Developing Server Rules

Discord Community Guidelines and Terms of Service

The Community Guidelines govern behavior across all of Discord and outline what's never acceptable. While many of these things are common sense, they should still be incorporated into your rules so that there is a clear expectation set among members as to how they should behave. Some key behaviors prohibited by the Community Guidelines include:

• Harassment, threats, and doxxing: This covers all forms of harassing behavior, direct or indirect threats of harm, and sharing someone's personal information without their consent.
• Hateful conduct and promotion of violence: Any expression that attacks or dehumanizes people based on protected characteristics, as well as organizing, promoting, or glorifying violent acts or extremist ideologies.
• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM): Creating, sharing, or soliciting any content that sexually exploits minors in any format.
• Self-harm promotion and graphic content: Content that glorifies suicide, eating disorders, or self-harm, as well as imagery of violence, gore, or animal cruelty.
• Spam, scams, and platform manipulation: Unsolicited bulk messages, phishing, financial scams, self-bots, and artificially inflated engagement.‍
• Misinformation and IP violations: Sharing false or misleading content that could cause real-world harm, as well as pirated content, game cheats, or other intellectual property violations.

The Discord Terms of Service also establishes a few additional caveats to using Discord, including the following

• You must be 13 years or older to use Discord
• Distributing “auto,” “macro,” or “cheat utility” programs as well as providing hacked/modded game software through Discord is prohibited.

Furthermore, if you are one of the lucky individuals moderating a Partnered or Verified server (or hope to have your server partnered/verified in the future), you will need to consider the additional restrictions imposed on these servers in the Discord Partnership Code of Conduct.

• Discriminatory jokes and language related to one’s race, age, gender, disability, etc. are prohibited.
• Content that contains sexually explicit or sexually suggestive material is prohibited anywhere on a partnered server.

If you encounter a violation of our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines, we ask that you report this behavior to us. For more information on reporting abusive behavior, see the following article: Reporting Abusive Behavior to Discord.

General Etiquette

Discord's Community Guidelines cover serious violations, but your server rules also shape the day-to-day experience of your community. Beyond the platform-wide rules, here are some common behaviors worth addressing:

• Trolling - Trolling refers to the act of disrupting the chat, making a nuisance out of yourself, deliberately making others uncomfortable, or otherwise attempting to start trouble.
• Discussing Offensive/Controversial Material - This includes topics such as politics, religion, acts of violence, rape, suicide/self harm, school shootings, and other serious topics; as well as hate speech including racial slurs or derivatives thereof, sexist or homophobic statements, and other similar types of behavior.
• The details of how you define this rule can vary depending on the extent to which you feel it is necessary to enforce (for example, if you are following the partner code of conduct you may want to also include “ableist slurs” as being prohibited.
• Elitism - Members should refrain from insulting or belittling others based on the games or versions of games that they choose to play.
• This is especially applicable to Discord servers where one game may be distributed among multiple regions from a gameplay or version perspective
• Disrespecting Server Staff - Insulting the server moderators or becoming belligerent after being warned.

While measured discussion regarding the reasons for being warned should be encouraged for the education of the user and general public, at some point it may be necessary to shut down the discussion or take it to DMs.

• Incitement - Encouraging the breaking of rules, inciting others to be blatantly rude and offensive, or otherwise promoting and/or encouraging conflicts between other members.
• Punishment Evasion - Users should not attempt to evade the consequences of their actions such as using an alternate account to bypass restrictions.
• It is recommended that this be punishable with an instant ban, as this is the type of punishment that is most difficult to evade compared to the other options available.
• A user that is evading a ban is generally considered by Discord’s Trust and Safety team to be harassment, and can be reported to them for further action.
• Inappropriate User Profiles - For ease of communication and the comfort of those in chat, the profile picture, custom status, and display names (i.e., the name that shows up while reading the chat) of users should be in line with the rules of the server. Furthermore, the display name should also be easily readable, mentionable, and not attempt to imitate other users or game development staff or hoist you to the top of the server online list
• In effect, this also means that the user profile should be safe for work, not contain any offensive or illegal content, and not be used to harass others or spam/scam.
• “Hoisting” refers to using characters like exclamation points to make it so that you appear at the top of the online members list. Some people will put multiple characters like this in an attempt to be at the top of the online list. While it is not always feasible to enforce against users that don’t often chat, it is good to have a policy to enforce this if you see someone chatting with a hoisted display name. But, if this doesn’t bother you, you can remove this provision.
• Advertisement - Similar but not quite the same as spam, this refers to users attempting to promote their own social media/discord servers/other content creation channels.
• Usually, it is good to invite users to talk to a moderator privately if they want to advertise something.
• Speaking languages not understood by the server - Essentially, users should be prohibited from communicating in a language outside of the server’s official language.
• This makes it easier for moderators to moderate the server by ensuring that they understand the conversations that are happening and prevents users from trying to fly under the radar by speaking in languages moderators don’t understand.

Server Specific Considerations

Your server will also have needs of its own not covered in the previous two sections, and that’s ok! It is perfectly normal to set up channel-specific rules or to even override certain server rules in certain channels. Some examples include:

• An artist channel where artists are allowed to advertise their art creation profiles (e.g., Pixiv, DeviantArt).
• An image spam channel where people can flood the channel with images.
• A “current events” channel where people can discuss some controversial topics in a civil fashion.
• An “on topic” chat where people should specifically only talk about a certain thing, compared to an “off topic” chat where general conversation about anything is allowed.
• A game-related friend request channel or “carry” where users that post there should be expected to be pinged frequently for assistance in a way that is not considered harassment/spam.

You will need to carefully consider your server’s specific needs when coming up with channel rules or other server-wide rules.

Rule Enforcement

Establishing your rules is all well and good, but ultimately a moot point if you don’t enforce them. Moderators should carefully consider how they want to enforce their server rules. Some possible systems include:

• Case by Case - Punishment is more subjective and dependent on the nature and frequency of transgressions. While this system gives moderators a large amount of flexibility, accountability can be difficult due to the lack of standards and certain moderators may punish users differently. This may be better suited to smaller servers where the moderation tasks tend to be leaner.
• Infraction Based - Similar to a “three strikes and you’re out” system, users are punished according to the number of times they break the rules. Users may receive a mute after a certain number of warnings followed by a ban. While this system is great for accountability, it does not account for the severity of the transgressions involved.
• Points based - If you’d like the accountability of the strikes/infraction based system coupled with the flexibility of the case by case system, consider a points based rule enforcement structure. In this system, each rule is worth a certain number of points based on the importance and severity of breaking the rule where moderators can adjust the point value with an additional explanation for accountability.

Whichever system you choose, a few things will make it work better: document your actions, keep mod notes in a consistent format, and make sure your whole mod team is applying the same standards. Tools like Discord's built-in AutoMod can also help by automatically flagging or filtering content before it needs human review.

Appeals

If a user thinks their warning is unfair, they may lash out in chat or in the feedback channels of the server. It is important to have a way users can easily discuss their warning with the server moderators. You can visit a more in-depth explanation on appeals here.

Bringing It All Together

From creating your rules to developing a discipline system, you should now have a set of rules that incorporate the important Discord-wide rules, rules that make your server a welcoming place, and rules specific to your server to help things run smoothly. By enforcing these rules clearly and consistently with an accountable tracking system and transparent appeal process, you should be well on your way to a server you can be proud of!

Special thanks to naviking for their contribution writing this article.