NFL and the Discord community disaster

• The NFL launched an official community on Discord 
• The staff were overwhelmed by troublemakers, who creatively exposed flaws in their moderation plans
• Key takeaways: the larger your community, the more responsibility you have to be ready for anything

What is Discord?

An instant messaging platform used by companies, organisations, and influencers who want fast, easy access to a captive audience. 

A Discord community is referred to as a server. Midjourney (an AI image generation bot) is an example of a massively popular server, with more than 20 million users. Most large servers have 10k-100k members. 

Discord has 200+ million MAUs (monthly active users) and can be a great way to start a conversation with your audience.

In a Discord community, you can share tips, ideas, news, and interests. However, like any community space, Discord communities need to be nurtured with care. 

NFL launch on Discord

In September 2024, the NFL (National Football League in the USA) announced that their official Discord server was open for everyone to join.

When joining a server, every member must agree to abide by the rules, however, ensuring people comply with these rules is the job of the community management team: not Discord.

Trolls and troublemakers are attracted to anywhere they can cause chaos. Unfortunately for the NFL Discord staff team, this server became a target straight away.

Discord offers some limited automated moderation features, and censor bots are also available, but troublemakers worked around these creatively and managed to post racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic content, viewable by 40,000 members. Many of these members were only just above the 13 year-old minimum age for Discord membership. 

Poor moderation reflects badly on the NFL, regardless of how obvious the source of the trouble.

Lessons learned from the NFL Discord community

Consistency and preparedness.

A community management team must be consistent in enforcing a clear set of rules. This means implementing a rule book for the management team as well. In a Discord server, no one can be above the rules. Otherwise, everyone gets very upset, very quickly. It’s difficult to calm people down in an instant messaging app when users feel they are being unfairly treated. 

The NFL server struggled with inconsistency in their management team’s enforcement of rules. This is understandable. We’re only human and when thousands of troublemakers are trying to break the server all at once, it can be hard to remember rules and process. 

For example, some community members referenced trolls who were only muted (temporarily silenced, on the naughty step) while their friends were permanently banned. 

The job of a community management team is hard. The larger the community, the more difficult it is to manage. Auto-moderation on the NFL server demanded better configuration, to anticipate the creative workarounds of a young tech-savvy audience. 

1. Discord is a fantastic platform for developing a highly engaged audience
2. The larger your community becomes, the more time and money it will demand
3. Your team needs to include people who live and breathe Discord and community management
4. Preparation is key: have rules for the management team and for community members
5. Be consistent in how you define and deal with troublemakers
6. Invest time in configuring and iterating your auto-moderation settings
7. Have a plan for rehearsing and managing disruption

Learn more about how to be an effective community manager.

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