Hey everyone! It's that time of year again, our team has been hard at work to create our latest Moderative Transparency Report!

Why we release transparency reports

A common question we hear around the times we release these reports is why do we spend the time writing these up? Honestly, that's a good question! Throughout all of our operations

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Reports

We don’t have the exact data on reports, but we can give a rough estimate. In the second half of the year, we received upwards of 5300 reports from members and staff of bad actors in our community.

How do we respond to a report?

When we receive the report, we will investigate what is going on with the help of the reporter themselves. We will request information as to what happened as well as the evidence they provide.

If we believe the behavior is against our rules we can take a range of different steps including:

• Banning a user
• Muting a user
• Blacklisting a user from advertising
• Blacklisting a server from being advertised
• Warning a user
• Removing content/ads
• Temporarily banning

In cases where immediate danger is present, we will work with Discord to deal with the situation as well as the appropriate law enforcement agencies.

Bans

Here are the top 5 ban reasons for the 941 bans recorded:

1. Direct Message Advertising
2. Slurs/Racism
3. Hacked Accounts
4. Staff and Member Disrespect
5. Not Safe for Work Imagery and Behavior

Unsolicited ads are mainly in the form of DM Advertisements where a user will DM other users with a link to their server or site. This goes against the Discord Terms of Service and is unethical. The main reason this is so high though is due to the lack of understanding of what is and isn’t allowed on the platform.

We also saw a large increase in the number of bans related to nitro scams, and other advertising schemes after compromising another user’s account. These have taken off recently and AYS reminds all members to be cautious when clicking links or joining servers.

We also use a range of auto-moderation tools that help to keep AYS a safe place. Those bans will come under raids.

Warns

Warnings are used to give a member a nudge that their behavior isn’t appropriate. This could include arguing with other members or consistent advertising in the wrong channel. We handed out around 800 Warns in the 2nd half of the year. The top 3 categories these were issued for were:

1. Improper Advertising

2. Staff and Member Disrespect

3. Spamming/Trolling

Mutes

If a user continues to break the rules we will hand out a mute which may range from an hour to a few days. We handed out 207 mutes.

Server Blacklists

We blacklist servers for a variety of reasons such as Terms of Service Violations and Invite Rewards. In order to keep our members safe, we blacklist these so they can’t be advertised and members cannot join them. We blacklisted 38 servers in this half of the year.

Appeals

We accept appeals to moderation actions from all of our users. This helps us in case we have made a mistake or there has been a misunderstanding in what has happened.

There were 258 appeals that were made to our staff team.

Of the 258 appeals that were made, 47 (~18.21%) appeals were accepted. Appeals can be made on the basis of the following:

• An incorrect moderation action was applied.
• The evidence at hand is insufficient or incorrect.
• Members who fell victim to a token-grabbing scam or another form of account compromising vulnerability.

We don’t revoke bans for those who genuinely committed an offense and apologize at a later time (in most cases). The appeals system is for when we’ve made a mistake that needs rectifying, or a member has been taken advantage of.

To Conclude

Thanks for reading our transparency report! We’re always looking to be as transparent as possible and this time we have a lot more data to be able to share with you all. We’ve recently introduced new guidelines for our moderation team on actions and when they can be taken to keep everything consistent.

Our moderation team works around the clock to keep you safe and we appreciate everyone who helps to achieve that, whether you make a report or are a mod, you have helped keep AYS a safe place.