We’re the server for the series My Hero Academia. A superhero manga series written and illustrated by Kōhei Horikoshi. With an active welcoming community, we overflow with an amazing environment free from toxic and NSFW content. Discuss the series and meet fellow fans all over the world!
Save your energy for the real threats.
With a community of over 50,000, we have to decide to invest either in a lot of staff or auto-moderation. In our case, we were able to utilize Gaius from the start and had the bot develop around our needs for some time. This has helped us to grow easily while maintaining full content standards.
We filter a lot more than standard for most communities. However, we’ve been able to create an extremely positive and safe community on Discord because of it. With an average of 60k+ messages a day with no harmful content present, we consider this a complete success thanks to auto filtering.
As a Discord Partner, we have to ensure we uphold Discord’s Terms of Service and Partner Guidelines. You can see some examples later on of content we have to filter out daily from our channels.
The template filters with Gaius are pre-made and tuned which means we don’t need to build up our banned words list from scratch. It saves us a lot of time when we set up new servers as well because we know they meet our standards. Since we’re able to customize them as well we can easily tune things whenever needed.
When we first really cracked down on unwanted content we did have issues with filter evasion. However overtime the community adapted and we started issuing warns when evasion happened. Constantly tuning the filters to every variation isn’t worth it. So when evasion does happen we execute harsh action right away and sometimes add it to the filters.
We do take into consideration context and don’t always warn, sometimes a mute is fine to get the point across to a user. Sometimes they just have a bad day, in the end, we do what we can for the betterment of the community at large.
It’s fine now. Why? Because I am here!
Auto-moderation can’t handle every absolute threat and issue. People evade filters, try to raid, voice chat grief, post screamers and NSFW. Of course, there are many more possible threats which is why we do have 12 members of staff.
Our community has a fair amount of younger users, with this brings potential risk to the community. From roleplay turned bad with attempted blackmailing to predators looking for someone to exploit. Discord is by far a cool and safe place but in large communities like ours, staff are there to be a ray of hope for people.
Users come to us with reports occasionally about people they see every day in the server or just joined. This ranges from concerning changes in attitude to malicious actions like harassment and defamation. We do what we can to provide them with the resources needed to help where we cannot, and issue action where we can as needed.
Every community is an auditorium of strangers, not everyone can mingle well which is why you need standards and enforcement.
Every staff team needs to have the tools they need to adequately do their job.
Tools our staff use:
Utilizing those tools via bot we can record every action taken and build up records for users who violate our rules. But they also serve to assist us in making our jobs easier. From purging a few dozen spam messages to banning a bucket of raiders who join to spam. Fast and efficient cleanup is a must during peak hours.
When a situation arises where harmful actors show up, your community will be the first to sound the alarm generally. But is that the case with every community? Below are some examples of what can happen with online communities under attack.
This happens in communities that are less moderated and there’s no real enforced system of law. Users join the fray and contribute to the attack. This isn’t ideal because it leads to easy toxicity and rampant abuse. Additionally, they’re less likely to notify staff or report harmful material.
With raids, panic can take a few forms. From spamming “Stop Spamming!” to spam mentioning raiders back as a form of “karma”. This leads to more spam and just fueling the attackers’ motivation to continue.
When users are educated on what they have available to call for help they will utilize it. In essence, it’s one of those “once in a lifetime” moments for them to feel they have the power to change the course of this situation. From being able to ping the mod team to a report button or command, these options empower users.
In MHA we provide users with a report command and the ability to ping the mod role. Both Moderators and Admins have it so both parties are notified when a situation breaks out. This helps with rapid response and getting things under control.
Providing users with a means to help maintain the community works in our favour to keep a positive environment and lets users know that staff care and are present. And most of all, that they have the power to do something.
Serious offence content will result in auto warns and mutes upon violation. This stacks up to an eventual automatic ban at 3 warns.
These warns expire after 30 days. This motivates users to change and helps them to stay in our community, some people have bad days and not every warn is a top-level violation.
Upon ban, Gaius will send a link to a Google form. When users fill it out the form will send the appeal via webhook to our staff for review and discussion.
A community without cheer
and humour will not have a bright future.
In order to help keep our users engaged and active we utilize bots to assist outside of events and stream/game nights. From games to social commands and levelling roles.
The custom commands module allows us to create endless social commands that users can utilize anywhere in the server. From hugs to gifting bread and throwing roses at each other these commands are a core part of our main channels.
We also utilize the levelling module so users can rank up overtime by talking in text and voice channels in the server. This gives them a sense of accomplishment every time they get a new level and reward role in their respective path.
From watching videos together to signing up for events, roles and new chapters we utilize Gaius reaction roles and Command Roles to let users signup anytime.
