Guide
Switch your Discord bot without losing member data
A migration rarely fails on the technical side. It fails because nobody wrote down beforehand what travels with you and what stays behind with the previous bot. Here you get both, honestly, including the order in which you switch over.
No Administrator permission required. Set it up in the web dashboard.
Why this goes wrong
Be honest with yourself: levels, balances and statistics can as a rule not be taken along. Those values live in the database of the service you are leaving, and there is no shared format both sides write into. So plan for one of two outcomes: you start from zero, or somebody re-enters the top places by hand. What does stay are the things that live on the server itself: channels, roles, permissions, pinned messages, your category structure. And what disappears without anyone thinking about it are habits. Members carry commands in their heads, the team has a routine that runs smoothly, and both break on the same day. The real damage is therefore rarely technical but social: for two weeks everybody asks how something works now, and the same answer gets typed twenty times.
What to decide first
Decide first what should happen to the old numbers, because everything else hangs off that. Three routes are common: a clean restart with an announced cut-off day, a manual carry-over of the top places as recognition, or a one-off reward for everyone who was already there. Each route is defensible, but you have to commit up front, because reversing it later never happens without friction. After that you determine what moves first. Deliberately do not pick the level system, but something that hurts nobody if it wobbles for a day: birthdays, polls, a welcome greeting. And set a date on which the previous bot really leaves. Without that date it keeps running for another six months, holds on to permissions and confuses new team members who cannot tell which of the two is currently in charge.
Step by step
- Tell the community a week in advance and say openly which numbers will not survive the switch.
- Back up outside of Discord whatever you want to keep. A screenshot of the leaderboard is enough for a manual carry-over.
- Bring the new bot in while the previous one keeps running, and set up a single uncritical function first.
- Switch off on the previous bot exactly the function the new one has taken over, so nothing fires twice.
- Move levels and economy last and take the old bot off the server on the announced day.
The mistakes almost everyone makes
The most expensive mistake is the hard cut: old bot out, new bot in, done. The moment the old one is gone you can no longer look anything up, not even how a setting was configured there. The second mistake is silence. A changeover without an announcement reads like a malfunction to members, and the first complaints arrive before you have set up the second function. Third mistake: letting both do the same thing at the same time. Two greetings, two log entries, two role grants. That looks sloppier than any pause. Fourth: leaving the old bot’s permissions in place out of convenience. A helper that does nothing any more but is still allowed to do everything is exactly the leftover nobody can explain later. And finally: starting on a Friday evening.
Frequently asked questions
As a rule you cannot, and you should say so openly instead of dancing around it. That is why an announced restart or a manual carry-over of the top places is the usual choice. Both land better with a community than a silent switch where everyone suddenly sits at level one again.
Until you have seen every function you moved once in real operation, usually one to two weeks. Longer rarely pays, because split responsibility produces mistakes of its own. Shorter only works on a server where little happens on weekdays anyway.
Leave them, but write-protected and with a note in the channel name. They are your only record of incidents from before, and sooner or later somebody asks for exactly that. New entries belong in the new channel so the dividing line stays clear.
It stays where it was collected until you request deletion; kicking a bot off the server is not a deletion request. Ask the previous provider actively. With the new bot you should know that path in advance: with Its-Comm every member queries their own data with /privacy and can object or ask for deletion right there.
Can I really not take levels and balances with me?
As a rule you cannot, and you should say so openly instead of dancing around it. That is why an announced restart or a manual carry-over of the top places is the usual choice. Both land better with a community than a silent switch where everyone suddenly sits at level one again.
How long should both bots run side by side?
Until you have seen every function you moved once in real operation, usually one to two weeks. Longer rarely pays, because split responsibility produces mistakes of its own. Shorter only works on a server where little happens on weekdays anyway.
What do I do with the old log channels?
Leave them, but write-protected and with a note in the channel name. They are your only record of incidents from before, and sooner or later somebody asks for exactly that. New entries belong in the new channel so the dividing line stays clear.
What happens to the data the old bot collected?
It stays where it was collected until you request deletion; kicking a bot off the server is not a deletion request. Ask the previous provider actively. With the new bot you should know that path in advance: with Its-Comm every member queries their own data with /privacy and can object or ask for deletion right there.