Flood protection

Flood protection watches how much one person is posting, not what is in it. Two separate detectors, each turned on and tuned on its own:

• Rate: too many messages, too fast.
• Duplicate: the same message over and over, even with other messages in between.

Where message filters judge a single message on its content, this judges a pattern across several. They work well together: a filter catches one bad link, flood protection catches the same harmless-looking line pasted into nine channels.

Both detectors start off, and configuring them is Server Owner only, the same bar as anti-nuke, and for the same reason. This can ban someone automatically based on a pattern, so it does not sit behind a permission that can be handed out.

Start with the summary

,antispam list shows everything at once, and it is the fastest way to see what a server is actually running.

,antispam list

,antispam list

Catch someone posting too fast

,antispam rate <on|off> [++punish <p>] [++threshold <n>] [++window <s>] [++duration <t>]

,antispam rate on ++threshold 6 ++window 5 ++punish timeout

The count is across the whole server, not per channel. Someone posting once in fifteen channels is the shape this is really for, and a per-channel counter would see fifteen separate ones.

Catch someone repeating themselves

,antispam duplicate <on|off> [++punish <p>] [++threshold <n>] [++window <s>]

,antispam duplicate on ++threshold 4 ++window 30

They do not have to be consecutive. Typing something else in between does not reset the count, which is the point: alternating two messages is the oldest way around a naive duplicate check.

"Identical" is judged after tidying the text up: capitals, extra spaces and invisible characters are ignored, and lookalike alphabets are folded back to normal letters, so 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗿𝗼 and free nitro count as the same message. It is not fuzzy beyond that: yes and yea are two different messages, deliberately.

Messages with no text (a bare image, for instance) are ignored by this detector. Four screenshots in a row is normal.

Try it without punishing anyone

Set the punishment to warn for the first week:

,antispam rate on ++punish warn

,antispam rate on ++punish warn

Nothing happens to the member. You still get the log entry every time it would have fired, which is how you find out whether your thresholds match how your server actually talks before they cost somebody a timeout.

Clean up the whole burst

By default, tripping either detector deletes every message in the burst, not just the one that crossed the line. Turn it off if you would rather keep them:

,antispam settings [++purge <on|off>] [++commands <on|off>] [++duration <t>]

,antispam settings ++purge on

++commands on is why running ,fm six times in a row does not get you timed out.

Exempt a channel

,antispam ignore <add|remove|list> [#channel]

,antispam ignore add #spam

Naming a category exempts everything in it, threads included. This is the first thing to reach for after a false positive: a #counting or #spam channel is meant to look like flooding.

Punish repeat offenders harder

,antispam escalation <on|off> [++punish <p>] [++days <n>]

,antispam escalation on ++punish ban ++days 7

Offences are remembered in the server's punishment history, so this survives the bot restarting. After the window passes, the slate is clean: someone who flooded once two months ago is not banned for a second slip today.

Who never gets caught

• The server owner and the bot owner.
• Anyone on your ,filter whitelist, one list, shared with the message filters, so you do not maintain two.

Note that moderator permissions alone do not exempt anyone. If you want your staff exempt, put their role on the filter whitelist. This is deliberate, and it is the same choice the trap channel makes: a protection every mod is invisible to is one nobody ever notices is misconfigured.

Start over

,antispam reset

,antispam reset

Clears everything and turns both detectors off.

If it fires on the wrong people

In order:

1. ,antispam ignore add the channel where it happened, if that channel is meant to be busy.
2. Raise the threshold or shorten the window. A server with a very active general channel may want ++threshold 10 ++window 5 rather than the default 6.
3. Switch to ++punish warn while you tune, so you keep the logs without the consequences.
4. Put your staff role on the filter whitelist if the false positives are all moderators.

If it fires on nobody at all, check ,antispam list first: both detectors ship off, and turning the feature "on" means turning a detector on.