Why this comes first
Discord itself keeps an audit log, but it does not reach far back and does not show a great deal: deleted messages, for example, never appear there. If a member claims to have been warned unjustly, or if somebody quietly renames half the server overnight, the log decides whether you can reconstruct it.
Hence our recommendation in getting started: set up logs before you switch on anything automatic.
One channel or many?
You can have everything written into one channel or choose a separate one per type of event. Both have their place:
- One channel is easy to survey as long as the server is small. When there is a lot going on, important things quickly slip past.
- Separate channels pay off from medium size upwards, especially keeping message events apart from moderation actions. The former come often, the latter are meant to stand out.
What can be logged
| Group | Events |
|---|---|
| Messages | deleted, edited, several deleted at once |
| Members | join, leave, name change, role gained or lost |
| Moderation | warning, timeout, kick, ban, unban |
| Server | channels created, deleted or renamed, roles changed |
| Voice channels | joined, left, switched |
| Invites | created, used, expired, including the question of who invited whom |
Every group can be switched on and off individually. Voice channel events produce a great many entries on active servers, only switch them on if you really evaluate them.
Two filters that create calm
Understanding error numbers
When something goes wrong in the bot, a message appears with a number in the format ITS-XXXX. That is not an end in itself: it names the type of error unambiguously, and the log holds the matching incident with the time and the affected area.
If you give us such a number, we find the case again immediately, in support that usually saves several rounds of questions. The list of numbers along with their meaning and a suggested fix is in the logs panel under Error codes.
Appearance
For logs we recommend the embed instead of the image card. The reason is practical: user IDs, case numbers and message contents can be copied out of an embed, and Discord's search finds them again. In an image card the same text is a picture and therefore invisible to the search. How to switch over is described under Image cards or embeds.
What is not logged
For data protection reasons the bot does not store a complete message history. What is logged is the event together with the affected content at the moment of the entry, not a searchable archive of all conversations. What exactly is processed is set out in the privacy policy.
Common pitfalls
- Nothing arrives at all. Usually the bot lacks the permission to write in the chosen channel. Check the channel permissions, not the server permissions.
- Deleted messages are missing. Discord only supplies the content if the message was still in the bot's cache. Very old messages cannot be reconstructed technically, by any bot.
- The log is overflowing. Then the voice channel events are probably on. On a server with many voice users they produce a multiple of all other entries.