Bot is offline: how to diagnose and fix

Sometimes Discord's UI lies. Before assuming Civora is down:

• Refresh Discord (Ctrl+R on desktop, force-close and reopen on mobile).
• Check the member list in a populated channel, not the server overview — the overview is cached more aggressively.
• Open the Civora dashboard. On the server's Overview tab, the bot status shows whether Civora's side of the connection is active. If the dashboard says the bot is connected but Discord shows offline, the Discord member list was stale — wait a minute and re-check.

If after refresh the bot still shows offline both in Discord and on the dashboard, continue.

The most common single-server cause: a Discord role change accidentally revoked Civora's permissions.

In your Discord server:

1. Open Server Settings → Roles.
2. Find the Civora role (auto-created when the bot joined).
3. Verify it has these permissions enabled:
   • View Channels
   • Send Messages
   • Manage Messages (for the Delete and Timeout actions)
   • Moderate Members (for the Timeout action)
   • Ban Members (only if any category uses the Ban action)
   • Read Message History

If any of these are off, turn them back on. The bot will become responsive within roughly half a minute.

A common subtle issue: server-level permissions look fine, but a specific channel has overrides that block Civora.

1. Right-click the channel where Civora seems silent → Edit Channel → Permissions.
2. Find the Civora role (or @everyone if Civora has no per-channel override).
3. Check that View Channel, Send Messages, and Manage Messages aren't explicitly denied (red X) for Civora.

Channel-specific denials override server-level grants. Civora can be "online" globally but invisible in one channel because that channel's overrides are blocking it.

If Civora has been offline for hours:

1. Open the Civora dashboard.
2. If it asks you to sign in again, your session expired — normal, just sign in via Discord OAuth.
3. If after signing in the dashboard shows that the Discord connection needs refreshing, reconnect via Discord OAuth from the sign-in flow.

If you're on a paid tier and a payment recently failed, the dashboard shows a banner about payment status on the Billing page.

• Open Billing from the dashboard sidebar.
• If you see a payment-failed banner, use the Manage button to open the Stripe Customer Portal and update your card.
• Once Stripe successfully charges the new card, the subscription becomes active again and moderation resumes.

If the subscription was canceled by Stripe after a long string of failed payments, your account is on Free tier. If you had more than 1 server connected on Business, only the first remains active under Free's 1-server limit; the others sit idle until you upgrade or remove them.

If steps 1–5 didn't help, the cleanest fix is to remove the bot from your server and re-install it:

1. In Discord: Server Settings → Integrations → Civora → Remove. This removes only the OAuth integration; your dashboard data is preserved.
2. In the Civora dashboard: open the server from the Servers page and use the Danger zone tab to remove the Civora-side server record cleanly. (Skip this step if you want to keep your previous settings — re-adding the bot to the same Discord server reattaches them.)
3. On the dashboard Servers page, start the bot install flow again and authorize on Discord.

This takes a couple of minutes and resets any unusual permission state from the Discord side.