A Discord staff ladder you can copy

The server this ladder assumes

Picture a community with a public chat, an announcements channel, a media channel, a couple of voice rooms, a staff room, a mod log, and an events category. Membership is open. Staff is not. You have an owner, one or two admins, senior moderators, moderators, trial moderators, and event hosts who are trusted with a night's event and nothing else.

If your server is a private friend group, you do not need this much structure. If it is a support desk or a school club, keep the order and drop the tiers you do not have people for. Empty roles with powerful permissions are how old staff keeps access after they have left.

Role order, top to bottom

Drag roles into this order in Server Settings. The owner is not a role. Bots that punish members or assign roles must sit above the members they affect and below the people who can remove the bot. A full account of why is in the role hierarchy guide .

What @everyone is allowed to do

Turn @everyone down to the minimum the community can live with, then add anything else on a named role. A permission left on @everyone is held by the account that joined thirty seconds ago.

• View Channels, Send Messages, Send Messages in Threads, Read Message History, Add Reactions, Embed Links, Attach Files, Use Application Commands.
• Connect, Speak, and Video in the public voice rooms, via channel overrides if you do not want those on every future channel.
• Create Invite off, unless you specifically want every member to be able to invite. Public invite links are a raid problem.
• Mention Everyone off. Manage Messages, Kick, Ban, Timeout, Manage Channels, Manage Roles, Manage Webhooks, and Administrator off.

Event host

An event host needs to move people in a voice channel, start a scheduled event, and post in the event channel. They do not need a moderation role. Put the extra permissions on the host role, and remove the role when the event is over rather than leaving a permanent "events team" that accumulates access.

Grant Create Events. If they must edit other people's events, that is Manage Events, which is a different and broader flag — most hosts do not need it. Grant Move Members only if the event uses voice. Grant Mention Everyone only as a channel override on the single announcements channel, never on the role itself, or they can ping the server from general chat.

Do not grant Kick, Ban, Timeout, Manage Channels, Manage Roles, Manage Webhooks, Manage Server, or Administrator. If a host needs a private prep channel, allow View Channel for the host role on that channel. Do not give them Manage Channels so they can build the prep channel themselves.

Trial moderator

A trial moderator is there to practice judgment, not to hold the server together. Grant Timeout Members. Grant Manage Messages only in the public channels, as a category override, if you trust them to delete spam. Leave Kick and Ban off. A wrong timeout expires. A wrong ban is an apology and an appeal.

They should see the staff channel (View Channel allow on that category) and not see the mod log until a senior moderator wants them to. They should not have Manage Nicknames yet: renaming people is a harassment vector when someone is new.

Their role sits above members and below full moderators, so a moderator can remove a trial who is out of their depth. Write down the trial length. Thirty days is long enough to see how they handle a heated night.

Moderator

Moderators handle the ordinary day. Grant Timeout Members, Kick Members, Manage Messages, Manage Nicknames, and the voice trio Mute Members, Deafen Members, and Move Members. Grant Manage Threads if your server uses threads and you want staff to archive or unlock them.

Withhold Ban Members. Withhold Manage Channels, Manage Roles, Manage Webhooks, Manage Server, Mention Everyone, and Administrator. Create Invite can stay off if a single permanent invite already exists; moderators do not need to mint new links.

This is the tier that most often gets Administrator "just for tonight." The case against that is short. If the missing power is real, add the specific flag to senior moderator instead of promoting the whole tier.

Senior moderator

Senior moderators are the people who can undo a moderator. Grant everything a moderator has, plus Ban Members and View Audit Log. They are the ones who read the log when someone says they were banned for nothing.

Still withhold Manage Roles and Manage Channels unless that senior also has a second, separate job. Those two flags are how a staff member rewrites the server, not how they ban a spammer. If you need both, the person is an admin and should be counted as one.

Two seniors must be able to act on each other only if their roles are not equal. If they share one top role, neither can kick the other. That is usually what you want among peers. An admin above them is the escape hatch.

Admin, and the owner

Admins hold Manage Channels, Manage Roles, Manage Server, Manage Webhooks, and Ban Members. They can add bots, edit the hierarchy under them, and rewrite channel overrides. There should be very few of them, and they should have two-factor authentication turned on before you enable Discord's "Require 2FA for moderator actions" setting.

Administrator is still unnecessary for an admin who already has the specific flags. Administrator also ignores every channel lock, including the mod log and any channel you hid from them on purpose. Leave it off. The owner account is the one credential that can always get back in.

The owner should not be the account that sits in voice every night. Use a separate admin account for daily work if you can, so the owner token is not logged into a browser on a shared computer.

Where the bots sit

A moderation bot that times out or bans must sit above the members it can punish. If it must also punish moderators, it sits above moderators, which means anyone who can compromise that bot can act with that rank. A welcome bot that only sends a message can sit just above @everyone.

A reaction-role bot must sit above the cosmetic roles it assigns and below every staff role. If it sits above Admin, a flaw in the bot is an admin-level event. Details, including why 2FA does not cover bots, are in bots and webhooks .

Channel map

Set the private categories with one deny on @everyone and one allow on the staff role that should see them. Do not walk down the role list denying View Channel on each role. The failure mode is described in locking channels without a lockout .

What this ladder still cannot say

Discord will not let a moderator assign the Verified role without also letting them edit or delete every role under their own. It will not let a channel manager rename a channel without also letting them rewrite who can see it. The ladder reduces how many people hold those bundled flags. It does not split the flags.

That split is a second policy on top of Discord: a check that allows "assign this one role" and refuses "delete a role," and a log of both the allowed and the refused attempts. Perminator is one implementation of that policy. You can run the ladder without it. You cannot make Discord's Manage Roles toggle mean less than it means.

How the ladder rots

Revisit the ladder when someone joins staff, when someone leaves, when you add a bot, and on a date you put on a calendar. The audit checklist is the short version of that review. Remove roles from people who have stopped showing up. Delete roles that no longer match a job. A role named after a person is a smell: the job outlived them, or the permission was never a job.