spam-catcher

In 2021, the team at MER Musikk just launched the official Discord server for Alan Walker. This new place was incredibly active, but unfortunately it was also very susceptible to spam.

As a moderator, I witnessed someone lose their account almost every other day. Popular bots such as MEE6 did not have protections against the kind of spam messages that were hitting us, so I decided to write a module for our in-house bot Avem.

That module became spam-catcher. Rather than using a fragile and ephemeral reputation list of domains, it directly targets the elusive behavior of the attacks.

With proper thresholds set, it worked reliably well. We saw fewer accounts getting hacked, and it allieviated some of the burden on our moderation team.

Soon, I got the opportunity to work on Avem further, eventually taking lead of its development for 2 years. My focus was on improving reliability, while adding requested features in parallel. This was where I learnt to use SSH for the first time!

~ Walker #4903