Disabled Hyperlinks Question + Suggestion

[dapper verge]

I know I could simply DM or ping one of the moderators but I thought this might also be of public interest.

I read your #server-news and it says you disabled hyperlinks but as far as I know, disabling hyperlinks is not possible and it seems we can still use hyperlinks, for example I'm using them here: #friend-and-guild-id message

So I don't really understand what you mean by "hyperlinks have been disabled". Does this mean hyperlinks are not allowed to use or am I just missing some Discord option/feature?

Question aside, Discord does warn people when they are visiting websites. While I support and understand that you want to protect the community, at some point, we are responsible for our actions. I think that if I click something without checking where it leads to, that's my fault and not yours or anyone's, if I do that I'm just irresponsible, careless, and don't understand the dangers of the Internet, it's not your fault and you shouldn't punish yourself, your server or other users in it because I'm irresponsible and careless. That's my opinion at least.

Opinion aside, if you have this scam links issue, you can either generate more awareness, hire more moderators (I saw you were recruiting new ones, good move), or invite a bot that checks links (plenty of these exist, Dyno probably being the most known one, but even if you wanted, we can also use Bridal Z23 to make a blacklist, or make it so she blacklists all links except for obviously safe ones, such as twitter.com, youtube.com or google.com). I'm happy to help you set this up, if you want. We found a whole list of Discord scam links in JSON format that could be implemented into Bridal Z23 or a brand new bot if you prefer.

[drowsy pivot]

Hi, thank you for your feedback
To be precise, the idea is to stop the use of what Discord calls "masked links" aka hyperlinks in the majority of channels from being abused by bots to send questionable links

We are already using Discord's own automod system, which has been very reliable at blocking out scam links being posted by scam accounts - these are usually to links to... "Questionable" discord servers

The only place where this is not active is #friend-and-guild-id , since well that's where people are legitimately going to post their legitimate servers for their guilds

Naturally, it isn't exactly possible to siphon out illegitimate servers to legitimate ones so

[dapper verge]

Oh! That explains why I was able to use them there. I thought something was wrong because I was able to use them in that channel so that's mainly why I made this post, either you forgot or I was ignorant of Discord features.

Well thanks a lot for this explanation. I hope the bots leave you alone. If not, I'm here to help in whatever way I can like I said. 👍

Also let me add, we also found this besides the JSON list with all the scam links:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/stop-discord-phishing

This is, in my opinion, much safer and easier for you. We wouldn't need to access Z23's source code this way. Check it out if you want.
Note that I never used it, not sure how good is it.

[storm cipher]

why add a whole npm package and a supply chain attack vector for a simple scam list that isn't really needed as the mods said, the occurrences of scam links getting through the cracks is small enough that they can be manually caught, not something that a outdated phishing link agreggate would help with much.

[dapper verge]

Because automod isn't really the efficient way to do it? You are still getting scam links in friend-guild. One was posted a couple of minutes ago.

And that list is not necessarily outdated, it does contain the Steam scam links you get in here. Even if it was outdated we could just make our own blacklist, I'm happy to cooperate with you to maintain it if you feel this is worth doing.

Otherwise I think it's fine, probably more of a preference thing than anything.

[naive basin]

Thank you but we’ve got it under control No matter what path we take there’ll be an endless amount of work, scammers will always find something new and we’ll always need to update this or that. The choice we’ve made is the one that’s simplest for us and easiest to maintain. No bot or amount of warnings will stop scams from happening, we just ask people be aware of anything they’re doing online, as they should’ve been doing since the internet was created.