User Moderator

Digital crowd control for Remo.TV via Discord.

User Moderator tracks every login event to Discord via a secure internal websocket and reports them to Discord for our moderators to review. It additionally stores usernames and IP addresses to a database to track if they've been banned; and if they have, their severity.

Login Reporting

Any time someone who is logged in connects to Remo, a login event is triggered over a private, password-protected websocket that is separate from the main socket. A small set of information about your connection and web browser is sent to the bot which reports it to Discord, and updates its databases accordingly.

Additionally, action buttons are provided to quickly serve moderation commands if needed.

An external IP information service is utilized to obtain the country code, ISP, and proxy. It's capable of differentiating a known VPN address from a Tor address. Tor addresses are automatically IP banned.

When a login event is reported, every tracked IP address for the reporting user is compared against known IP addresses of banned users. If a match is found, the bot assumes that the username is an "alt account" and reports it to the moderators. It will also automatically ban the username depending on the severity of the matched accounts' ban. If a banned match with a high severity ban is detected, the account logging is is also issued a high severity ban.

Username & IP Address Tracking

The bot doesn't save everything that it reports during a login event. A PSQL database with two tables named users and ips is used:

1. users
   • username - The username of the user logging in.
   • ips - An array of every unique IP address the user has logged in with.
   • banned - A boolean flag on if the username has been banned.
   • prejudiced - A boolean flag representing a high severity ban.
2. ips
   • ip - The IP address to track.
   • banned - A boolean flag on if the IP address has been banned.
   • prejudiced - A boolean flag representing a high severity ban.

When a user logs in, an entry in each table is created or upserted where necessary, such as a new user logging in, a known user logging in with a new IP address, etc.

Banning and Severity

There are two different types of bans that this bot can issue. A low severity ban, or a high severity ban - called a "prejudiced" ban. A normal ban would typically be used for offenders who are unlikely to try to retaliate, an offensive username, or an IP address associated with Tor. The bot will not usually take automatic action against these (except auto-banning Tor addresses) kinds of bans.

The high severity, "prejudiced" ban is used for users who are likely to attempt to create new accounts to dodge their ban. When someone logs into Remo on an account that matches another with a prejudiced ban, the username and IP address are automatically issued a prejudiced ban. For most cases, this will stop all but the most determined offenders.

A planned feature called "nuke" works almost exactly like a prejudiced ban, but also issues prejudiced bans for all users (even unbanned accounts) and IP addresses associated with the one that was nuked.

"Slash" Commands

Three slash commands are available to the highest ranking roles on the Remo Discord server:

1. /ban target: username/ip prejudiced: boolean - Will ban a username or IP address, with an optional prejudiced flag to issue a high severity ban.
2. /unban target: username/ip - Will unban a username or IP address. Unbanning a prejudiced ban also drops the prejudice.
3. /massban target: all/users/ips - Bans all users and/or IP addresses that are banned in the bots database. An optional target flag is made available to only ban usernames or IP addresses. Omitting the target defaults to both.

Slash commands can be issued anywhere in the guild, and replies are ephemeral, meaning that only the issuer will see them. Special notifications are sent to a moderation logging channel as well.

Config

A file named config.json is required in the /src directory to function. This file should never be committed.

{
  "discord": {
    "token": "Your Discord Bot token",
    "guildId": "012345678901234567",
    "clientId": "987654321098765432",
    "eventChannelId": "246824682468246824",
    "logChannelId": "135791357913579135",
  },
  "database": {
    "user": "postgres",
    "host": "127.0.0.1",
    "database": "user_moderation",
    "password": "hahano",
    "port": 5432
  },
  "remo": {
    "key": "superultraomegano",
    "url": "thatsasecr.et"
  },
  "misc": {
    "ipApiKey": "0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF"
  }
}

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