The one rule that matters
A member or a bot can only manage roles that sit BELOW their own highest role. That covers giving and removing roles, editing them, and deleting them. The same goes for moderation: you can only kick, ban or time out someone whose highest role is below yours. The server owner is the only exception.
What role order does and does not change
- It decides who can manage whom (the rule above).
- It decides someone's name colour: the highest role that has a colour wins.
- It decides where people show in the member list, for roles set to display separately.
- It does NOT change server-wide permissions: those simply add up across all of someone's roles.
- It does NOT decide channel permissions: in a channel, an "allow" on any of someone's roles beats a "deny" on another of their roles, whatever their order. A setting for that one member beats both.
A safe role order
From top to bottom, this works for almost every server:
- Owner and admin roles
- Moderator roles
- Your bots (so they can manage the member roles below them)
- Member roles: members, game roles, notification and pick-your-role roles
- @everyone (always at the bottom)
Why bots go just under your moderators
A bot that hands out roles, runs a role picker or times people out has to sit above those roles and members. Put it just below your moderators, not above them: then it can manage your members, but it can never change or hand out your admin and mod roles, even if something goes wrong.
Common mistakes
- A bot's role sitting below the roles it is supposed to hand out: its role picker or join role fails with "missing permissions".
- Giving a bot Administrator to "fix" permission errors. It hides the real problem and gives the bot power over everything. Fix the role order instead.
- Putting a new moderator role below a member role: the moderators then can't time out people with that role.
How Foreman handles it
Foreman never asks for Administrator. Before every push from the website, he checks the role order and names any role he can't reach, with the fix, before anything changes.