One of our goals this year has been to make it easier for moderators and admins to keep their communities safe and welcoming for all. Since the introduction of AutoMod and its keyword filtering abilities back in June, over 20 million unwanted messages have been automatically removed from servers before they had a chance to be posted.

You read that right: AutoMod has removed over 20 million unwanted messages since its inception. If it took an average of five-ish seconds to review and decide to delete a message on your own, it would equate to about 1157 days saved — 1157 days that are better spent connecting with friends, building communities, and collectively committing culinary atrocities in #questionable-foods. We couldn’t be more excited to give that time back to you.

But we’re not stopping there: Today we're introducing new features and sharing a sneak peek into our plans that'll make it easier to keep your communities safer from two big evils: spam and raids.
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AutoMod Blocks Spammy Messages Before They’re Posted

AutoMod now comes equipped with spam-cleansing abilities that help you identify and block messages containing spammy text content and excessive mentions across all of your text channels, Threads, Text Chat in Voice, and yep — even our recently released Forum channels.

Whether you've seen them out in the wild or you’ve already prepared yourself by reading our Scams and What to Look Out For post, you’ve likely come across ‘em before: shady links made to look like legit websites. “You won’t believe how easy it is to get some free Discord Nitro at ‘fre3-nitr0-leg1t.com,” they say — that’s because it’s completely fake.

With AutoMod's "Block Spam Content" filter, you'll be able to identify users who try to post messages and links that have been widely-reported as spam on Discord and block them before they’re posted. 

Alongside general content spam, there’s another type of spam that *really* gets people’s attention: a cavalcade of bloopbloopbloopbloopbloop notifications that throws off your groove, forcing you to deal with someone who decided to mention every individual in your community. 

In addition to blocking content spam, AutoMod can also “Block Mention Spam” for you. Any message that mentions an excessive number of members will be blocked, saving your community from getting those annoying bleepbloops in the first place. 

Both “Block Mention Spam” and “Block Spam Content” can be found in Server Settings > AutoMod, as long as Community is enabled. (Need help? Learn more about working with AutoMod!)

‍On the Horizon: Better Protection Against Raids 

The best communities on Discord are welcoming to anyone interested in joining, and easily accessible with the click of an invite button. This open-arm mentality can sometimes carry a bit more weight than expected — some baddies may get a hold of your server’s invite and what follows is a plethora of suspiciously-similar accounts named “NotARobot” all barging in at once.

We’re focused on building tools to help better detect and prevent raids in your communities, while making it easier to de-escalate them should they happen. We’re early in our progress on anti-raid capabilities, but we’d like to introduce a few features your community can use now:

Pause Invites Without Fully Deleting Them

To help manage and control surges in new members, you and your moderation team now have the ability to pause your server’s invites. 

Because this cuts off the flow of new arrivals, this can be an effective way to halt a raid in progress. Existing invites will be temporarily disabled without the need to delete them permanently, and well-intentioned community members trying to join will know that the pause is only temporary. Your future friend will be able to hold onto their invite and try again later on.

Once you and your moderation team are all situated, unpause your invites and everything will work as usual! 

You’ll find the option to pause your server’s invites in Server Settings > Invites. 
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Has a Raid Occurred? Let Us Know. 

Help us out by reporting raids using the new “Report Raids'' feature in your Server Settings drop-down. You can include information on what’s happened during the raid, including channel, DM and mention spam and even let us know about those suspicious “NotARobot” accounts.

We’ll be able to use your report to study what types of raids have been occurring within your communities, helping us better craft anti-raid tools for you in the future. ‍
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A Safer Future Ahead…

We’ve also given all Community servers an extra buff: a new suspicious link filter that automatically detects and blocks messages containing links that are verified to be harmful, such as phishing links. It’s always on in the background for Community-enabled servers, so you can rest assured that even if you don’t make your setup super-complex, we’ve still got your back.

All of this is designed to help safeguard your community around the clock, lower the strain on your moderation and admin team, and save you time. We couldn’t be more excited to give more time back to you to spend with your friends and help build wonderful communities together. 

AutoMod’s constantly evolving, as all good robots do, so keep an eye out in Server Settings > AutoMod for when new features pop up! 🤖

Not using AutoMod yet? If you manage a Community server, you’ll find AutoMod within Server Settings. If your server isn’t a Community Server yet, enable the Community feature set within Server Settings > Community, where AutoMod and plenty of additional server features will be available to you.