Auto Moderation on Discord is Changing Forever
Here is everything you should know about the new built-in auto moderation feature on Discord.
This feature is currently in BETA and is slowly rolling out to a small group of servers
Ever since the dawn of Discord, we the server owners have been using third party bot applications to auto-moderate content in our servers. Let’s learn more about this feature and make sure we’re on the same page.
What is Content Moderation?
Content Moderation is the process of ensuring user-generated content follows the general platform guidelines. Discord has grown exponentially over the years and it’s necessary to moderate the undesirable contents of each and every community and server.
What is meant by automating it?
Auto moderation is when unwanted user generated content is filtered from the chat/platform automatically without the involvement of a human.
Majority of the time, complex moderation actions have to be taken by a human content moderator. We have been depending on bots like Auttaja, Sapphire, Dyno, whilst still hiring (human, I hope) staff members for the moderation team.
Features of the Built-in System
Quick Set up
It comes with 3 preset filters that you can put on to instantly filter the most common unwanted words in categories. The categories are:
Insults & Slurs: Blocks out the ethinical, racial, phobic slurs that is considered hate speech.
Sexual Content: Filters out the sexually explicit messages. Useful for family friendly conversations.
Severe Profanity: Contains the informal swear words.
Responses & Bypass
You can set an action that Discord will take against the person saying the filtered words. Unfortunately, you cannot ban or timeout someone with the built-in filter. Not yet, that is.
You can also send an alert to a custom channel basically making it “message logs”. But for messages that violate the filters.
You can also set Roles/Channels where users can bypass the filters.
Including Discord’s default list, you can have a maximum of 3 sets of these lists with different settings. Each set with 1000 words each.
Discord does not have a full list of these “Commonly flagged words”.
— What Discord’s new Auto Mod feature means for Discord Bots
Should you simply turn off your bot’s Auto Mod module and opt in the Discord’s built in one? Or should you keep using the bots and leave the BETA feature aside until its fully polished? Let’s see the differences.
Uptime wise, Discord’s better
Without a doubt there will be 99.99% uptime for your auto mod system if you set up with Discord’s built in.
If we say that one Discord bot is my only auto mod in the server (let’s ignore the moderation team for a second), and for some reason it has an outage, you are screwed.
With this feature built into Discord you run less into the risk of having this feature to be on a downtime.
The way these keywords work
There’s no option for us to choose whether we want the words to be exactly what they’re shown to be blocked or if it contains in the word.
For example, if I block “cock”, then messages saying “shuttlecock” will also be filtered. If I add “ana” as a filter, then it will also block messages with “banana”.
I think letting us use regex filters would be a great upgrade.
Personally, for now, I would keep both the bots and Discord’s auto mod up and running.
This article was published to Netcord HQ by Roonie#1255. Join the Official Daily Dose of Discord server to continue this conversation, suggest new articles, or write ones yourself!
