Ban, kick, timeout, mute: Discord sanctions explained

Discord provides a base of native moderation actions: what your server can do on its own, without a bot, and what you find in its audit log. There are three of them.

RaidProtect, for its part, talks about sanctions. The word covers those native actions, which it triggers on your behalf, and the ones it adds on top. When you pick a sanction in the bot's settings, you draw from both families alike, and everything lands in the same history.

These three exist without any bot. RaidProtect only triggers them for you, faster and while keeping the record.

• Timeout (temporary exclusion). The member stays on the server but can no longer write, react or speak in voice, for up to 28 days.
• Kick. The member leaves the server, their messages stay, and they can come back with a new invite.
• Ban. The member is excluded for good and cannot come back while the ban holds. Discord can delete their recent messages in the process.

These do not exist in Discord: the bot builds them, out of roles or chains of native actions.

• Warning (warn). No technical effect: the member is notified, and the record stays in their history. Useful to document things before going further.
• Mute. A role that removes the permission to write. It depends entirely on your channel permissions.
• Jail. A role that cuts off access to the whole server except one channel, long enough to talk with the member. Combined with DM Lock, it takes away the same rights as a ban.
• Softban. A ban followed by an immediate unban, chained by the bot: recent messages disappear, and the member can come back.

Both stop someone from talking, but not in the same way. The timeout is a native Discord feature: it applies everywhere on the server, in text as in voice, it survives a role change and the member sees a countdown. Its limit is its duration: 28 days maximum.

The mute, on the other hand, relies on a Mute role that the bot assigns. It is only worth as much as your permissions: if a channel forgets to deny that role the right to speak, or if a new channel is created without carrying those permissions over, the member keeps writing. In exchange, a mute can last indefinitely and is set channel by channel.

In short: the timeout for a quick, reliable cool-down, the mute for a long or tailored restriction.

All three remove the member from the server, but their consequences have nothing in common.

• The kick deletes no messages and does not block a return. It interrupts someone, it does not push them away.
• The softban cleans up recent messages, which the kick does not, while leaving the door open. It is the right answer to a hacked account that spams: the legitimate owner will come back once the account is recovered.
• The ban is the only measure that truly prevents a return. Keep it for accounts created to do harm, repeat offenders and raids.

A ban does two things at once:

• it cuts off access to the server;
• it cuts off access to your members, since Discord reserves direct messages for people who share a server or are friends.

That combination is what makes it radical. You can reproduce it without excluding anyone:

• the jail locks the member into one channel and takes away the rest of the server;
• DM Lock stops them from writing privately to other members.

Same exceptions as for a ban: friends, bots, staff. From the point of view of what the person can still do, jail + DM Lock = a ban.

Except a ban does not stop at the account you targeted: Discord adds a block at the IP address level, to prevent a return with another account.

But a public IPv4 is shared by a lot of people (a family router, a student residence, a club network, a mobile carrier behind CGNAT), and those addresses get reassigned regularly. Accounts that did nothing wrong end up blocked at your server's door, sometimes months later.

Hence our recommendation: the jail as your default reflex, the ban for throwaway accounts created only to attack you. The same rights taken away, no collateral damage, and it can be undone.

There is no universal scale, but this ladder covers the vast majority of cases.

• An isolated slip: a warning, then a short timeout if it happens again.
• An argument getting heated: a timeout of a few hours, long enough for it to settle.
• A member to talk to in private: the jail, which isolates them in a dedicated channel without excluding them.
• A hacked account spamming: a softban, which cleans up without punishing the victim.
• A self-bot or a raid account: a ban, without hesitating.

RaidProtect's anti-spam applies this kind of ladder on its own: you pick the sanction for each type of spam, and the bot handles it.

• Banning a hacked account. The owner is a victim, not an attacker. The softban cleans up the damage and leaves them a way back.
• Relying on a badly configured mute. A Mute role that is not denied in every channel is worth nothing. Check it after each channel creation, or prefer the timeout.
• Forgetting the role hierarchy. A bot can only sanction members placed below it in the role list. It is the first thing to check when a sanction does not go through.
• Keeping no record. A sanction with no trace is a decision you can neither explain nor review. RaidProtect keeps every action in a searchable history.