On the surface, Discord handles event reminders for you. The platform fires off a notification when an event begins, and that’s it.
For a once-a-month movie night, that’s probably fine. If you’re running raids twice a week, a weekly tournament, or scheduled content your community plans their week around, you’ve already learned how thin a single start-time ping really is. People mute notifications. They miss it. By the time someone sees the alert, you’re five minutes in with half the roster missing and the rest waiting in voice.
For organizers running events that matter, a useful reminder system would let you:
- Send reminders before the event, not just at start time
- Schedule multiple reminders — a day before, an hour before, ten minutes before
- Write a custom message for each one
- Reach only the people who actually RSVP’d, with the granularity to ping just the “yes” crowd
We built Apollo with this kind of organizer in mind — the Discord communities running real, recurring programming like raids, tournaments, classes, content schedules, and weekly meetings. The whole product is designed around getting people to show up, and the reminder system is the piece organizers feel most.
How reminders work
By default, Apollo sends a reminder 15 minutes before the scheduled start time. When it fires, Apollo creates a thread on the event message and pings everyone who signed up. The thread doubles as a dedicated chat channel for the event itself.
If 15 minutes isn’t the right window, change it with /settings reminder_interval. Reminders can be sent up to a full week before an event starts. If you’d rather they post to the event’s text channel instead of a thread, disable thread reminders with /settings thread_reminders.
Who receives reminders
Reminders go to attendees who selected a signup option that indicates attendance. Apollo’s default options are Accepted, Tentative, and Declined — only the people who clicked Accepted get pinged.
Apollo events are deeply customizable. During event creation, you can add or remove signup options, set a capacity for each one, and configure which options count as attendance.
If you find yourself building the same set of signup options every week, save them as a preset with /signup_presets, then set it as the default with /signup_presets default.
Multiple reminders, each with a custom message
If you’re running events your community organizes their week around, this is the single biggest reason to pick up Apollo Premium.
A 15-minute reminder is fine for casual events. It is not enough for a raid night, a tournament, or anything that requires people to prepare. Some attendees need a day-before heads-up to plan their evening. Some need an hour-before to get logged in and set up. Some need a ten-minute “go go go” so they’re not still finishing dinner when the event starts.
Premium lets you schedule up to 5 reminders per event, and every one of them gets its own custom message. A single raid night might look like:
- 24 hours before — “Raid tomorrow at 8 PM ET. Consumables stocked, addons updated, logs running.”
- 2 hours before — “Heads up — raid in 2. Eat now.”
- 15 minutes before — “Invites going out. Hop in voice.”
Custom messages let you write reminders in your community’s voice — the context attendees need, in the tone they recognize from you. Layered across multiple touchpoints, that specificity is the difference between soft attendance and the kind you can plan around.
Temporary attendee roles
For a handful of attendees, pinging everyone by name works fine. Once an event has 30, 40, or 80 signups, the ping turns into a wall of mentions that’s hard to scan and easy to tune out.
Apollo Premium can create a temporary Discord role for each event and auto-assign it to everyone who signs up. When the reminder fires, Apollo uses that role instead of pinging every attendee by name — the message stays short, readable, and professional even with 40 people signed up.
The role also gives you a clean way to ping attendees in chat throughout the event — no manual mention lists, no copy-paste, no “wait who signed up again.” When the event is deleted, the role goes with it. Your server doesn’t accumulate dozens of stale roles over time.
For anyone running recurring high-stakes events, this is the difference between “I have a bot that sends reminders” and “I have an operations system.”
Event mentions
Reminders only help if people sign up. Apollo can ping specific roles when an event is posted — up to 5 roles per event — so the right people see new events as they go on the calendar.
It’s not a reminder in the strict sense, but the right mentions at posting time drive RSVPs, which makes every reminder downstream more effective.
FAQ
Can Apollo send DMs for event reminders?
No. Apollo sends reminders to a text channel or thread — DM reminders aren’t supported.
Do users need to RSVP to get reminders?
Yes. Reminders only go to users who’ve signed up. If no one’s signed up, Apollo doesn’t send a reminder.
Can users opt out of reminders?
Yes. Anyone can opt out of all Apollo reminders with the /reminders off command. Reminders can also be disabled entirely on a per-event basis.
How many reminders can I have per event?
One on the free tier. With Apollo Premium, up to 5 reminders per event, each with its own custom message.
Get started
Apollo’s free tier covers the basics: one reminder, default timing, default message. It works.
If you’re running events your community organizes their week around, Apollo Premium is built for you — up to 5 reminders per event with fully custom messaging, temporary attendee roles, and the rest of the toolkit serious organizers depend on. It’s the difference between hoping people show up and running events you can count on.
To get started, invite Apollo to your Discord server and create an event with the /event command. To unlock the full reminder system, see Apollo Premium. Questions? Join the Support Server and talk to an Apollo expert.