This article hasn't been translated into your language yet. You're reading the English version.
How to set up auto-created temporary voice channels in your Discord server — hub channel configuration, naming templates, user permissions, auto-delete, and advanced organization. Step-by-step guide using Rally Bot's free Temp Voice plugin.
Grow your server faster with Rally
Rally gives server owners community management tools, member engagement features, and discovery placement — all in one bot. Add it to your server in 2 minutes.
Add Rally to your server →Voice channel management is one of the most persistent headaches in Discord server administration. Every community goes through the same cycle: you create a few voice channels, members ask for more, you add more, half of them sit empty, and eventually you have a sidebar full of "Gaming 1 through Gaming 7" channels that have not been used in months.
Temporary voice channels solve this cleanly. One hub channel. Members join it to trigger a private voice space that is automatically named, automatically configured with their permissions, and automatically deleted the moment they leave. The sidebar stays clean, voice usage scales to actual demand, and members have privacy and control without admin overhead.
Rally Bot's Temp Voice plugin is free, configurable, and handles the entire lifecycle — creation, naming, permissions, and deletion — without any ongoing management from you.
Permanent voice channels have a fundamental scaling problem. You cannot know in advance how many channels you need. Add too few and you create contention (members waiting for a channel to free up, or tolerating strangers joining their conversation). Add too many and the sidebar becomes a graveyard of empty channels that makes your server look dead.
Temporary channels solve both problems simultaneously. Supply is always exactly equal to demand: if 12 groups of people want to voice chat at the same time, 12 channels exist. When everyone leaves, zero channels remain. Your sidebar always looks accurate rather than aspirational or cluttered.
Additional advantages:
Go to rally.casa/bot and click Add to Discord. Select your server from the dropdown in Discord's OAuth2 authorization flow, approve the permissions, and Rally Bot joins your server.
Log in to the Rally dashboard at rally.casa with Discord to access your server's configuration panel.
Rally Bot includes 18 free plugins
Temp Voice is one of 18 free plugins in Rally Bot — alongside moderation, economy, leveling, AI chatbot, music, suggestions, starboard, and more. You enable only what you want. Installing Rally Bot once gives you access to the full toolkit with no per-feature costs.
The plugin is now active but not yet functional — you need to create and designate the hub channel in the next step. Enabling the plugin without a hub channel configured means nothing happens until you complete Step 3.
The hub channel is the single channel members join to trigger temporary voice creation. When any member joins the hub, Rally Bot immediately creates a new temporary voice channel and moves that member into it. The hub channel itself always remains empty.
Creating the hub channel in Discord:
➕ Create Voice Channel (common, intuitive)🎙️ Join to CreateNew VoiceStart a CallDesignating it as the hub in Rally:
From this point forward, any member joining the hub channel will have a temporary voice channel instantly created for them.
Multiple hub channels for different purposes
Rally Bot supports multiple hub channels, each with different configuration. You can have one hub for gaming (creates channels under a Gaming category), one for study groups (creates channels under a Study category), and one for general calls — each with its own naming template and default settings. Configure each hub channel separately in the Temp Voice plugin settings.
How temporary channels are named determines how useful and organized your voice section feels. Rally Bot supports multiple naming approaches, from simple to fully customized.
Naming options:
Username-based (default):
{username}'s channel — creates names like "Alex's channel" or "Maya's channel." Simple, personal, and immediately communicates who created it. Best for small and medium servers.
Custom static name: All temporary channels share the same name (e.g., "Voice Chat"). Minimalist, but provides no indication of who is in the channel or what they are doing.
Template with variables: Rally Bot supports several template variables for more expressive naming:
{username} — the creator's Discord display name{game} — the game the creator is currently playing (populated from Discord Rich Presence if available){number} — auto-incrementing number (Voice 1, Voice 2, etc.){activity} — the creator's current activity statusExample templates:
{username}'s {game} session → "Alex's Elden Ring session"{username}'s room → "Maya's room"Gaming #{number} → "Gaming #1", "Gaming #2"Configure naming in Rally:
In the Temp Voice plugin settings, navigate to Channel Naming and select your preferred format or enter a custom template.
Content moderation for channel names:
Members can rename their temporary channels (configured in Step 5), which means they can set inappropriate names without checking templates first. Enable Rally Bot's content moderation for temp voice channel names from the same settings panel. This automatically flags or rejects names that violate your community guidelines.
When a member creates a temporary channel by joining the hub, they become the channel's owner. Rally Bot can give channel owners a configurable set of controls over their own space. Getting this balance right is important: too few permissions and the feature feels hollow; too many and you create moderation risks.
Recommended permission set for channel owners:
Rename their channel: Allow. Lets members set a meaningful name for what they are doing. Enable content moderation (Step 4) to keep names appropriate.
Set a user limit: Allow. Channel owners can cap how many people can join their channel — useful for private calls with specific friends ("room for 4 only"). This is one of the most useful owner permissions and rarely causes problems.
Kick members from their channel: Allow, with caveats. Lets channel owners remove disruptive members from their space. This is analogous to kicking someone from a private call. The main risk is abuse (gatekeeping behavior, harassment); moderators should retain the ability to review and join any channel.
Lock the channel: Allow. Owners can close their channel to new joins. Useful for private sessions that should not be interrupted.
Configure these in Rally:
In the Temp Voice plugin settings, navigate to Owner Permissions and enable or disable individual permissions using the toggles.
What moderators always retain (regardless of owner permissions): Server moderators with appropriate roles retain the ability to join any temporary channel regardless of lock status, and to forcibly close channels that violate server rules. Temp Voice channels are not private from server administration — they are private from other members.
Auto-deletion is what makes the system clean. When the last member leaves a temporary channel, Rally Bot deletes it automatically — no manual cleanup required.
Auto-delete is enabled by default. If it has been toggled off during configuration, re-enable it in the Temp Voice plugin settings under Auto-Delete.
Delete delay: You can configure a short delay (0–60 seconds) between the last member leaving and the channel being deleted. A small delay (5–15 seconds) prevents the channel from disappearing while a member briefly disconnected and is reconnecting. A zero delay is clean but may delete channels before a reconnecting member can return.
Default of 5–10 seconds is appropriate for most servers.
What happens to channel history: Discord voice channels do not have chat history in the traditional sense — they are audio-only by default. Any text chat associated with a voice channel (if enabled) is deleted alongside the channel. If your server uses voice channel text chat, inform members that this content does not persist.
Auto-delete keeps your server looking alive
A server with 50 empty permanent voice channels looks abandoned, even if members are active in text. Auto-delete means your voice section always accurately reflects current activity — zero empty channels when nobody is in voice, and exactly as many channels as there are active groups when people are. This is a meaningful first impression for new members exploring your server.
For servers with diverse communities and voice use cases, additional organization makes the temp voice system significantly more powerful.
Category-based organization:
Instead of all temporary channels appearing in a single flat section, configure Rally Bot to create temporary channels inside specific categories based on which hub channel was used.
Example structure:
📂 GAMING VOICE
➕ Create Gaming Channel ← hub
[auto-created channels appear here]
📂 STUDY & WORK
➕ Create Study Room ← hub
[auto-created channels appear here]
📂 HANGOUT
➕ Create Hangout Channel ← hub
[auto-created channels appear here]
Each hub channel creates temporary channels within its own category. The voice section stays organized even during high concurrent usage.
Configure in Rally: In the Temp Voice plugin settings, for each hub channel you can specify which category temporary channels should be created in. If no category is specified, channels are created adjacent to the hub.
Game-specific naming templates:
Rally Bot can read Discord Rich Presence data to detect what game the channel creator is playing. Use the {game} variable in your naming template:
{username}'s {game} → automatically creates "Alex's Elden Ring" or "Maya's Minecraft" or "Jordan's Valorant" based on what Discord reports they are playing.
This is one of the most useful features for gaming servers — the voice section becomes a real-time view of what games people are actively playing, which functions as informal social discovery (members join a channel because they see someone playing the game they want to play).
If Rich Presence is not available (the member is not playing a detected game, or has activity status disabled), Rally Bot falls back to a configurable default — either the username template or a generic name.
Per-category channel limits:
For large servers, configure a maximum number of simultaneous temporary channels per category. This prevents a single category from growing too large and keeps the sidebar manageable even during peak usage.
Once configured, announce the feature to your server so members know how to use it:
Voice channels are now self-serve. Join ➕ Create Voice Channel to instantly get your own private voice space. You can rename it, set a user limit, and control who joins. The channel automatically disappears when everyone leaves — no cleanup needed.
Commands in your channel:
/voice rename [name],/voice limit [number],/voice lock,/voice kick [@member]
Pin this in your general or #announcements channel, and include it in your server's welcome or info materials.
Viewing active temporary channels: All active temporary channels are visible in your server's channel list as usual. The Temp Voice plugin panel in the Rally dashboard also provides an overview of currently active channels, their owners, and member counts.
Closing a channel:
Moderators with the appropriate role can join any temporary channel and use /voice close to trigger immediate deletion — even if members are still present. This is useful for channels that are violating server rules.
Reviewing channel activity: Enable Rally Bot's voice logging in the moderation settings to log when temporary channels are created and deleted, who owned them, and how long they lasted. This audit trail is useful for investigating complaints about specific channels.
Adjusting owner permissions after launch: If you find that channel owners are abusing rename permissions (creating inappropriate names), tighten the configuration. You can revoke any owner permission from the Temp Voice plugin settings at any time — changes take effect immediately for newly created channels.
The hub channel is not creating temporary channels. Verify that the Temp Voice plugin is enabled and that the hub channel is correctly selected in the plugin settings. Also verify Rally Bot has Manage Channels and Move Members permissions in the voice category. Without Move Members, the bot can create the channel but cannot move the joining member into it.
Temporary channels are not being deleted after members leave. Check that auto-delete is enabled in the Temp Voice settings. If it is enabled and channels are still persisting, verify that Rally Bot has permission to delete channels in the relevant category.
Members cannot rename their channels.
Verify that the rename permission is toggled on in the Temp Voice plugin's Owner Permissions settings. Also confirm members are using the correct command format (/voice rename [new name]).
Channel names are inappropriate.
Enable content moderation for channel names in the Temp Voice settings. Existing problematic channels can be renamed by moderators using /voice rename while in the channel, or by closing and recreating the channel.
Rich Presence game names are not appearing.
Rich Presence data comes from Discord's desktop application and requires the game to support it. Mobile users and users with activity status disabled will not provide game data. The {game} variable gracefully falls back to your configured default if no game is detected — verify your fallback template is configured.
Temporary voice channels transform voice management from an ongoing administrative task into something that works automatically and scales with your community. The hub-and-auto-create pattern is the industry standard for good reason: it solves the empty-channel problem, gives members privacy and control, and eliminates the admin overhead of manual voice channel maintenance.
Rally Bot's Temp Voice plugin is free, handles the full lifecycle from creation through deletion, and supports enough configuration to work well for servers of any size — from small friend groups to large public communities.
Add Rally Bot to your server — it takes two minutes, and temporary voice channels will be running in your server within ten minutes of configuration.
Enable name moderation before giving rename permissions
If you plan to allow members to rename their channels (Step 5), enable content moderation for channel names first. Without it, you are relying on members to self-moderate — which works for most servers but creates problems in public communities with high join rates.
Example: Gaming Voice allows a maximum of 20 simultaneous temporary channels. If 20 channels are already active, new hub joins show a "channel limit reached" message until an existing channel is freed.
Configure per-category limits in the Temp Voice plugin settings under each hub channel's Advanced section.