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A honeypot is a channel that no real member would ever post in. Anyone who does is almost certainly a bot that joined and started posting without reading anything, so the bot acts on them immediately. It works because spam bots do not read channel names, topics, or pinned messages before posting. A human sees a channel called “do-not-post-here” with a pinned warning and moves on.

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Setting it up

/honeypot channel add designates a channel, and /honeypot channel remove takes one back out. /honeypot status shows the current setup and /honeypot toggle turns enforcement on and off without losing your channel list. /honeypot action chooses what happens to somebody who posts: Everything is configurable from the page in the dashboard as well.

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Making it work well

  • Make the channel obviously off limits to a person. A clear name, a topic, and a pinned message. The point is that humans are warned and bots are not.
  • Put it somewhere a bot will find it. A channel buried where new members cannot see it catches nothing.
  • Consider mute first. Ban is the most effective and the least forgiving. Starting with mute lets you see what the trap actually catches in your server before you make it permanent.
Actions run through the same moderation pipeline as manual ones, so they appear in your infraction history and moderation log with the honeypot named as the source.

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Required permissions

The bot needs permission to carry out whichever action you choose, and its role has to sit above the members it is expected to act on.