I’m also looking for a designer to help design this newsletter! Currently it’s discord themed but i’d wanna move away from that. If you’re good with typography, UI/UX hit me up (paid postiion)

Ban appeal methods

Below covers all the possible ban appeal methods along with their pros and cons for the user as well as the server staff reviewing appeals.

Email (not recommended)

Essentially you’d need a form of communication for the appeal. If your server has a website/domain you could accept appeals through there. The advantages of this include:

1. Everyone has an email

2. Could setup a custom email to accept appeals for free like [email protected]

3. Easy to sort, search and manage many ban appeals.

There are a number of cons with this too such as:

1. Some users may not want their emails to be exposed

2. Your email can get spammed by a bad actor

3. Only users with email access can go through appeals (you can set up email —> discord but that’s too extra lol)

4. Someone else can appeal for the user (no account authorisation)

5. Users may forget to include their username / ID leading to a more back and forth process.

6. Users may not provide the right info that would be needed for their appeal

I personally don’t suggest you handle ban appeals via email. Below are better methods

External Forms

One of the the most popular appeal methods due to it’s free cost and easy management. Google forms is the most popular. When a user gets banned, they get a custom ban DM with the google form’s appeal link. There are many number of bots that allow for a custom ban messages, use any you prefer.

Now this gets extra useful with an automation that posts google form submissions to discord as a webhook. The most popular is to setup this automation script. It takes less than 2 minutes to setup. You can also use services like Zapier. I would suggest having a “#ban-appeals” channel for your staff to review.

If you prefer better aesthetics and branding, you could use tally.so for your forms. It as various integrations and can also be used to post submissions directly to discord. If you own a domain, you can connect a form with subdomain with tally for free (free branding woohoo!)

Pros of external forms

1. Easy to setup

2. Doesn’t rely on a bot

3. Multiple people can manage

4. Preset questions for users to answer

Cons of external forms

1. No two-way communication

2. Can’t notify users that their appeal has been accepted / denied

3. Users can submit appeals on behalf of others since their is no user authentication

Dyno ban appeals (suggested)

Not many people know but Dyno has ban appeals built-in. You create the form via the Dyno dashboard. You are able to customise the questions, have the submissions post in discord, make a decision within discord (there’s buttons attached to the appeal embed), force a user to only be able to submit 1 appeal, or have a cooldown between submissions

Once you create an appeal you’re given a link. The great thing about this is that you are able to use Dyno ban appeal forms with other bots too! Simply link the Dyno form in your ban message with the moderation bot you use. Once a person wishes to appeal they will be prompted to sign-in with discord to authenticate their account and submit the appeal. When the appeal is accepted the user gets a DM from Dyno if they have their DMs open and have a mutual server with Dyno (they most likely do due to the popularity of the bot)

Pros of Dyno forms:

1. Easy to setup

2. Users need to authenticate their accounts

3. Easily post to discord

4. Unban users directly from discord

5. Users get notified with the appeal decision WITH an invite back to the server

6. You’re able to view form submissions online on Dyno’s dashboard too

7. Able to use Dyno forms pros with other discord bots, simply link the Dyno form in the ban dm from your mod bot

Cons of Dyno forms:

1. Relies on Dyno to be online :KEKW: (it’s not that bad

2. Requires Dyno to be IN the server (some people don’t like extra bots in the server)

3. No 2 way communication

Dyno appeals are my go-to option for ban appeals due to the simplicity in setting up and how useful it is compared to the other options.

Custom self hosted ban appeal via website

This one’s a bit more advanced but is very useful too. There are self hosted websites, you can use either Sylveon’s or jcsumlin’s ban appeal. The instructions to set this up are very clearly mentioned in the repositories and is actually very easy to set up. I, as a non-developer, was apple to get it up and running in less than 10 minutes.

You can set it up as such that when a user is unbanned it would send them an email. Your self-hosted ban appeal bot gets the users email when they auth their account in order to submit their appeal. This is better than Dyno since it doesn’t require a mutual server and they will still be notified of their appeal.

Ban appeal server

A server where you handle ban appeals. Users are sent the server invite in the ban dm message from your bot. If your server has a website, you could also have it linked there. In the server you have only 1 or 2 public channels and you use a tickets or (self-hosted) modmail bot. This type of ban appeals is useful if you need to have quick 2 way communication when discussing the appeal. Whether you use a tickets bot or modmail comes to your personal preference. The only advantage with a modmail bot is that you’re easily able to have a discussion with your staff in the same channel without having the messages go through to the appealing user due to the way modmail works.

If you’re using Dragory’s modmail bot, you have it such that it’s cross server. Users join one server, but all modmail tickets are opened in your original server. Some users are not aware how modmail works, where the ticket does not have a channel, but is in DMs with the bot, as such you may need to provide instruction.

Users accessing the ban appeal.

There’s only a few ways users can know how to submit their ban appeals. Most appeals will have a URL (form link, server link, online web portal etc.). Here are a few ways users can be informed on how to appeal

• Custom Ban DM with URL / Server invite - Most common way, when a user gets banned they have the appeal information listed there. If users DMs are closed they won’t get the appeal info

• Appeal link listed on the website - If your server has a website associated with it, you could have the appeal link listed there too, most common is in the footer.

• Appeal link listed in an information channel in the server - Have the appeal method listed in the server. If your server has a website / domain, could be worth making a redirect like example.com/appeal as it’s easier to remember.

• Custom Welcome message with URL / Server invite - If you don’t use custom ban DM, most users have at least 1 mutual server with their DMs open with a popular bot like Carl, Sapphire, Dyno etc. You could mention your appeal link there, albeit might not be the best sending the appeal link in a welcome DM

From all these methods you should incorporate more than 1 of them. For large servers I would advise doing a combination of the first 3.

What should the questions should the ban appeal ask ?

The purpose of a ban appeal is to allow the banned user back in the server but is also used to gauge if the person is a troll or is sincere. How you structure your ban appeal questions is up to you and your server depending how seriously you take them. Below are a few questions you may ask:

• What is your username?*

• What is your user ID?*

• Why do you think you were banned?

• How was your behaviour wrong?

• How will you change to become a more positive member of the community?

* optional. if you’re using a ban appeal method to auth the user’s account, you wont need these 

We’re back and now will be posting new articles twice a month! If you have any suggestions or feedback do let me know.

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Articles are regularly updated on the Notion Page and may be different than the newsletter https://go.daksh.gg/resources
- Daksh