The bot is set up in Team Manager. You need to be a Team Manager or Super Team Manager to do this.

Invite XMOD

Open Team Manager, go to Add bot, and click Invite. Authorize XMOD on your server. Discord sends you straight back and links the server for you.

Prefer to do it by hand? Turn on Developer Mode in Discord, right-click your server, copy its ID, and paste it to link the server.

Permissions

The invite asks for exactly what XMOD uses and nothing more, never blanket control of your server. The two that catch people out are Manage Roles, which only works on roles below XMOD's own, so keep its role high in Server Settings, Roles; and Manage Channels, which is what lets Zap deny permissions per channel.

What XMOD is granted

Kick, Ban, Timeout and Move Members for the punishments; Manage Roles for role actions and the Zap role; Manage Channels for Zap's per-channel denials; Manage Messages to delete other people's posts; View Channels and Read Message History to see the server at all; Send Messages, Send Messages in Threads, Manage Threads, Embed Links and Add Reactions for chat; and Change Nickname, which only ever covers XMOD's own nickname.

If a server grants less than this - an older install, or a hand-edited role - Bot settings names the missing permissions rather than letting the affected actions fail as though the tool were broken.

Private channels

XMOD sees a channel only if its own role is allowed to. A staff or ticket channel that denies View Channels will not appear in the console at all - add XMOD's role to it to moderate there.

Turn on the three intents

If you run XMOD on your own bot application, open it on the Discord developer portal, go to Bot, and switch on all three privileged gateway intents: Presence, Server Members, and Message Content. Save, then restart the bot.

All three, or none of it works

Discord refuses the whole connection if the bot asks for an intent that is switched off - it does not simply drop that one feature. Bot settings will show Used disallowed intents and the console falls back to a much thinner view: no online status, no member list ordering, no typing indicators, and no live voice channels.

Set it up

Everything under Bot settings belongs to one bot. Every server runs its own, so pick the bot at the top of the page, then set its timeout and reason presets, log channel, AutoMod, and commands.

Prefer your own bot?

Each of your servers can run the tool on its own Discord application instead of XMOD, so the bot carries the name and avatar that server's community should see, and stays an application only you can revoke. Set it up under Team Manager, Add bot: pick the server under Bots, open Manage bot, then paste the Application ID from General Information and the token from the Bot tab. We check the token with Discord before saving it.

Servers are independent here. One can wear your own bot while another stays on XMOD, and two servers can share one application if you would rather run a single bot in both. What changes for a server with its own application is that it uses that bot and no longer uses XMOD at all, so you invite your bot to it and never need ours. The three privileged intents have to be enabled on your application, not ours - if they are off, Discord refuses the connection and Team Manager says so rather than quietly falling back to XMOD.

We store each token encrypted and never show it again. Removing the application from a server, or unlinking that server, deletes its token and puts that server back on XMOD; resetting the token in the developer portal also makes our copy useless.

Studio