Comment by vivzkestrel
7 days ago
- Slightly veering off the topic here, to anyone reading this, I wanted to ask. I am thinking of starting a discord server for my SaaS
- The idea is to have a bugs channel that works like a forum (remember that new discord forum Q/A feature) where people come and post Q/A about bugs aka issues (SaaS is not open source)
- A feedback channel where people can submit feedback, paste screenshots, (not sure if links should be allowed here)
- What kind of tools, bots do you recommend so that it doesnt get overloaded with junk, spam or worse porn and crypto stuff
Please do not. Some people do not use Discord and thus will never report bugs or give feedback even if they use your software and would otherwise report bugs for other software.
Something public-facing that uses standard protocols would be ideal. Email, forums, IRC. For bug reports, a web form that doesn't need an account registration would be nice. You want to reduce friction or people will give up partway through the process. Don't mark too many fields as required or try too hard to categorize things either, that's a common misfeature I run into.
These days the out-of-the-box automod and autospam prevention tools in Discord are generally good enough you probably don't need third party bots to do it (unless the community gets particularly huge, and even then maybe not). Most bots are now for entertainment more than community management when the Discord is configured right.
The biggest trick to getting access to most of those built-in features is that it needs to be marked as a "Community Server" [1], so expect to put in the effort to meeting those requirements and getting Discord certified on them. Most of them are good practices in general, especially for something you are trying to present as a public, professional face of your company.
Also, I don't think any moderation tools are currently gated behind Server Boosts/Levels, but it may also be worth budgeting for buying a Server Level or two [2]. Most of the reasons to budget for that are marketing and comfort. If you plan to do things like Live Q&A or screensharing events, having the better audio/video capabilities of higher levels can be useful. The custom header for Discord Invites is often a marketing tool to help assuage users seeing the invites that it is indeed the right official community. (Some of the moderation tools were previewed at higher Server Levels, and it does seem like something Discord takes into account when testing various new, desirable features.)
(ETA: Also, automoderation only gets you so far in general, you may still want to budget for the labor of real moderators as well, no matter how good you think you can configure the automod tools.)
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047132851-E...
[2] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039337992-S...
you can use a multipurpose bot like sapphire https://sapph.xyz for moderation, anti-spam, logging, and automations.
to reduce junk, spam stuff you could try adding onboarding/verification questions before granting access also can se AutoMod + keyword/link filters and rate-limit new users
this won’t remove 100% of spam but it'll drastically reduce it some manual moderation will still be needed.