Hey Admins and Mods,

Today we're excited to share with you a new experiment that we'll be rolling out over the next few weeks. You'll no longer need to settle on choosing one server region that your voice channels run on for your whole server. Instead you'll be able to use a different region for each of your voice channels.

But what does this mean for you?
- Each of your voice channels will have a voice region setting. More regions means better call quality because you're not forcing one region for everyone.
- We've also added a new option called "Automatic." By default, all voice channel regions will be set to "Automatic." This means that the region will be automatically determined based on the first person to join an empty voice channel, and the region can change anytime a voice channel becomes completely empty and new person joins it.
- You still have the option to set a specific region if you want though. This option will be moving from Server Settings and is now found in each voice channel settings page.

We recommend using the default region, "Automatic", so you don't need to constantly change voice channel regions based on who is in a voice channel (Let Discord handle that!), but you're always able to make changes under Voice Channel Settings at any time.

Also — because there's a region setting for each voice channel now means that the permissions to manage this have changed. Instead of granting roles the Manage Server permission to change the server region, any roles that have the Manage Channel permission will be able to adjust the voice channel region if needed.

Like we mentioned, this experiment will be rolling out over the next few weeks, and if things look good we'll be swapping over to this system permanently. If you have specific questions around this change, you can check out the Help Center article here: https://support.discord.com/hc/articles/360060570993

Hey Admin and Mods,

Today, we are excited to release our new Rules Screening feature to all communities. We all know that joining a new community can often be overwhelming and confusing. A great way to help set new members up for success is to outline a set of rules and guidelines that describe your community’s culture and how one should behave in it.

Rules Screening gives you a simple, clean way to ensure that potential members can understand the guidelines for your community before joining, helping ensure that they can be positive additions to your community. If enabled, new members will be prompted to read your rules when they join your server, and until they agree to them and pass your verification level requirements, they will not be able to talk, react, or DM other members.

For servers that traditionally have not used gating mechanisms (e.g. bot role gate) know that enabling Rules Screening does create more friction to joining and could lead to a decrease in new member joins. However, it does offer the least friction possible for anyone who wants new members to agree to rules.

We also know communities often need more sophisticated screening methods like custom response/manual application, oAuth, and third party connections. We are hard at work building those so that we can release them to you soon as well.

As always, please provide any feedback or comments on these new features so we can help improve them moving forward!

Happy Screening & Happy Holidays.

P.S. If you grant roles to new members on join via a bot, it will bypass this feature. We recommend updating your bot to only grant roles once members pass the screening. Look for the pending flag in our developer documentation.
P.S.S If you plan to remove your bot role gate and use Screening, make sure you enable talking perms on so they can talk after passing. We've already ensured that pending members are not able to talk, dm, or react until they've accepted the rules.

Hey Admins and Mods,
- The amount of members required to join Server Discovery has been lowered to 7,000 members (from 10k). We plan to continue lowering this requirement as time goes on because small communities are great communities too! Slowly lowering the requirements over time means we can properly scale our own moderation and ensure communities in Server Discovery are safe for everyone.
- For server moderators on the go, you can now publish Announcement channel messages on mobile. Just long press a message in an Announcement channel and you'll see a publish button! If you don't see it, you may need to update your app.