make discord private | ALTTP Randomizer | Page 1

gloomy dust Oct 12, 2025, 9:21 PM

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the spam bots are getting out of control, I'm not in a huge amount of servers but this is the worst by far
please consider making the discord private, people can still find the link on the ALTTPR webpage easily enough

modern viper Oct 12, 2025, 9:30 PM

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out of the last five people who spammed, four were already members of the server

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Discord invite links from the web are collected and scraped by spammers to find servers to spam

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going private does not fix this in any way

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there's nothing meaningful we can do about this, it's a Discord problem, it's happening all over

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it's incredibly frustrating

gloomy dust Oct 12, 2025, 9:32 PM

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you said this last time but it keeps getting worse
I don't think the problem is going to fix itself

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it's not happening all over

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this is the worst by far

modern viper Oct 12, 2025, 9:33 PM

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what magic setting do other large servers have enabled that stops this?

gloomy dust Oct 12, 2025, 9:34 PM

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their discords are private

modern viper Oct 12, 2025, 9:34 PM

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I'm kinda at my wits end dealing with the actual spammers, it doesn't help having people blaming us for not doing enough when there's nothing that works

gloomy dust Oct 12, 2025, 9:34 PM

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why not try it and see if it helps

modern viper Oct 12, 2025, 9:37 PM

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because it does not stop spammers who are using accounts already in the server

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they don't have to join!

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nowadays it's almost entirely recently-hacked accounts spamming

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they're legitimate people who joined via invites just like everyone else

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when they start spamming, Discord bans them from the service relatively quickly - but they spam the servers they're already in first

gloomy dust Oct 12, 2025, 9:39 PM

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I understand your frustration, it is annoying as hell

modern viper Oct 12, 2025, 9:40 PM

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it'd be great if we had, say, automod ability to filter out people who post multiple images

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that's something Discord doesn't offer, it'd take a custom bot scanning every message, which is something Discord has made less viable due to how they've reworked the API

gloomy dust Oct 12, 2025, 9:41 PM

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I wonder if there is some connection between whether the server is private and the tendency of its members to get hacked

modern viper Oct 12, 2025, 9:42 PM

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I would expect most people are members of a mixture of both private and public servers, assuming they use Discord enough to be in multiple servers

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I'm really not sure why you're obsessively focused on the public/private server dichotomy, it plainly makes no difference

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if there's any correlation, it'd be because smaller servers are much more likely to be private, but that does not mean that you can fix the problem for large servers by going private

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we have over 20k server members, many of them are not tech-savvy and are prone to things like clicking on suspicious links in DMs

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we have a lot of automod rules in place to try to stop spam, in the past that has worked quite well (and stop a significant number of spam posts that you never see), but with this latest batch of image spam, there's no good way to filter it automatically

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we could take away image-posting privileges for new members, but a lot of the spammers aren't new members

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and we pretty regularly get people joining and wanting to post things like tracker screenshots, so that'd be a problem for legitimate use

gloomy dust Oct 12, 2025, 9:48 PM

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it's true this is the largest server I'm in and that's probably the main issue

modern viper Oct 12, 2025, 9:48 PM

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I would imagine if you're a very large server, you probably take away most people's image/attachment privileges anyways

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with hackings (as opposed to invite enumeration/scraping) that's the big risk factor, the more people you have, the more likely you'll get hit by random account takeovers

gloomy dust Oct 12, 2025, 9:50 PM

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I can't help wondering if the experiment might be worth trying

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maybe some people who are in large private discords could let us know if their issues are comparable

late ridge Oct 12, 2025, 10:35 PM

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the only thing I've seen suggested that might help somewhat is a honeypot channel (which bans anyone who posts in it), but I'm not sure if that's actually effective

knotty salmon Oct 13, 2025, 4:12 AM

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This could have been an ~~email~~ #mod-mail.

gloomy dust Oct 13, 2025, 6:27 AM

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it could but I didn't see any reason to, I'm not complaining about anyone or have any issues with anyone personally
and I thought other people who have experience in these things might be able to add some insight

wraith helm Oct 13, 2025, 7:37 PM

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gloomy dust it's true this is the largest server I'm in and that's probably the main issue

Right, you're assuming that public/private is the key variable, when in fact it's probably just size. I guarantee the other servers with less spam are on a smaller scale than this.

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Seems like there's no easy answer to this, except wait for Discord to roll out a solution, fix the API, etc.

gloomy dust Oct 13, 2025, 7:47 PM

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wraith helm Right, you're assuming that public/private is the key variable, when in fact it'...

yea. I actually thought the other large server I was in was comparable, but it's actually "only" 3000 odd

modern viper Oct 13, 2025, 8:11 PM

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better mod tools would be excellent 👍

#make discord private