Make sure to enable these permissions: Manage Users, Manage Modmail, Manage Posts and Comments
Watchdog includes a set of default rules to help you block hate speech and insulting language towards your community members.
If you'd like a different set of rules, you can define your rules in plain English, just as you'd give them to a human. Here are some examples:
"No messages related to cryptocurrency or NFTs"
"No links to external websites unless they're links to watchdog.chat"
"No discussions of US politics"
To set up your custom rules, just send us a DM after purchase.
Get an alert and/or automatically kick, ban, delete messages from, or mute offenders — you decide what happens.
Watchdog ships with safe defaults (alert and delete message) but punishments can be customized. You can even apply multiple punishments to an individual rule violation.
Want to use different punishments? Suggestions for additional types of punishments? Just send us a DM.
Discover the Dashboard
Watchdog's admin dashboard features detailed statistics and rule management functionality for every community.
📈 Easily track rule violations and monitor user activity, including which action was taken against offenders.
✅ Run automated test cases to see how different messages perform and view rule wording.
👮 Create custom rules for your community and configure the punishments to be enforced.
Watchdog is for busy community owners who don't want to spend their nights and weekends manually moderating chat messages or paying a costly contractor to do it for them.
If you have a small server with only a few active users or an exceptionally nice community, it probably doesn't make sense for you to automate chat moderation. If you're afraid of AI or disagree with using it to solve problems, Watchdog is also not a good fit for you.
If you have a Discord, Telegram, Reddit, or X community, you're covered.
If you have something else, send us a message to let us know which integration to build next.
Watchdog seamlessly integrates with your community using a custom-built Bot. You might be familiar with Discord or Telegram Bots where you have to click a button to approve a given bot to join your server — Watchdog is no different.
From that point on, the Watchdog bot will receive updates to include the message contents every time a message is sent to your community. Behind the scenes, it passes each message to a cutting edge AI model to analyze the message for rule violations, then takes whichever action(s) (alert, kick, ban, and/or mute) you have configured when you set up your rules.
Messages do have to be passed to an AI model to be analyzed for rule violations, and messages that violate the rules are stored for reporting purposes. You can access this report at any time, and you can also request that we delete the report at any time. Note that you can always send us a message if you want Watchdog to skip processing messages from certain channels and we'll be happy to help you with that.
Unfortunately, false positives including accidental bans have a chance of happening with or without Watchdog involved. Here are 3 actions you can take to help mitigate these sorts of issues:
Have a crisp set of rules:
Here's an example of a clear rule that is unlikely to cause false positives:
"No racist language towards other community members" ✅
On the other hand, this rule is too vague and will have issues being enforced:
"No bad messages" ❌
Use the "alert" action to test new rules without affecting users:
If you're not sure how your rule will behave in the real world yet, Watchdog lets you get alerts about rule violations without automatically enforcing the rule afterward. Just select the "alert" action after creating a rule and wait for Watchdog to send you a notification.
Have an appeals process:
In the event of a false positive, it's a good idea to have a way for your users to contact you so that you can reverse the action taken if a mistake was made. This can be a support email address, an X handle to DM, or something else depending on what type of community you run.
You might notice that each plan includes a certain number of messages. This is the maximum number of messages Watchdog will moderate for you every single month. Generally every single message sent to your community must be monitored for rule violations, and the limit on the number of messages is global across all of your communities in a given month.
Important exception: Messages sent from admins don't count against this limit because Watchdog skips analysis on those messages. The assumption is that your admins are trustworthy people that won't break the rules.
Finally, the message limit resets monthly, but you can always purchase additional credits if you run out in a given month.
Discord AutoMod does let you block "commonly flagged words" but there are several problems with the approach it uses:
AutoMod is only available for Discord, not Telegram and only works for text, not images or voice.
No transparency in terms of which words get blocked by default or what criteria is used, making false positives hard to debug.
If you want to define custom bad words in addition to what is provided by default, you have to type in each word that you want to block one-by-one or define a complicated regular expression to do a partial match, so there's no real intelligence behind the customization.
You can't apply different sets of rules by channel. You can only enable the bad word filter globally for the entire server, and exclude certain channels from AutoMod - you can't define different rules for those channels.
On the other hand, Watchdog's approach is superior in that it allows you to define a rule in plain English to block whole classes of bad words, images, or voice messages (racism, sexism, political discussions, etc.) without you having to do any manual data entry or having to be comfortable writing complex regular expressions. The criteria being used is as transparent and as flexible as possible since you define the rules yourself, and you can even apply different rulesets by channel.
Watchdog is superior to using a CAPTCHA in several ways:
Improves your conversion rate and user experience:
Filling out a CAPTCHA is annoying for everyone, even legitimate users who may decide to leave instead of dealing with a difficult-to-read CAPTCHA puzzle.
Realtime chat moderation:
Rulebreakers are identified as soon as they send messages that violate the rules. CAPTCHAs are not able to analyze the context of a message.
Identify both human and bot rulebreakers:
CAPTCHAs only identify a certain percentage of bots that aren't able to solve CAPTCHAs. They don't detect humans who decide to break the rules later, or more advanced bots that defeat CAPTCHAs.
Build away, but meanwhile crypto scammers and trolls are on their way to infest your server as we speak. Proceed with caution!
Refunds: You can request a refund via live chat for up to 7 days after purchase. If Watchdog hasn't processed any of your messages, your request will be approved - no questions asked. Refunds are not offered otherwise because of the high costs of GPU processing, which is required for Watchdog's AI model to moderate your messages.
Free Trials: You can try Watchdog for free on Discord and Telegram by heading to the demo section of the website.
