If your chat has more than ~30 active visitors at peak, sooner or later somebody will: spam links, drop racist garbage, try to derail a thread, harass another regular. Most community-chat tools ship with a moderation drawer full of knobs. New admins reach for all of them at once. That's the burnout path.
Here's the ordered set we recommend, based on what's worked across customers that run 50,000+ messages a month with zero full-time moderators.
The right order to enable moderation
- Day one: nothing. Watch the room for a week. See what your community actually does.
- Week two: turn on slow mode. 10–30 seconds per user is usually enough to quiet the loudest typer.
- Week three: load your banned-words list. Start small (5–10 words you know you'd ban). Add to it as you see new patterns.
- Month two: enable user-mute and tell regulars about it. Self-mute beats centralized banning.
- Only if needed: AI moderation. For high-volume rooms where banned-words isn't keeping up.
- Rare: IP / CIDR bans. The nuclear option. Reserve for repeat offenders who use throwaway accounts.
Slow mode is your best tool — start there
Slow mode forces a per-user cooldown between messages. A regular who's mid-rant types one line, has to wait 15 seconds, types the next. The friction is invisible to normal posters and crushing to spammers.
Configure: 10–30 seconds for typical communities. Live-stream rooms (radio shows, sermons, esports) can go to 5 seconds. Anything under 5s defeats the purpose.
Banned-words is mostly placebo — until it isn't
Most communities never need a 200-word ban list. They need maybe 10: the obvious slurs, plus a few patterns specific to their topic (a crypto-scam URL pattern, a competitor's domain, a particular meme that derails every thread).
Test your list with the panel's live tester before saving. Real-world example: someone added cunt to a banned list and the chat broke on a Scottish DJ named DJ Cunto. Patterns matter; words bite back.
Mute lets the room self-curate
The single most-underused feature in community chat. A visitor who finds another visitor annoying hides them — for themselves, persistently, across reloads. No mod intervention. No "is this user actually bad or just annoying" debate.
The pattern we see: heavy mute usage correlates with healthy community. Visitors who self-edit their feed stay longer and post more.
AI moderation: when banned-words breaks down
Banned-words matches strings. Visitors writing actual harassment will use creative spellings, leetspeak, or just be cruel in pristine English. AI moderation (we use OpenAI's omni-moderation classifier) reads the message in context and flags by category: harassment, hate, sexual content, self-harm, violence-graphic.
It's not a silver bullet. It will miss subtle stuff. It will occasionally false-positive on a heated argument. Treat it as a layer on top of slow mode + banned-words, not a replacement for either.
Pinned announcements > Discord-style #rules
A community of 1,000 people has 1,000 attention spans. They will not read a rules channel. They will see the pinned message at the top of the chat for ~10 seconds when they first join.
Use it for: "show starts at 8pm UK time", "no link spam, you'll be muted", "this is a friendly room, don't be weird". Three lines. Refresh weekly.
The two things you should never turn on
- Members-only mode (sign-in required to post) as a default. It cuts your first-time-poster rate by ~70%. Use only when you have an actual reason — a private launch, a paid community.
- Wholesale link bans. Visitors paste image URLs, YouTube links, gig flyers — that's healthy chat. Ban specific scammy domains, not all links.
The cost of over-moderation
Every knob you turn on costs you some posters. Slow mode loses a few impatient typers. Banned-words loses people testing edges. Members-only mode loses lurkers who'd have posted once. The most successful community chats we've shipped run with the minimum moderation that keeps the room from turning to dumpster fire — and zero more.
The chat that's hardest to break is the one with regulars who self-police. Build for them; the rest follows.