Discord is ramping up its content moderation tools and rolling out resources to support its overworked volunteer moderators. The company is also expanding its premium memberships program, which allows users to set up paid subscriptions for their servers.
In a series of announcements published Thursday, the company said it was rolling out AutoMod, an automatic tool designed to help protect its communities and create a safeguarded environment. According to information provided by Discord, at its core AutoMod is a powerful automatic keyword filter that will allow moderators to detect, block, or receive alerts of harmful messages or phrases in a server’s channels, threats, and Text in Voice chats before they’ve ever posted.
“Community moderation should be a hobby you celebrate, and stepping away to make time for yourself shouldn’t rack your mind with guilt of what could be happening when you’re gone,” Discord said in a blog post on Thursday. “Moderating your growing community should feel rewarding and fulfilling, not add constant stress from dealing with bad actors or unruly members.”
With AutoMod, moderators who are away can put users who post bad or harmful things in an automatic “time out,” which will ban them from posting until the moderator is back. A server’s moderation team will be able to determine which words and phrases are harmful themselves and set up custom keyword filters. You can learn more about how AutoMod works in Discord’s frankly hilarious YouTube video explaining the feature below.
AutoMod will no doubt be a welcome support for Discord’s moderators, who have been struggling to fight against abuse for years. At one point, they even developed their own guerrilla mechanisms, such as containment rooms or bots, to fight raids from destructive users and trolls.
As many of the perpetually online know, moderators and admins are key in internet communities, and Discord is launching two new resources for these users, including the Discord Community Resources “educational center,” the company explained. The center will be a blog featuring articles from “experienced community leaders,” with the aim to teach mods and admins how to build, engage, and grow their servers.
In addition, Discord will also launch a new “Admin Community” for mods and admins, run by the company itself, to help them chat and connect.
Lastly, Discord also had some news on premium memberships, a feature that allows a community’s creators and owners to put their server behind a paid subscription. More and more influencers are using Discord to connect with fans, and the chat platform has become a hub of the cryptocurrency community. Testing on premium memberships began with a small number of servers in December, but will be expanding to more servers this summer, the company said.
Update 6/16/2022, 11:35 a.m. ET: This post has been updated with additional information about Discord’s AutoMod tool.