One bot instead of five
Which of the bots on a typical Discord server Pangobot can take over from - levels, tickets, logging, reaction roles, welcome messages, giveaways, applications - and what it deliberately does not do.
Almost nobody decides to run six bots. You add one for levels, another for tickets, another for logging, another for reaction roles - and end up with six dashboards, six sets of permissions, six things to check when something stops working, and six chances that somebody else's outage becomes your problem. Pangobot is one bot whose features are modules, so those jobs can be done by one.
The jobs, and what does them here
| What you run a bot for | The module that does it |
|---|---|
| Levels, XP and a leaderboard | Leveling |
| Support tickets, with a transcript when they close | Tickets |
| An audit trail: deleted and edited messages, joins, roles, bans | Logging |
| Reaction or button roles | Role Menus |
| Welcome messages, with a picture | Welcome & Goodbye |
| A role for everybody who joins | Join Roles |
| Spam, invite links, banned words, mention raids | AutoMod |
| Bans, kicks, timeouts, warnings and a case history | Moderation |
| A verification gate, raid lockdown, anti-nuke | Join Guard and Verification & Anti-Nuke |
| Giveaways with a draw and rerolls | Giveaways |
| A starboard or highlights channel | Starboard |
| Voice channels that make themselves | Temp Voice |
| Who invited whom | Invite Tracker |
| Member-count and statistics channels | Server Statistics |
| Applications, staff forms, ban appeals | Forms & Applications |
| Suggestions and user reports | User Reports |
| A server currency, daily rewards and a shop | Economy |
| Small games in a channel | Minigames |
| Custom text commands | Custom Commands |
| Announcements on a timer or every so many messages | Scheduled Messages |
| A message that stays at the bottom of a channel | Embeds & Sticky Messages |
| A countdown to an event | Countdowns |
| Reminders people set for themselves | Reminders |
| Birthdays | Birthdays |
Every one of those is switched on and off on its own, and most of them are free. What the larger ones cost is on Free and premium.
What Pangobot does not do
- Music. No playback, no playlists, no soundboard. This is the bot Pangobot most often does not replace, and there is no plan for it to: music bots live or die by Discord's and YouTube's rules, and that is not a fight worth tying the rest of a server's moderation to.
- Chat companions. There is no persona to talk to and no roleplay partner.
- Meme, image and anime commands.
- A full RPG or gacha game. Economy is a currency, a daily reward and a shop you stock yourself - not battles, inventories and pulls.
- Server backups. Anti-nuke can put back channels that an attacker deleted, with their permissions and their place - but it is not a backup bot, and the messages in a deleted channel are gone: Discord deletes those with it.
- Cross-server ban lists. What happens on your server stays on your server.
Moving over without breaking your server
- Add Pangobot and switch on one module that matches a bot you already run. Leave the other bot exactly where it is.
- Set it up in the dashboard and let both run for a few days. Two bots doing the same quiet job (logging, statistics) is harmless. Two bots doing the same loud job is not - two welcome messages, two level-up lines or two bots handing out the same role will annoy your members, so do those one at a time and switch the old one off first.
- When you are happy, switch that feature off in the other bot rather than removing the bot - then going back takes a minute.
- Remove the other bot only once nothing it did is still wanted, and remember to take its role and its channel permissions with it.
What does not come with you
On a small server that is barely noticed. On a big one it is a real decision, and the usual answer is to keep the old leaderboard as a pinned message or a screenshot, say what is happening, and start fresh - or to leave levels with the bot that already has them and move everything else. Tickets that are already open elsewhere stay where they are too.
Settings are the same story in reverse: set up here once, and they stay even if Pangobot is removed and invited back.
Why one bot is less risky than five
- One set of permissions to understand, and one role in your role list.
- One place to look when something did not happen.
- One bot to check after a Discord change breaks something.
- Fewer accounts with power over your server - every bot you add is another one that could be taken over.