Verification and welcome
The gate on join, its six challenges and the cost of making them harder, and why the greeting fires after the gate rather than before it.
Two features that sit either side of the same moment: someone arriving.
Both are off until you switch them on.
Verification
A gate on join. The member cannot see the server properly until they pass it, which stops a scripted join wave from becoming a scripted spam wave.
You choose a role that verified members receive, and a channel where the challenge appears.
The six challenges
Ordered roughly by how much they ask of a real person, which is the trade you are actually making:
| Challenge | What the member does | Stops |
|---|---|---|
| Button | One click | Mass-join scripts that never open the gateway |
| Emoji pick | Clicks a named emoji among several | Naive clickers, without asking anyone to type |
| Maths | Answers a short sum | Scripts that cannot read the prompt |
| Code | Retypes a code shown as text | Anything not actually reading the message |
| Image | Retypes a code shown as a distorted image | Most automated readers |
| Phrase | Types a phrase you choose | As above, and it can be a line from your rules |
The phrase option is the one worth thinking about. Setting it to a sentence from your rules means passing the gate requires having looked at them, which no image captcha achieves.
Attempts and retries
You set how many tries a member gets and how long they wait after running out. The default gives a few attempts and a short cooldown.
Be careful raising the difficulty here. A challenge that real members repeatedly fail has cost you the community it was meant to protect, and the people it costs you first are the ones on phones, in a hurry, or not reading in their first language. A raid is a bad afternoon; a gate nobody can pass is a dead server.
Watch for a burst
If many verifications fail in a short window, that is the shape of a raid hitting the gate, and Wardnox says so in your log once per window rather than once per failure. A ping for every failed captcha during a raid would bury the one message you needed.
Welcome messages
A greeting when somebody arrives. Plain text, or an embed with a title, colour, author line, footer and an image.
Four placeholders are available: the member as a mention, their username, the server name, and the member count.
It fires after the gate, not before
If verification is on, the welcome is sent after the member passes it. This is deliberate, and it is the reason to enable both together: without it, a join-raid produces a hundred cheerful greetings for accounts that never made it through the gate, which turns your welcome channel into the raid's amplifier.
With verification off, it fires on join, because that is the only moment left.
The mention goes outside the embed
Discord does not notify anyone for a mention that appears only inside an embed. If you want the greeting to actually reach the person it names, the mention has to be in the message body, which is what the "mention the member" option does. Turning it off is a reasonable choice for a tidy channel; just know the greeting is then displayed rather than delivered.
Banner images
You can upload a banner or point at a URL. An uploaded image wins, and is attached to the message rather than linked, so it needs no public host and cannot expire out from under you.