opal zenith
Recently there's been a big surge of scam links disguising them as steam gifts while in actuality being malware. Even though I only use #al-lore I've seen these on a daily basis and think that something should be done about them since some really aren't smart enough to realise it's a scam (my friend was got by one).
How do these fake scam steam gifts work then? It's quite simple, they use Discord's markdown feature that lets you make text redirect to a link like this. You can make these yourself like this: [text](link), so it's really easy for anyone to do.
How would you go about blocking these markdown links then? This too is quite simple and in the end and all you need to do is to make a custom rule on Discord's automod and add the following regex pattern (also known as a regular expression): \[[^]]+]\(\s*<?https?:\/\/.*?\s*>?\). This blocks all valid markdown links, you can also exclude some roles from this rule so they can still use them, if wanted.
You can read more about regex patterns here.
Below an image of the regex in question working as intended.
