Draupnir bot

The Draupnir bot installed by us is powered by draupnir.

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Draupnir is a moderation bot for Matrix that helps you keep your rooms and communities safe, clean, and friendly.
Think of it as a security guard for your Matrix rooms — always on duty, always ready to step in when trouble shows up.

This component is mandatory if you want to have a Matrix server with open registration, and strongly recommended for all Matrix servers, even those with closed registration.

What does Draupnir do?¶

Moderating a Matrix community can be hard work, especially if your rooms are public or attract a lot of people. Draupnir automates much of that work and gives you easy commands to handle the rest.

With Draupnir you can:

• Ban and remove troublemakers quickly — and delete their messages so they don’t linger.
• Block harmful or unwanted content using word lists, link filters, or custom rules.
• Prevent spam and flooding by limiting how often users can post or how many people they can mention at once.
• Stop malicious events that could crash clients or break the room.
• Moderate across multiple rooms from a single, private control room.

Who is it for?¶

Draupnir is a great fit for:

• Public chat rooms that need to stay friendly and on-topic.
• Large communities where moderators can’t watch every room at once.
• Homeserver admins who want consistent moderation across all their rooms.
• Homeservers with open registration.

Whether your Matrix space is a fan club, an activist hub, a developer group, or a casual hangout — Draupnir helps keep it safe.

Usage¶

Getting Started¶

To start using Draupnir, you need to have it installed on your Matrix homeserver. New customers (without a homeserver) can select Draupnir directly in the order form, while existing customers can add it by contacting us.

Draupnir is a pretty complex solution with numerous of features and settings, so we strongly recommend to read the Draupnir documentation before starting to use it.

The steps below will help you to set up Draupnir and start using it in your rooms. Please note that the policies and protections mentioned below are prepared by us based on our experience, Draupnir developers’ recommendations, and community moderators’ feedback. We strongly recommend precisely following these steps to ensure your rooms are protected from spam, CSAM, and other illegal content (yes, even on servers with closed registration. A single public room is enough to flood your server with man-made horrors beyond your comprehension).

I. Prepare the Management Room¶

The first step is to create a private management room for Draupnir to operate from. We can’t do that on your behalf, because only you, as the server owner/admin, can have control over your server’s rooms.

1. Create an unencrypted private management room
2. Share the room ID with us
3. We will ensure that Draupnir will recognize this room as your management room

II. Initialize the Draupnir Bot¶

Once the management room is created and Draupnir is aware of it, you need to initialize the bot itself.

1. Once the management room is set (see above), invite @draupnir:your-server.com into it
2. Assign Draupnir the admin role in that room (power level 100)

III. Configure Policy Lists¶

The bot is ready to be used! Almost.

One of the killer features of Draupnir is to use shared moderation policies, that save your time, effort, and sanity by using already prepared and community-vetted lists.

However, in this guide we mention only mandatory policy lists curated by Muninn Hall community, that is organized of well-known and trusted community moderators, developers of the moderation bots (including Draupnir), and even Matrix protocol developers.

More details about policies and how to use them can be found in the Policies section below.

Note: It may take a few minutes for Draupnir to process each command; if a command fails (usually with errors like ESOCTIMEOUT or similar), just resend it in a minute. That happens because each policy list contains numerous rules, and it’s often too much to process at once. Don’t worry! Eventually, all commands will be processed successfully.

1. (Mandatory) Send the following command to the management room to subscribe to the Community Moderation Effort policy - a well-known and trusted policy in the Matrix community:

!draupnir watch #community-moderation-effort-bl:neko.dev

2. (Mandatory) Send the following command to the management room to subscribe to the Active Threats policy - managed by community moderators to maintain a fast response to active threats and spam attacks:

!draupnir watch #huginn-muninn-active-threats:feline.support

3. (Mandatory) Send the following command to the management room to subscribe to the CS Auto Open-Reg Policy - managed by community moderators to automatically block requests from Matrix servers with open registration without any protection mechanisms in place:

!draupnir watch #cs-auto-open_reg:codestorm.net

IV. Configure Protections¶

Apart from the policies that contain specific rules to prevent already-known bad actors to attack your rooms, Draupnir also provides various built-in protections that can be enabled to prevent common spam and abuse tactics.

We list below both the mandatory for public servers, and optional but recommended protections that you could enable to keep your rooms safe. While you can choose to skip the optional protections, we strongly recommend enabling them all to ensure maximum safety for your rooms.

1. (Mandatory for public Matrix servers) Send the following command to the management room to suspend (not ban) users of your homeserver who were reported in the policies you subscribed to:

!draupnir protections enable HomeserverUserPolicyProtection

2. (Optional, recommended) Send the following command to the management room to automatically reject invitations from users who are reported in the policies you subscribed to:

!draupnir protections enable BlockInvitationsOnServerProtection

3. (Optional, recommended) Send the following command to the management room to ban users who send an image or video right after joining a room (common spam tactic, you definitely do not want to see what that image/video contains):

!draupnir protections enable FirstMessageIsImageProtection

4. (Optional, recommended) Send the following command to the management room to automatically redact messages (not ban users) that contain more than 3 mentions (common spam tactic, used to annoy users and force them to leave the room):

!draupnir protections enable MentionLimitProtection

You are ready to go!

V. Ongoing Usage¶

To protect your rooms, you need to invite @draupnir:your-server.com to each room you want it to moderate and assign it the admin role (power level 100). After that Draupnir will automatically apply its moderation rules to the room.

Please note that sometimes Draupnir may report errors like ‼ | Error while trying to redact messages for BAD_ACTOR in YOUR_ROOM: Error: ESOCKETTIMEDOUT — don’t worry, this is normal and happens when Draupnir attempts to process a large number of rules or messages at once. Usually that may happen during the initial setup, but it should not affect the ongoing moderation of your rooms

There is an awesome community handbook that contains step-by-step instructions for cases when your server sends (or receives) spam/illegal content and you need to take action fast. It is a great resource to have at hand, so we recommend reading it and keeping it bookmarked!

Policies¶

Matrix community already coordinated and created various shared moderation policies, which you can use to set up Draupnir. By default, we recommend using the policy lists curated by Muninn Hall community - that’s a good starting point for everyone, because Muninn Hall is organized of well-known and trusted community moderators, developers of the moderation bots (including Draupnir), and even Matrix protocol developers.

The curated policy lists focus on unambiguous, specific and clear rules, that are acceptable everywhere (spam, obvious scams, CSAM, etc.), and avoid controversial or debatable rules (e.g., political speech, etc.).

However, there are many other policies available, which you can use to set up Draupnir according to your needs.

We strongly recommend reading Draupnir documentation about policies and how to use them.