Replacing TeamSpeak, Discord has become a constant for most gamers, streamers, and content creators to communicate during games or connect with their communities online. So, citing the expansion of the Discord community, the company is taking some significant steps to improve the user experience. Therefore, Discord has now announced a new AutoMod tool that can automatically detect and block certain offensive words or phrases in a server.
Discord Releases New AutoMod Content Moderation Bot
Discord recently took to an official blog post to announce its newest AutoMod tool. This feature resides in the Server Settings menu, under Content Moderation, on desktops and allows server moderators with “Manage Server” permission to configure the tool to detect and block offensive or abusive words or phrases in their servers.
Along with the blog post, Discord shared a quirky, anime-style video, detailing the features and functions of the new AutoMod tool. You can check it out attached right below.
Now, coming to the technicalities, Discord says that AutoMod works by scanning a server’s written conversations, be it in a Thread, #text-channel, or in a server’s Text Chat in the Voice channel, to detect words or phrases that have been blocked by a moderator. However, for the tool to work, server moderators need to configure it and add the keywords or phrases they want AutoMod to detect and block.
At launch, AutoMod will come with three ready-made lists of words that moderators can choose to filter. Furthermore, they can add up to three custom lists of words to ban them on their servers. Furthermore, according to Discord’s FAQ section, AutoMod will soon gain the ability to block harmful links and spam messages as well.
After adding the keywords that they want to block in their servers, moderators can also choose one of three responses for users who use the blocked words. Currently, they can select to block the message before being posted to a chat, send an alert to a chosen channel, and apply a timeout for the guilty user account.
Right: What a relayed message to a moderator channel looks like
As for the availability, AutoMod is currently exclusive to Community servers that are essentially larger spaces like public chatrooms. It is not available for smaller servers such as those that include a group of friends using Discord as a communication tool while gaming. So, what do you think about Discord’s new AutoMod moderation tool? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
