Our tools for managing Discord DMs

Direct Messages are the final frontier for Discord moderation. For years, mods & admins had no say over who could even DM their members by default. This was broken in September 2023, with the introduction of Security Actions. With the recent release of User Apps (check out Our Article on a security issue with an unreleased iteration of this feature) apps can finally access DM content without invasive & private OAuth2 scopes. With these features at our fingertips, we've developed tools to help you keep your members' (and your own) DMs safe!

DM Report

With the introduction of User Apps, context commands in DMs are now able to surface full message content, allowing our app to read & verify the contents of a message before reporting it to server staff. You should always report TOS violations to Discord before using this app. However with this app in hand, you can finally report bad DMs to servers that you share with the reportee. No more relying on screenshots! For server admins/mods, you can finally verify scammers/malicious users based on these DM reports from your members!

Guild Lockdown

Using the afformentioned Security Actions API, we developed an app that automatically extends the period for actions, allowing for indefinite pausing of invites or DMs for any given server. This means you can stop your members getting random DMs instantly, with a 2-step install. First, Add the App to your server. Next, use the commands to allow or block joins or DMs!

DM Privacy & Jurisdiction

A question I (Panley) have thought about a lot is where the line is with regards to DMs. It's Discord's responsibility to keep DMs safe - not that of 3rd parties or servers. So where's the line for what 3rd party apps should/shouldn't access/keep? This is something I believe Discord should decide, and something they have been deciding with the release of features & policy updates. However just because Discord allows users to submit data, doesn't mean that data is fair game.

This is why only configuration data is persistent in these apps. As for DM reports? Once the content is obtained, it's stored in CloudFlare's KV storage, with a TTL of 10 minutes. This means, no matter what, the longest we ever hold message content & report context is 10 minutes. Reports are destroyed upon completion for this same reason.

The jurisdiction of DMs & Discord's willingness to expose them to 3rd parties has changed a lot over recent years, with PlayStation & Xbox integrations allowing you to chat over Discord using effectively 3rd party clients. The special case before this was the StreamKit Overlay, which auths with your Discord client and reads all messages to display on OBS/Xsplit.

We're committed to transparency in how we handle user data. We take as little as possible as rarely as possible, but some things are simply needed to make our apps work. This is why we made DM Report and an early version of Guild Lockdown OSS. You can find all of our OSS repositories Here.