Protecting Your Discord from Hate Raids
Hate raids from Twitch can spill over into streamers’ Discord servers, especially if there are links to the Discord server available on Twitch or other platforms.
There are a number of ways you can set up your server to prevent hate raids or diminish their impact. By setting your server up effectively, you’ll be able to secure it with just a few actions, without having to resort to deleting channels or roles. It also means you’ll be able to return things to normal just as quickly, while minimizing any disruption or upset to your community.
Server Protection Highlights
Limiting New Members
The most effective thing you can do is restrict the ability of a newly joining member to access your server and community. There are a few ways that you can put in a few barriers to keep out potential hate raiders and other folks joining in bad faith.
- Allow new members to only see a single channel, until you assign a role that gives them access to the rest of the server.
- Keep new members separate from existing members (so they can’t see your existing members list) until you’re confident they’re not there to cause trouble.
- Require email or phone verification for all members (in settings).
- Make new members wait a certain period of time before being able to chat.
- Restrict your voice channels, especially the ones you use on stream, so that new users can’t join those unless you or your mods move them into the channel.
- Don’t give new members permissions or roles where they could abuse certain functions like Text-to-speech (TTS), which could be abused while you’re live on stream.
A more easily accessed option is to use a Discord bot to set up a ‘reaction role’. This grants a role by selecting a reaction below a specific message. It offers much less protection against raids but should help keep out spam bots.
We recommend setting up your server so that most channels’ permissions are synced to their categories. That way, if you need to make any changes or lock things down, you only have to change the category permissions.
If you already have your own server, make sure you (and your mods) know the exact steps you’d need to take to secure it if you’re raided. Check out The Games Hotline’s Discord template, which you can use to compare settings–or even copy and use as your own.
If you know of a problem user that appeared in another server and you’d prefer they didn’t join yours, you can ban them in advance:
- User Settings > Advanced
- Developer Mode = ON
- Right-click on the user’s name and copy their ID (not their username)
- In a private channel on your server, type: <@ID>
- Post the message and you’ll be able to right-click their name and ban the account.
The Games Hotline Discord Template
We created a server template designed to protect any community targeted by a hate raid. Feel free to copy it, change it as much as you’d like, and use it as if you’d made it yourself.
If you already have a server it’s probably not practical to invite your entire community to a new one. However, you can still use the template to compare the role and channel permissions, replicating the setup to make your current server more secure.
In our template server, the only existing members new arrivals can see are admins and mods. They must be manually assigned a role before joining the main part of the server. Until then they can only post in a single channel, which is where any hate raids would be confined to. Your community members would have no way to tell a raid was even happening, and the raiders wouldn’t be able to see or interact with them in any way.
To help you understand how everything works, there’s a ‘Read Me’ category with information about the various roles, channels, permissions and general setup, including exactly what to do in the event of a hate raid. All of the information is stored in the channel topics.
On desktop, make sure you click on the channel headers to get the topics to display properly.
Full Discord Settings Review
Here are some settings we recommend you double-check or consider in preparation for a hate raid.
User Settings > My Account
- Enable 2FA
User Settings > Privacy & Safety
- Set ‘Safe Direct Messaging’ to ‘My friends are nice’
- Allow direct messages from other server members? Here, you can apply your setting to all servers you’re in at once, or choose individually in each server’s privacy settings
- Choose who can add you as a friend
- Choose who can join your game and voice channel
- Hide personal information when enabled
User Settings > Streamer Mode
Hides personal information when you’re live and silences Discord notifications.
Server Privacy Settings
ON by default, this is your personal setting to allow direct messages (DMs) from your server members; you can’t control whether or not your members can DM each other.
Server Settings > Overview
- ON Send a random welcome message when someone joins this server
(so you can tell when a new member has arrived)
Server Settings > Moderation
HIGH Verification requirements for new members.
If you get raided this could give you up to 10 minutes to secure your server before any raid accounts can post. ‘Highest’ requires phone verification for maximum security.
Explicit Media Content Filter: Scan media content from all members.
ENABLE 2FA Requirement for Moderation
Server Settings > Invites
If you have a Discord invite on your Twitch (or any other) profile, or one that can be easily retrieved with a Twitch chat command, you may be more vulnerable to a hate raid. Check any open Invites you have in your server’s settings. Always edit invites when you create them, and avoid creating invites that have unlimited uses and never expire. This will limit the size of any potential hate raids.
Server Settings > Integrations
Review your webhooks – if you have Twitch Subscriber or Patreon connections, do you want them to have immediate access to all channels? Some people will occasionally subscribe to a service for the chance to harass, particularly if there is a low entry cost, such as a $1 Patreon tier.
Server Settings > Roles
Roles are an important way to hide or allow access to channels. By using roles to grant permission to view channels and post messages, it makes it easy to remove access just by removing someone’s role.
Check the order of your roles – a role can only manage roles that are below it in the list – and that they don’t have permissions you’d prefer they didn’t. Also check how having multiple roles can affect what someone can see or do, so that combining two roles doesn’t accidentally allow someone to use channels in a way that was unintended.
Discord allows you to view your server as different roles to test settings and make sure everything works as intended, but it can be easier to create a backup account instead. You can log in to both accounts at once – one on desktop, one on browser – and quickly add and remove roles to your backup account to see which channels it can view and send messages in. You can also use the Account Switcher.
Server Settings > Audit Log
This record of server changes can be used to undo any changes made by a mod or admin whose account was compromised, or hurriedly changed some permissions while dealing with a hate raid. While the log only goes back so far, anyone with permission to view it will also be able to see any recent invites that have been created.
DISCORD BOTS
There are a huge number of bots you can add to your server to help improve the functionality, entertain your community, and make it easier to run. Here are a handful that can help take care of some of the most common requirements.
Dyno has a wide variety of features to help you manage and moderate your server. Admins can be added using the dashboard to help manage Dyno itself, or mods can be added to the Moderation module allowing them to use its mod commands.
Other modules allow you to automatically assign a role to members the moment they join and use the Automod’s banned words list to mute, kick or ban members. You can also use Autoban to ban new members depending on the age of an account or whether a username contains certain words or invites.
?purge [number] is a useful command to delete a specified number of messages – the command prefix can be changed.
Unless you subscribe to the premium version, Dyno has quite strict limits on certain features – you can only set up three reaction roles and a single Twitch feed – but the following bots can make up for this and are even simpler to use.
This bot can handle everyone’s Twitch notifications. Multiple streamers can be added from the dashboard. If a member is a Twitch Partner or Affiliate, they can be automatically assigned a ‘Live’ role each time they go live, to make it easier to see which community members are currently streaming.
Discord’s own bot, this gives you a number of pronoun options that you can also add to.
Note: If someone has multiple pronouns they must select “Pick Multiple”, otherwise their current pronouns will be replaced by the next ones selected. Once the bot has joined your server, just type /prompt.
This will allow members to react to particular messages which will grant them roles that allow them to view or hide certain channels, or make it easy to ping a group of members with a particular interest all at once. After posting the message you want members to react to, and creating the role(s) you wish to grant, you set up the reaction in a single message as shown below – use forward-slash to access the commands.
