Discord AutoMod Update Will Bring Mention Spam Filters

A new AutoMod Setting is coming to Discord and here's is everything you need to know about it. Out of all the raid types, a mass-mentioning raid has to be one of the most damaging. And with this, you will be able to prevent them before they even happen!

Discord AutoMod Update Will Bring Mention Spam Filters
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In this era of online communities, you never know when a raid might take place in your community. Out of all the raid types, a mass-mentioning raid has to be one of the most damaging.

However, with the development of new spam moderation tools by Discord, it is now easier for community managers to moderate spam and bad words with the new introduction to Discord's AutoMod feature. This feature is getting new and useful features time to time. One of the best one of which, is the upcoming mention spam filter.

AutoMod: Block Mention Spam

AutoMod on your community's moderation settings, may only have 2 - 3 settings right now. We are going to talk about the 3rd one a bit later. The two settings are the settings:

  • Commonly Flagged Words
    Premade by Discord. 3 sets of categories are given for you to tailor your bad word filters. The three sets are Severe Profanity, Insults & Slurs, and Sexual Content.
  • Custom Keyword Rule
    This filter is for you to set custom "bad words" that you want blocked from your community.

These bad-word filters have their own sets of actions you can set. What happens when someone says one of the blacklisted words?

Mass Mention Filter

There is going to be an additional filter setting in this settings tab. And with this, users will be able to block mass-mention or otherwise known as mention spam.

Screenshot from DiscordPreviews

Mention spam is when one or more users constantly spam one or multiple users/@everyone/or a server role. This type of spam is not healthy for a community because it encourages members to click the leave button. Nobody likes to get pinged.

With this new filter, however, you can set how many mentions are allowed in one message- it can range from 1-50.

Better than bots? Yes.

Many users are rather upset with the native implementation of features originally exclusively found in 3rd party Discord bots. However, they are overlooking one thing. Discord bots work with the API and its users. It detects your messages. And it can only detect the damage done and take it from there.

On the other hand, Discord's native implementation of this system can detect the damage before its even done. If a message is found to have large amount of mentions, and a filter is set up, Discord will completely prevent the message from going through. Nobody will see or sense the message was ever typed.

This is similar to the block bad words feature. Whereas, third party Discord bots would react after the message was already sent. Possibly seen by the participators in chat. Not to mention, not perfect uptime, harder setting up, and not being new-user friendly.

But of course, I would like to know your opinion on this feature. Should Discord add all moderation features natively or let the bots do the job?

Let's discuss in the official Netcord server.