AutoMod

AutoMod lives on the AutoMod tab of the Moderation plugin. It is ten independent rule sets that all share the same structure:

Action — what happens on a hit Role permissions — who the rule applies to Channel permissions — where it applies Settings — the knobs specific to that rule

Every rule starts Disabled. Nothing runs until you pick an action.

Actions

Every hit is mirrored into your mod-action log channel, with the rule name and the message that triggered it.

Scoping a rule

Both scopes use the same two modes, and getting them the wrong way round is the classic AutoMod mistake.

Role permissions

Almost always you want the first mode with your staff roles listed — enforce for everyone, exempt the moderators. Up to 50 roles.

Channel permissions

The same two modes, applied to channels. Ids may be individual channels or whole categories — a category id covers every channel inside it.

Up to 100 channels. The classic use of the second mode: an #off-topic channel where the link rule applies and nowhere else.

The fourteen rules

The first ten describe messages a member might plausibly send by accident. The last four — grouped under Attack patterns — describe things nobody produces unintentionally, which is why their defaults are tighter and why they are worth having even on a server that leaves every content filter off.

Bad words

Blocks messages containing words from your own lists. Two lists, matched differently:

Press Enter or type a comma after each word. Start with the exact-match list; the partial list produces false positives fast (this is the "Scunthorpe problem").

Repeated text

Long runs of the same character or the same word repeated.

Server invites

Discord invite links.

The code is the part after discord.gg/. Your own server's vanity URL is always allowed and does not need an entry. This is the safest rule to enable first — almost no false positives.

External links

Any external link.

Subdomains are included: allowing youtube.com also allows music.youtube.com.

Excessive caps

Messages that are mostly uppercase.

The minimum stops short messages from tripping it — without it, "OK" is 100 % uppercase.

Excessive emojis

Excessive spoilers

Counts ||spoiler|| blocks.

Excessive mentions

Counts user, role and @everyone mentions together. One of the three rules worth enabling on day one — mass-mention spam is the most common raid tactic.

Zalgo

Corrupted text built from stacked combining characters.

Anti-spam

Too many messages in a short window.

Counts per member across the whole server, not per channel — hopping between channels does not reset the counter.

Attack patterns

Four rules for behaviour that is never accidental. If you enable nothing else on this page, enable these.

Scam links

Blocks phishing and scam domains — fake Nitro giveaways, cloned Steam login pages, "free gift" sites.

Cloudy ships a built-in list of known scam domains that you cannot edit — a server removing discordnitro.gift from it helps nobody. Extra domains adds your own on top; enter bare hostnames, subdomains are matched automatically.

Lookalike detection additionally flags domains that imitate Discord or Steam without being on any list yet: disc0rd.gg, discord.gg.example.com, steamcommunity.ru. Leave it on — new phishing domains appear daily and a list alone is always a day behind.

Cross-channel spam

The same message posted in several channels in quick succession — the signature move of a compromised account.

Attachment spam

Too many attachments in a short window, regardless of what they contain.

Sticker spam

The same idea for stickers, which slip past every text-based rule.

Timeout duration

Rules using a timeout action share one setting:

28 days is Discord's hard cap on communication timeouts, not a Cloudy limit.

Warn escalation

Warnings on their own do nothing. Escalation turns an accumulated count into a punishment:

"At X active warnings, do Y."

Up to 10 steps, each with a unique threshold. A step fires when the member's active warning count reaches exactly its threshold, so each level punishes once.

A sane starting ladder:

Warning expiry

0–365 · default 0

Warnings older than this stop counting toward the thresholds. 0 means warnings never expire.

Custom notices

Override the bot's built-in channel messages. Leave a field empty to use the default in your server's language. Each up to 500 characters.

{user}, watch your language — {rule} is not allowed here.
{user} was muted — {rule}.
{user} collected {count} warnings and was {action}.

Native AutoMod sync

Cloudy reads a message after Discord has delivered it. Discord's own AutoMod checks it before it is published. For a scam link that difference is the whole point: one blocks the message, the other deletes it a moment after everyone with the channel open has already read it.

Turn native AutoMod sync on and Cloudy creates matching rules inside Discord's own AutoMod for the three rule shapes Discord is able to express:

The rest cannot be mirrored because they depend on state Discord's AutoMod does not track: how many messages arrived in the last ten seconds, how many channels the same text appeared in, how many warnings this member already has.

Mirrored rules keep running in Cloudy's engine too. Discord blocks the message; Cloudy still records the warning, escalates and writes the mod log — you get both halves.

Switching the option off removes the rules Cloudy created. The feature needs the Manage Server permission; without it Cloudy silently keeps the engine-only behaviour instead of failing.

Recommended starting point

Four rules, conservative actions, escalation on:

Exempt your staff roles on all four, run it for a week, read the mod log, then tune thresholds before adding more rules.

Scam links is the one to enable even if you disagree with everything else here: it has no false positives worth worrying about, and the message it stops is the one that costs a member their account.