What’s the problem?

Moderators currently don’t have great tools for de-escalating an unfolding situation.

an unfortunate scenario for any moderation team 😔

What is Timeout?

• There is a new permission ✨  MODERATE MEMBERS ✨ which allows users to time other users out
• A timed out user cannot interact in the server. (No chatting in text channels or talking in voice channels)

• Moderators (users with this permission) can time out bad actors for a certain amount of time.

• Only moderators can see who is timed out

How does it work?

• We added a new field communication_disabled_until to the guild member object, which stores a timestamp

Changes we made in response to feedback

• During a soft launch, we heard from moderators that showing 'timed out' UI to everyone in the server would feel like publicly shaming bad actors. Moderators told us they would not use the feature in its current form.

  • Since the goal of Timeout is to deescalate bad behavior, we changed the feature to only show moderators the users who are timed out.

• We also made some changes to ensure our design choices were accessible.

  • We originally wanted to gray out timed out user’s messages. However, this treatment wouldn’t meet a11y requirements.
  • It also had the unfortunate effect of looking like the message failed to send.

  Q&A

  • If a timed out user leaves a server, will they still be timed out?
    • Yes
  • What happens if a user is in a voice channel when they get timed out?
    • They will be disconnected : )