into them, verifying that you own them in the process. This makes connected accounts way more trustworthy than a text field and you can also choose to display any of these Connections on your profile. 

We wanted to take authentication a step further by allowing these external identities to share extra info from your Connections. Now, in addition to signing in to an account to prove you own it, certain Connections will now provide additional details and stats, such as how many followers an account may have or if you’re a highly-reviewed seller, to further legitimize the person behind the Discord account.

Admins and moderators won’t get to utilize your info automatically: Even if you connect some accounts to your Discord profile before joining a server, you’ll need to manually opt-in to any Linked Roles to make use of the information from your connected accounts. This helps protect your privacy in every new server you join!

You even can obtain a Linked Role for a community without displaying Connection details on your personal profile — the Connection information is checked without the community admins ever seeing it. If a server you’re in offers a Linked Role, you’ll find a new Linked Roles option in your Server Settings drop-down menu.

Once you select the new Linked Roles option, you can select the role (or roles) you’re interested in obtaining to gain access to private spaces or special perks within that server. Pick the Linked Role you want, and you’ll then be shown its linking requirements:

If you have yet to connect the accounts needed to snag a certain Linked Role you’re eyeing, you can start the connection process from this menu. Happen to already have connected the necessary accounts in the past? Just hit “Finish” and you’ll be granted the role — no need to reconnect an account you’ve already associated with your Discord profile! 

What kinds of permissions or channel access will your snazzy new role give you? It totally depends on how the community admins have set up their servers. It could be just for show to give users a bit more context about who you are, while other communities may require you to obtain a Linked Role before accessing specific spaces in their server. 

Just like the roles you’re used to, the benefits a Linked Role provides can vary between every community — and with these roles being self-obtainable, you’ll be able to grant yourself new roles without pinging @Mods at the dead of night to approve your snazzy “Gamer Extraordinaire” title. 

Stuck on a step or still confused about what Connections and Linked Roles can offer? Check out our Help Center article on ‘em.
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Shhh… Sneak Peek: Brand New “Official” Apps!

We mentioned "official" a few times now, and you might have noticed the new green checkmark next to these Connections. These snazzy icons help let you know if it's creating the Linked Role based on an official app, a verified app, or an unverified one.

That brings us to our other big news of the day: we’re introducing a new “Official” designation for apps! This "Official" icon indicates this app is from a vetted developer. This will help establish an important level of trust between apps from developer partners and the millions of users who interact with those apps every day across Discord. 

To start, we’re launching 22 “Official” apps today and will be opening up a process for other apps that want to become “Official” to do so starting next year.
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How to Set Up a Linked Role for Your Server 

If you’re a moderator or admin and have ever made a role within your server — and you likely have before if you’re an admin — then setting up a Linked Role is mighty similar to creating any other role in your community. 

Start by heading into Server Settings > Roles > Create Role. From here, right alongside the Permissions tab for a role, you’ll see a new “Linking” tab: this is where you’ll be able to specify which connected accounts are needed to grant a particular role.

You can even require specific attributes for the account a member has connected. Looking to set up a Dota 2 community? Use Linked Roles to check if community members have at least one item in their Dota 2 inventory so you know they’ve at least played a bit.

Moderators can add a requirement for any role you want. You can go as detailed as requiring all your members to connect a certain account before they participate, or simply create a role with the sole purpose of showing off a particular Connection.

Whether it's hanging out in your communities, playing games with friends, or trading rares, Linked Roles can help bring a sense of security to your space. During our testing period, we heard from admins and noticed in usage that server members who have a Linked Role in their community were more likely to earn the trust of their fellow members who then felt more comfortable chatting with them.

Like every community on Discord, you and your moderation team determine how lenient or strict you want your new Linked Roles to be and the benefits they offer your members. And now, you’ll be able to provide a way for your members to prove they’re the real deal when they say “my cat has 50,000 TikTok followers.” (Also, that’s impurressive!)
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Inviting All Developers: Creating New Connections That Cultivate Community

Discord was built to be flexible, created on an open API to meet the ever-evolving needs of the people who use it. Trust varies based on the context of the community – and with so many types of communities that call Discord home, we’re excited to invite developers to create or upgrade their apps to support this feature, empowering any type of community to level up trust within their server. Developers in the community can utilize our new Connections API to help verify identity and build trust in ways that are unique to the community  — provided that their creation follows our Discord Developer Policy. 

If you’re a dev interested in integrating Connections into your own unique app, hop on over to the Connections API documentation and our How To Guide to get started. Please note that the review process of apps for the “Official” Connection check mark will begin early next year.

Stay tuned for more info, and feel free to join other developers over in the Discord Developers server for more information on how to get building!

The expansion of what Connections and Linked Roles offer to communities on Discord is an exciting step forward for not just how users talk with each other, but also for admins, mods, and even developers on Discord! We’re excited to see how Connections will serve as a crucial new tool utilized by communities across Discord to help build trust in the interactions taking place in their spaces.

Got an idea for a website or service that would be rad to implement Connections? Let’s connect – share your ideas with us over on Discord Feedback Forums, or you can send us a message over on the usual places: Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.