Set up your first ticket category

What “category” means in TicketCord

We use Discord’s built-in channel categories - there’s no separate concept to learn. Every new ticket becomes a text channel inside the category you choose, and the bot manages permissions per channel so only the requester and staff can see it.

The quick path: /setup

Instead of creating everything by hand, run /setup in your server. The command is restricted to users with the Discord Administrator permission, and it sets up the Discord side of things in one go:

• Creates a Tickets category for open tickets and a Closed Tickets category.
• Creates two staff roles - a Ticket Admin role with full ticket permissions, and a Ticket Support role with reply-and-read access. (On the free plan these are named TicketCord Admin / TicketCord Support.)
• Applies permission overwrites: the two staff roles can see and act in tickets, @everyone is denied.
• Reorders the new roles to sit just below the bot’s own role so Discord’s role hierarchy lets the bot manage them.

For the command to work, the bot needs either Administrator or Manage Channels + Manage Rolesat the server level (the invite asks for these by default). If your server has Discord’s 2FA requirement enabled for moderator actions, the account that created the bot in the Discord Developer Portal must have 2FA on too - that’s a Discord-side rule, not ours.

If you already have ticket-shaped categories or roles

Before creating anything, /setupscans your server for existing categories and roles whose names look like a previous ticket setup (e.g. “Tickets”, “Closed Tickets”, “Ticket Admin”, “Ticket Support”). If it finds any, you get three buttons:

• Use existing- keep your current resources untouched; you’ll point the dashboard at them yourself.
• Create anyway- make new ones with slightly different names so they don’t collide.
• Cancel - back out without changing anything.

You still have to finish setup on the website

This is the part people miss. /setuponly creates the Discord-side infrastructure. It doesn’t tell TicketCord which categories or roles to use - that happens in the dashboard. After running the command, head back to Configurationand select the new resources in the setup wizard. Without that step, tickets still won’t open.

Or: create the categories yourself

1. In your server, create a category called something like Open tickets.
2. Optionally create a second one called Closed tickets - TicketCord can move resolved channels there instead of deleting them, which is useful for audit history.
3. Set both categories to private by default: in the category permissions, deny View Channel for @everyone and grant it for your staff role and the TicketCord bot.

Point TicketCord at them

Open the setup wizard in the dashboard, or go to Configuration > Channels. Pick the open-tickets category - you can pick more than one if you want tickets to spread across them as each fills up (Discord caps each category at 50 channels). If you made a closed category, set it as the destination for closed tickets.

Both settings accept a list, so you can add more categories later without replacing what you already chose.

What the bot does to permissions

When a customer opens a ticket, TicketCord creates a new text channel inside the open category and adds three permission overwrites: deny @everyone View Channel, grant the requester View + Send + Read History, and grant your staff roles the same. The category-level permissions stay untouched.

Next up

With somewhere for tickets to land, you’re ready to create a ticket panel so customers have a button to click.