What is a honeypot channel on Discord?

TL;DR

• A honeypot channel is a decoy channel where a bot immediately bans anyone who posts in it.
• It catches one thing: bots that post in every channel they can write to.
• It does nothing about targeted scams, and the member it bans is usually someone who joined last week.
• Daxeon reads every channel, so the scam message gets deleted and the curious member keeps their account.

What is a honeypot channel?

A honeypot channel is a decoy channel. You make a channel no member has a reason to post in, you tell people to stay out of it, and a bot removes anyone who posts there anyway. The name "honeypot" comes from cybersecurity, where a honeypot is a machine left exposed on purpose to identify attackers.

A honeypot channel is aimed at selfbots that spam every channel in a server, usually pushing a phishing link. Those selfbots could not tell the decoy from a real channel. They posted in both, and the rule on the decoy caught them on the way past.

How to set up a honeypot channel

Plenty of moderation bots can do this, and they all work the same way.

1. Create the channel. Usual names are do-not-post, no-post and honeypot. Some admins use bait instead, like free-nitro or airdrop-claim, to pull in accounts hunting for somewhere to advertise.
2. Give @everyone View Channel and Send Messages. The channel only catches selfbots and spammers if they can see it and post in it.
3. Warn members. Tell your community that posting in that channel gets them banned. The idea is that most members read the warning and understand it.
4. Add the rule. Any bot that supports moderation rules will work here. Create a rule that bans any member that posts in that channel, and deletes their message history. Two commonly used bots for this are HoneyPot and Sapphire.

What honeypot channels catch, and what they miss

Mass-posting bots get caught, and for a long time that was most of what hit a Discord server.

Selfbots adapted. Skipping a channel that has no message history costs a few lines of code, so the accounts still tripping the trap are members who did not understand what the channel was.

Scams on Discord today are more targeted than the old mass-posting bots. In one campaign we tracked, the scammer replied to a member's question in an ordinary conversation with a phishing link. Honeypot channels also miss DM scams, impersonators, compromised accounts, and more.

The biggest cost is that the honeypot cannot tell who it caught. Imagine someone unfamiliar with Discord wants to join your community, and accidentally types in the honeypot channel. They are banned and their messages are wiped. You lose a community member and it may be hard for them to find their way back.

In my personal experience, I've found server admins feel that if a community member gets caught in the honeypot, it's their own fault. They either ignored, didn't understand, or didn't see the warnings, and there isn't much the admin can do to prevent that. But, admins don't need to settle for that. There is a better solution that prevents more scams, and punishes fewer community members.

Daxeon vs Honeypot

What you want from a honeypot is the spam bot gone before your members see it. Daxeon bans that account as it joins.

The Scammer Filter bans accounts flagged in the Daxeon network the moment they arrive, so the bot that raided another server last week never posts in yours. Bot Purges clear out the bot accounts that sit in your server. It does all this without the need for a decoy channel that clogs up your channel list and could catch unsuspecting victims.

Then there are the scams that a honeypot isn't designed to catch. Daxeon's chat filters delete phishing links and malicious invites. DM Disable switches off member-to-member DMs, the one attack that never touches a channel at all.

Daxeon logs every removal with the message that caused it, so staff can act on the accounts that deserve it. A honeypot channel bans anyone who posts in it and deletes their message history, so mods can't tell if it was deserved.

Conclusion

A honeypot channel is a good step in the right direction, but it isn't enough for a community that is serious about growth while protecting its community members. What really hurts your members now is a message in a channel they trust, from an account that looks like it belongs there. No honeypot will catch that.

If you're serious about protecting your community, use Daxeon's chat filters to catch scams in all your channels.