The Moderation module

What the module adds to Discord

Discord’s native tools handle the moment: you remove someone, done. What they do not keep is the thread — that this member is on their third warning, that the previous one came from another moderator, and on what grounds.

That is exactly what decides the quality of moderation over time. With no history, every incident is judged cold, by whoever is around that day, in that day’s mood.

• A per-member history: every warning, mute, kick or ban, with its date, reason and author.
• Genuinely temporary temporary sanctions: the mute lifts on time even if nobody is online.
• A log in a dedicated channel, so the team sees decisions go by without hunting for them.
• A searchable sanctions page in the dashboard, instead of scrolling a channel.

What order to configure it in

1. Pick the log channel. Keep it to moderation and closed to members: it holds sanction reasons, therefore information about people.
2. Check the position of the Kuratos role in the server role list. Discord forbids a bot from acting on a member whose highest role sits above its own: that is nine failures out of ten, and the error message is not always explicit.
3. Set your default mute durations. Having two or three usual durations stops one moderator improvising “3 days” and another “3 hours” for the same thing.
4. Decide whether the sanctioned member gets a DM. We recommend it: a silent sanction reads as arbitrary, and that is what feeds conflicts outside the server.

If the bot says it cannot sanction a member, the cause is almost always role hierarchy, not a missing permission. Drag the Kuratos role above the roles it must be able to manage.

Logs: what to record, and what not to

It is tempting to log everything. That is a mistake: a channel where everything scrolls past stops being read, and the important message disappears between two nickname changes.

Record what you might have to revisit — sanctions, message deletions, joins and leaves during an incident. Leave out what nobody ever reads back.

Keep in mind too that these logs contain personal data under the GDPR: a Discord ID is personal data. They therefore need a retention period, and Kuratos purges them automatically rather than keeping them forever.

The mistakes that come up most

• Giving the bot Administrator “so it works”. It does not fix role-hierarchy problems, and it creates an account able to do anything on your server.
• Logging into a public channel. Sanction reasons are information about people: they do not belong in front of everyone.
• Using the kick as a middle sanction. It does not stop a return and it costs you the record. A long mute is almost always better.
• Not writing down the sanction ladder. Three moderators without a shared ladder produce three case laws, and accusations of favouritism follow quickly.