Monvoke Setup: What to Configure First After Adding the Bot

Decide these once, and recruiting stops needing manual work

Deciding on a handful of /config settings right after adding Monvoke means every recruitment from then on comes down to running a command, waiting for people to join, and playing - nothing else to touch in between. /invoke and /custom work the moment you invite the bot, but leaving /config untouched means repeating the same manual steps every time you post a recruitment.

/config can only be run by members with Administrator permission on the server. Running the command and picking a setting opens a modal where you type in or change the value - there's no need to look up channel or category IDs yourself.

Set your server's timezone

The Timezone setting under /config controls how Monvoke interprets the start time you enter for a scheduled recruitment (the schedule parameter).

Leave it unset, and the interpretation depends on the creator's Discord client language: Japanese clients are read as JST, everything else as UTC. Enter 072130 (day 7, 21:30) from a Japanese client and it's read as 21:30 JST; enter the exact same digits from an English client and it's read as 21:30 UTC - 6:30am the next morning in Japan. The same input can land nine hours apart depending on who created the recruitment.

Go to /config → Timezone and enter a UTC offset in the modal (+9 for Japan Standard Time, for example). Once it's set, every scheduled recruitment on the server is interpreted against the same offset, so the client-language split stops happening. Submitting the field empty resets it.

Choose a category for dedicated voice channels

The Category for creating dedicated VCs setting decides where Monvoke places the dedicated or public VC it creates once a recruitment wraps up.

Leave it unset, and the VC is created in whatever category the recruitment channel itself belongs to. On servers that keep text-channel categories separate from voice-channel categories, that means VCs end up somewhere unexpected, and the voice channel list stops staying tidy.

Set a category under /config → Category for creating dedicated VCs, and the VC always lands there regardless of which channel the recruitment was posted in. This setting requires the bot to have the Manage Channels permission.

For how VC creation and gathering participants actually works, see From recruitment completion to gathering in a voice channel.

A related but separate setting is the Autoroom trigger channel - a different mechanism where joining a voice channel automatically spins up a new VC. Details on registering trigger channels and naming types are covered in the Features guide - Autoroom.

Set up a recruitment-only channel

Any channel registered as a recruitment-only channel under /config automatically deletes regular messages members post there. Without one set up, chatter and other notifications get interleaved with recruitment posts, and a recruitment that just went up quickly scrolls out of view.

In a registered channel, only recruitment messages stick around, so opening the channel shows exactly what's being recruited for right now. The limit is 1 channel on Free and 10 on Plus.

Registering this channel also unlocks a second capability: inside it, you can create a recruitment just by sending a message in the format description@number of members - no /invoke needed (this is Quick LFG). The number is how many members you want besides yourself, entered as digits from 1 to 99; @0 creates an uncapped recruitment. Mentioning a role in the same message notifies that role and takes priority over the default mention below.

For servers with members who aren't comfortable typing slash commands, or where most posting happens from phones, setting up a recruitment-only channel adds a way to start a recruitment without /invoke.

Add a recruitment list channel

Setting a recruitment list channel under /config gathers every currently active recruitment on the server into a single channel.

Without one, each recruitment just sits in whatever channel it was posted in. On servers running multiple recruitment-only channels across different categories or games, that means checking channel by channel just to see what's currently open.

With a recruitment list channel set, each recruitment appears in a compact entry alongside its current headcount, and you can jump straight from there to the full recruitment message. The more recruitment-only channels a server runs across games or categories, the more this helps.

Decide who gets notified by default

The Default mention setting under /config picks a role that gets notified automatically whenever a recruitment is posted.

Leave it unset, and posting a recruitment notifies no one. The /invoke modal has an optional "Mention Roles" field, so without a default, someone has to pick a role there every single time they want a notification sent.

Set a default mention, and submitting the modal with that field left blank still notifies the role you configured. To notify a different role for one particular recruitment, just pick it in that modal - it overrides the default for that one post.

If different roles cover different games on your server, leaving the default mention blank (or resetting it back to blank) is a valid choice too - it disables the automatic notification and keeps the decision in the modal every time.

Display language and ID labels

Setting Display language unifies Monvoke's display language across the whole server. The options are Japanese, English, French, German, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Russian.

A recruitment message's language is normally determined by the client language of whoever created it. Leave display language unset, and which language a recruitment shows up in can vary from post to post depending on who made it. Set it, and every recruitment posts in the same language no matter who created it. Choosing "Auto (command executor's language)" undoes that and reverts to the per-creator behavior.

ID Labels let you show different registered game IDs depending on what a recruitment is for. You register a label name plus a comma-separated list of keywords (flags) - up to 15 per server. When a VC is created, if the recruitment's title or description (or, for autorooms, the trigger channel's name) contains one of those keywords, only the IDs registered under that label show up in the VC's ID list. If nothing matches, the IDs registered without a label are shown instead.

Servers built around a single game don't need this. On servers that host several games, ID labels keep unrelated game IDs from showing up together in every VC. On the member side, registering under a label is just one extra choice in the /id command.

Settings you can leave for later

Once the settings above are in place, the parts of Monvoke that matter for day-to-day recruiting are covered. What's left is how the recruitment image looks, which matters less early on.

Recruitment Image Settings under /config lets you pick the character shown in the recruitment image (Monvoke, Sign, or none) and a default background (transparent, or one of seven built-in backgrounds - wall, wasteland, space, forest, playroom, rainbow, plaza). This is available on every plan.

Registering your own images as a background, character, or icon image is Plus-only. Until the built-in options stop being enough, there's no need to touch these - set them up whenever you're ready to put more work into how the server looks. See Plus plan details for more.

Learn more

/config has more settings than covered here. The full list is in Features guide - Server settings. For the bigger picture of what Monvoke does, see Docs - Monvoke overview and quickstart.

For more on voice channels, see the Features guide - Autoroom and From recruitment completion to gathering in a voice channel.