Discord gets autonomous moderation tool to fight spam and slurs

Today, Discord is announcing widespread availability of AutoMod, an autonomous moderation tool built directly into the platform to take the strain off human moderators. Alongside the official launch of AutoMod, Discord is also letting more servers offer paid memberships to their users and is adding new features to manage these premium subscriptions.

AutoMod is designed to scan servers for select words and phrases and can then automatically dole out responses like blocking messages, alerting admins, and timing out offending users. The feature has been available to a “small group of servers” for a couple of months but is now available on any Community Server across Discord.

Discord’s own AutoMod software offers a built-in alternative to the third-party moderation bots that have sprung up to automate the often difficult job of keeping communities safe and civil on the platform. At launch, AutoMod offers three ready-made lists of words that moderators can choose to filter, with the option of adding up to three custom lists of banned words. According to Discord’s FAQ, future AutoMod features will include the ability to detect and block harmful links and spam.

AutoMod is available to admins with the “Manage Server” permission and can be found within a server’s settings menu. It’s only available for community servers, which are designed to be larger spaces similar to a public chatroom rather than for small groups of friends who just want to use Discord to chat while playing games.

Meanwhile, Discord’s Premium Memberships feature, which launched as a closed experiment last December is expanding to more eligible servers in the US. The feature is designed to let admins monetize access to their server with access to member-only chatrooms and other benefits. It’s also getting some new functionality, including an analytics dashboard for admins to track premium revenue, the ability to offer free trials, and support for custom server emoji.