Raids and lockdown
Detecting join floods, and locking the server during an incident.
A raid is when a lot of accounts join your server at once to cause trouble. The raid detection is turned off by default.
Detecting a raid
TalciGrade monitors how quickly members are joining.
- Join rate. Enough members joining within a short window enables lockdown mode.
- New accounts. Accounts created within the last few days (seven by default) are treated as suspicious while this is happening.
The join rate matches your server
How many joins count as a raid depends on how big your server is. Ten joins in ten seconds is an attack on a server of two hundred and an ordinary afternoon on a server of fifty thousand.
TalciGrade works the number out from your member count, and it grows as your server does.
| Members | Joins that trigger a raid |
|---|---|
| Up to 100 | 10 |
| 1,000 | 32 |
| 2,500 | 50 |
| 10,000 or more | 100 |
If you type your own number, it stays. TalciGrade will never overwrite a threshold you set.
Pausing detection
If you are running an advertisement or a partner shout-out, a rush of joins is expected. You can pause detection for a set time, after which it turns itself back on.
Use /raid pause 60 in Discord, or the Anti-Raid page on the Dashboard.
A pause always ends on its own, so detection cannot be left off by accident.
After a raid
When you turn lockdown off, people are often still arriving. Without a pause, that would immediately trigger another lockdown and you would never get the server open.
TalciGrade waits fifteen minutes before a join rate can trigger lockdown again. You can change that, or set it to zero to turn the wait off.
Turning lockdown on yourself is never blocked by this.
Raid mode and lockdown are two different things
They are often confused, so it is worth being clear:
| Raid mode | Lockdown | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Holds new members, pauses automatic roles, can raise Discord's verification level | Stops everyone sending messages in every channel |
| Who it affects | People arriving | People already in the server |
| Turned on by | Detection, or /raid on |
/lockdown on |
Turning on lockdown does not start holding new members, and turning it off does not change your detection settings.
Raid mode
Raid mode is what the detector switches on when it sees a flood.
- Holds new members, giving them the quarantine role until you have looked at them
- Pauses automatic roles, so nobody arriving in a raid is handed one
- Raises Discord's verification level, if you have enabled that
Each of those can be turned on or off in the settings.
Raid mode ends by itself when the joins stop. After ten quiet minutes, TalciGrade lifts it and says so. That only applies when the detector turned it on: if you switched it on with /raid on, it stays on until you turn it off.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
/raid status |
Shows what is currently on |
/raid on |
Hold new members, until you say otherwise |
/raid off |
Stop holding new members |
/raid pause 60 |
Stop detecting raids for 60 minutes |
/raid resume |
End a pause early |
Locking channels
Locking is one thing at two sizes. /lock locks the channel you are in; /lockdown on locks every channel at once. Both work the same way: they prevent @everyone from sending messages.
Only the @everyone permission is changed, so every other permission stays as it was. Unlocking restores the previous state, and /lockdown off only reopens the channels the lockdown itself locked, so anything you had locked deliberately beforehand stays locked.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
/lock |
Nobody can send messages in this channel |
/unlock |
Reopens this channel |
/lockdown on |
Nobody can send messages anywhere |
/lockdown off |
Reopens the channels the lockdown locked |
/lockdown status |
Reports whether the channels are locked |
Which to use
Locking and raid mode are separate, and neither turns the other on or off. They answer different questions:
- Locking is about messages: who can talk, in one channel or in all of them.
- Raid mode is about arrivals: who can join and what happens to them when they do.
So unlocking the server does not end raid mode. The commonest reason to unlock during a raid is to tell the members who are still there what is going on, and that should not quietly stop the bot holding new joiners. If raid mode is still on when you run /lockdown off, the reply says so and points you at /raid off.
The one place they travel together is a trigger response that asks for a lockdown: that is a rule deciding both at once, because something reaching for a lockdown is responding to a raid.
During a serious raid you usually want both, in either order.
When the bot has just joined
Raid detection waits ten minutes after TalciGrade joins a server before it starts watching.
A server that adds TalciGrade in the middle of a raid looks exactly like a raid, and locking down a server the moment you invite the bot is not a helpful first action.
Setting it up
Open Security > Anti-Raid on the Dashboard for the join thresholds and what lockdown mode does, and Security > Lockdown for the manual controls.