Comment on Discord Servers asking for Phone Numbers and 'Verification Levels'
Sanctus@lemmy.world 9 months agoNo, they would just sign up with a new alias, wait, then join the server, wait, and then do it again. Most servers should not do this. But for situations like ours, a small RP server being harassed, it was useful for the year it was up. The users would not have been okay with that if the entire server wasn’t a close community of about 20 people. Its just another example of a thing that can protect extremely small teams conveniently being abused by bigger entities to get something they want (your data).
CallumWells@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
AFAIK you can have roles which have access to different parts of your server. Thus you can have that all newly joined accounts have a role where they only can see and interact with a channel for those waiting for acceptance. You can even make it “fill out a form in a thread” for why they want to join, and only after they’ve been accepted will they be given access to the rest of the server (or just some of it)
Sanctus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I did that. When you get trolls in your server targeting your players, you can throw all the forms and wait times you want. It accomplishes two things: 1) it kills the real people trying to play, every barrier of entry just to type silly Naruto RP stories on a discord channel turns people off incrementally. 2) the trolls don’t care, they make multiple accounts using gmail aliases and wait out the restrictions, when those are up a tidal wave of troll/bot combinations fucks your server.
In the end, I had to lock the server down for 3 months, I implemented a tool that exposed your MAC address, if it matched one on my blacklist you were automatically banned. This killed new players too. But it completely stopped the troll once I reported the MAC address to discord with screenshots. It ended up being a nurse at the hospital one of my players went to. They ended up losing their job. Crazy story tbh. I wouldn’t handle it again like that but this was before I had worked IT.