DiddiLeija Tips for having a safe Discord server
Do you have a growing Discord server? How to keep your community safe? (January 22th, 2023).
Intro
Being the owner of a Discord community is a great responsibility. You’re in charge of a space people has chosen to hang out, meet folks and share knowledge. Most of the time you don’t have to do much, but sometimes, you’ll face a spammer, a rude user or something similar, and you have to take the moderator hat.
I’ve seen that a few times. Some big, well-known servers where I’ve been have received spammish stuff, inappropiate content, aggressive dudes, and other bad stuff at some point. I remember one time a bunch of spam messages by a bot account got stuck on a server for almost 3 days. But why? Because there was no moderation tools, and the only moderator was unactive most of the time.
In order to minimize the “bad behavior” incidences, and quickly smash the outcoming issues, I’d suggest you to take 4 advices applicable to Discord servers (though some of them are universal tips lol).
Tip 1: Set up a moderation bot/integration
Moderation bots are great. Mostly because they’re online 24/7 (unlike human moderators), and you can set them
up to automatically detect rude stuff. Also, some bots have enabled text commands (e.g. /report @badguy) that
can be used by all users in order to report bad behavior or request user timeouts. Always consult the bot docs to learn
how to set it up to your needs.
In my own usecase, I’ve been using YAGPDB.xyz, a easy-to-use bot for basic moderation.
Tip 2: Trust in a few extra moderators to help you out
This is a great idea when you have a lot of members in the server. Pick up users you trust, and have demonstrated to be fair and nice with other folks. Consider having them on a role upper to most of the users, but below you (so you can keep everything under control if needed, but allowing your moderators to help others). You can also teach your co-moderators to interact with moderation bots (in case you followed Tip 1, described above).
Tip 3: Set up a #rules channel or something similar
IMHO, this one is vital to prevent unintended rudeness (though it can’t help against intended attackers). If all your users can read what’s expected from them while on the server, they will be more careful and even help or remind other users to follow the rules.
Channel names such as #rules or #checklist are great to attract the atention of newcomers. These are a few rules
you can say to get started:
- Server language – “This is an English server, please use this language as best as you can”, “Please speak Spanish while on this server”, “This is the French-spoken server, if you speak English please head to this other server…”, depending of the language you’ve chosen for the server.
- Expected behavior – “Please be kind, respectful and nice. We want everyone to feel welcome here”
- Inappropriate behavior – “This is not a server for adult content”, “Please avoid rude behavior against others”
- Rules about invites, self-promoting, etc.
- Everything else you need on your server.
In addition of sharing the server rules, you can also explain what can users do when they find something wrong, who can they ask for help, and if there’s any exception to a rule (e.g. if you have a channel for another language than the one you’ve mentioned as the main language).
Tip 4: If you don’t want agressive comments in your server, don’t be agressive yourself!
This is the most intuitive tip I can give. In Mexico, we call that “predicar con el ejemplo” (“preach by example”). Again, this would only work against unintended behavior, but I believe it can always help.
Outro
Of course, there’s no way to avoid all the incidents that could pop into your server. But by following these 4 easy steps, you can reduce and mitigate them, and make your server a nice place for everyone, everytime :)