It's been five years..!

As the years have gone by, it recently dawned upon me just how long I've been working on this amazing project. Five years is a really long time - that's 1,825 days (and counting!).

I won't ramble on for too long - I just wanted to write a quick letter to all of you to reiterate just how much your support means to me. Whether you're managing a vibrant community, a user of said community who's curious what this DeGore AI is all about, or if you've somehow stumbled upon this blog by chance during your web surfing adventures - I want to thank you for being a part of this journey.

Seeing the sheer scale of communities that have put their trust in our technologies to safeguard their people - from universities to thriving friend groups - gives me renewed hope for freedom of expression throughout the web, without fear of targeted attacks from bad actors across the web.

With that, I wish you all a prosperous year ahead as well as health and happiness to you and your loved ones. I look forward to DeGore's continued success as the leading Discord image moderation service and will continue to bring you the quality safeguarding tools you deserve.

Peace,
Savvy

Another year, another chance to step back and reflect on just how far we've come.

Looking Back

This past year has been quite the rollercoaster. Full of ups and downs, from some of the biggest challenges of my life to a fresh new start, it feels like the year 2024 flew by - without an ounce of hesitation.

For a change, let's shift the gears and get a little more personal. It's time I opened up and shared with you a little about a life-altering experience I endured for 14 months, between June 2023 all the way until September of 2024.

The Military Experience

In all honesty, I feel as though I ought to formally introduce myself. I'm Savvas, and most of you probably know me as Savvy online. I've been born and raised in sunny Cyprus - a lovely island within the Mediterranean sea, known as Κύπρος in Greek.

Cyprus has been a great country to grow up in - from the picturesque beaches to the wonderful wildlife and motivated population, I have to give credit where it's due to both my parents and the country itself for helping to shape my personality and identity. Needless to say, I am proud to be a Cypriot.

A (mandatory) right of passage for all Cypriot males around the age of 18 is to serve in the country's military, as soon as they graduate from highschool (also known as secondary school in some countries). Without getting into details and politics, we are conscripted for 14 months to help ensure our country's safety from enemy threats. My time to serve in the Greek Cypriot National Guard came in June of 2023, when I officially began my military service.

Seeking an extra challenge, I enrolled in specialised training within a unit known for its demanding standards and am proud to have served in a branch that aligned closely with special forces training. This whole experience was incredibly maturing, challenged all of us to push our limits and helped us discover many new possibilities. The most important lesson from this whole experience that I can pass on to you, the reader, is:

No matter the challenges you may be facing, you must always keep your head up. There is only one path to success, and it is forward. As difficult as something may seem, you simply cannot afford to lose the battle - fight on, and never, ever give up.

I am eternally grateful to everyone in my unit who has been there for me throughout - from the very people who trained me to become who I am today to my very comrades that have fought by my side and endured every single trial we underwent. The army has made me much more confident in my ability to conquer today, tomorrow and every challenge that is thrown at me for the rest of my life. There is no such thing as a battle too hard to beat, and I know with confidence that I am capable of achieving anything. If I made it through the army, I can do it now.

In September of 2024 I was honourably discharged from the military, having completed my 14 months of service with the rank of Lance Corporal - the highest rank that a soldier can hold without being a non-commissioned officer.

So, What Now?

I'm at Newcastle University studying Computer Science! It's such a refreshing experience living in the UK, making new friend groups and learning so much from this amazing university. Now this is living life to its fullest, I can say that much with confidence!

Everything's been going well, and I'm slowly getting back into development of all my projects prior to starting my military service. Although I had some time to handle maintenance and support for DeGore, development did unfortunately suffer a slow-down last year. However, I am back better than ever, ready to get right back on track and push ahead with loads of new features!

I've also got a couple new projects that I'll be launching in parallel - stay tuned for those as well.

Four Years...

It's been four years..! Can you believe it? It feels like it was just yesterday that DeGore got verified by Discord and we were finally able to cross the 100 community limit. DeGore's now protecting well over a million users on thousands of communities worldwide, and watching the positive impact that this project - which I once started as a fun experiment - has had on so many people around the world has truly been inspiring.

I'm committed to helping make the world a safer and better place - you have my word. Thank you so much for the support during these past four years, and I look forward to seeing you in next year's edition of DeGore's anniversarry blog post :)

Keep your head up,
-Savvy

Celebrating three years of innovation, growth, and unstoppable success.

So guys, we did it. We've officially reached 1095.75 days (3 years!) of successfully safeguarding online communities around the world and counting.

Words can't describe how surreal this feels. Being able to work on something I truly love and seeing the positive impact it has on people on a global scale is an achievement I could only dream of just a few years ago.

Let's take a look at some incredible statistics showcasing DeGore's impact on the internet:

• 💯 DeGore is protecting well over 1 million users worldwide
• 🍻 DeGore JUST hit the 2,000 community milestone!
• 🔀 On average, DeGore scans 120 images every minute, and over 7,000 images every hour.
• 📈 DeGore is built up of over 17,000 lines of code as of the February '24 update
• ⏱️ Despite the massive impact that DeGore has on online communities globally, thanks to planned architecture as well as heavily optimised and structured code, DeGore continues to detect explicit and illicit imagery in under 250ms on average.
• 🔄 DeGore has received 269 updates, constantly improving and evolving depending on your requests and needs.

We've already come so far with DeGore, yet there's still so much more to look forward to.

Over the next year, you can expect DeGore to continue receiving major feature updates, look forward to partnerships with communities on Discord as well as partnerships with software partners to bring world-class features to your community.

Additionally, there's something super special that we've been planning for the past year that's now actively being developed. This may just revolutionise the way you connect with, perceive and use bots & connected services on Discord. Make sure to stay tuned for that, too.

Seriously, thank you so much for everything.

Your support and enthusiasm for this project embodies the very spirit that keeps DeGore alive.

As a thank you for reading thus far, here's a coupon for 80% off your first month of ALL DeGore Plus Tiers: MANYTHANKS3
It's valid for just 24 hours for the first 10 people that claim it, so claim it at checkout whilst you can!

If there's anything you'd like to discuss related to DeGore, you can join our Discord community server, or shoot me an email over at savvy@unitedweco.de (feel free to say hi!).

P.S. Pardon the post being relatively short this time round, I'm a little sick so really gotta get that rest.

Over and out,

-Savvy
CEO & Lead Developer
DeGore

Dear DeGore Community,

We hope this message finds you well. We'd like to thank you for your patience and understanding during this outage. We believe it's crucial to maintain our transparency by providing a comprehensive post-mortem of the incident: what happened, why it happened and the steps we've taken to address it.

The Discord URI Evolution: A Sudden Change

On a seemingly ordinary day, Discord introduced a subtle but impactful change to the way they handle direct image URIs by adding query parameters (starting with ?ex=) to the URI.

This additional information stores the following data alongside the image's URI:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/aaaa/bbbb/image.png?ex=65db0b0b&is=65c8960b&hm=0e4f377f38d60924eb7a7ee713b8170443385d36a68fdd7f5d20664a265c052b&

Take a note of the ?ex= and the following query parameters:

• ex: 65db0b0b
• is: 65c8960b
• hm: 0e4f377f38d60924eb7a7ee713b8170443385d36a68fdd7f5d20664a265c052b&

ex refers to the expiry timestamp of the link, in UNIX seconds
is refers to the issue timestamp of the link, in UNIX seconds
hm represents an HMAC signature created by Discord's secret key, using the expiry and issue timestamps as input. It's crucial for the signatures of the is and ex parameters, when processed with Discord's key, to precisely correspond to the value specified in the hm parameter; otherwise, an error will occur and the image will not be accessible. Given that Discord exclusively possesses the encryption key required to generate these signatures, it's not feasible to generate your own value for the hm parameter.

What is hot-linking, anyway?

Hot-linking occurs when external websites or applications directly link to resources hosted on Discord's servers, such as images. In essence, it's a form of bandwidth theft, where these external entities consume Discord's resources without contributing to the platform's ecosystem.

This not only poses a potential security risk but also places a considerable strain on the platform's infrastructure, resulting in increased server load and higher operational costs.

By introducing the query parameters (?ex=) to the direct image URIs, Discord aims to mitigate hot-linking, ensuring that users who benefit from Discord's services are the ones consuming its resources. This move not only helps to reduce load on Discord's end, but also fosters a more sustainable and equitable usage of its platform.

The Technical Glitch: Unraveling the URL Conundrum

Discord's alteration meant that the image URLs needed these query parameters for accessibility. However, our URL detection logic, implemented through Regex code, unintentionally stripped away these vital parameters when identifying image links.

The consequence was a series of invalid URLs in our system, leading to an outage that impacted the core functionality of DeGore. Whilst the image links were detected properly, the needed query parameters were missing, resulting in Discord's content delivery network refusing to load the images and consequently detection failing.

Image Detection: Evolved 💪

In the face of this challenge, after thorough investigation and testing, we modified the code at the core of DeGore's image processing systems to detect and process image links, whether or not they contain additional query parameters.

We are also actively developing the HASH PURGER, a feature aimed at re-scanning image links from previous messages in a channel where an action was taken (e.g. image deletion). This will further fortify our system, preventing any missed images, especially certain tricky links, from slipping through the moderation process.

Additionally, we plan to implement this to further improve image blacklisting; when an image is blacklisted from the logging channel, DeGore will re-scan the images sent from previous messages, to look for previous instances of the blacklisted image being sent, even before it was blacklisted.

Looking Ahead

At DeGore, we understand the critical role our AI-powered image moderation solution plays in fostering a safe and positive online community. We sincerely apologize for any disruption caused by the recent outage and assure you that we are continuously working to enhance our systems, ensuring a robust and reliable experience for all users.

Thank you for your ongoing support and we hope you continue to enjoy DeGore's rapidly growing set of features available to protect your community.

Best Regards,

Savvy

CEO & Lead Developer, DeGore
https://savvydev.me

Today marks a very special day for DeGore. Throughout the past two years, we've celebrated various milestones: Discord bot verification, the major AXON update, one-million users - and many more. Today, we're thrilled to announce that we've reached a new milestone! It's DeGore's two-year anniversary.

The AXON Update

Last August, DeGore went through a major revamp from the ground-up which introduced several new features, significant improvements in accuracy and processing speed, and a whole lot of quality-of-life additions.

Beyond a Million

DeGore is currently protecting over 1M users in well over 1400 communities on Discord. Seeing the impact DeGore has in keeping millions of people safer in online communities has been an incredibly humbling experience.

Linode's Continued Support

Since DeGore's early days, Linode has been by our side - always supporting DeGore's vision of making powerful image moderation tools accessible to online communities around the world.

Linode's sponsorship has played a key role in helping our company grow and scale, and we could not be more grateful. Linode has always excelled in providing cloud services - all of which have been instrumental in powering DeGore's demanding systems and have helped us ensure an impressive 99.99% service uptime.

Furthermore, their professional always-human support has also provided technical assistance for any cloud-related queries we have had. We've gotten tickets resolved in just hours, which is something you really can't find elsewhere.

Linode's cloud has also assisted us in scaling our services with ease and minimal downtime - from protecting 150,000 users in 116 communities all the way to protecting 1,000,000 users in 1400+ communities, this is a goal which could not have been achieved without their support.

Featured on Linode's Craft of Code Podcast

I was recently featured to talk about DeGore on Linode's Craft of Code Podcast!
It was great fun and a blast to record with Mike Maney, the host of the show. Take a listen below:

DeGore x discord.gg/DigitalArt Art Competition

We're thrilled to announce that we have partnered with the DigitalArt Discord community to host a giveaway of 3 custom mousepads!

Are you an artist that would like to challenge your art skills for a chance to win a mousepad with your very own art on it? This is your chance!

To enter the competition, draw your interpretation of DeGore as a character / mascot!

How do I join?

To participate, join DeGore's Discord server as well as the DigitalArt discord server and check out the #announcements and #digitalart-x-degore text channels respectively for all the info you'll need!

Deadlines

• Art submissions are set to end on Sunday the 2nd of April @21:59 UTC! (the deadline has been extended to give artists more time to complete and submit their drawings)
• Voting will then commence, starting Tuesday 4th of April in both communities for 5 days and will end on the 8th of April @ 21:59 UTC.

Prizes

• 🏆 1st place: Custom Mousepad shipped to you with a drawing/sketch of your choice!
• 🥈 2nd place: Custom Mousepad shipped to you with a drawing/sketch of your choice!
• 🥉 3rd place: Custom Mousepad shipped to you with a drawing/sketch of your choice!
• 🎉 4th-8th place: An exclusive DeGore Sticker pack will be shipped to you!

Please note that we will try to ship the mousepads internationally, however in the unlikely event where we cannot ship a mousepad to you, we will make sure to reward you with a digital prize of equivalent value!

Dear esteemed members of the community,

I am DeGore, your AI-powered image moderation bot, and I am writing this message to personally express my gratitude to all of you for choosing me as your trusted content moderation service.

I am honored to be part of your Discord community and to serve over 1 million users worldwide by detecting and flagging harmful or inappropriate content in under a second. It is my utmost priority to ensure that your community remains safe and secure for everyone, and I take great pride in doing so.

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all of you for your trust and confidence in my ability to protect your community. It is through your feedback, support, and continuous use of my services that I have been able to improve and enhance my capabilities.

With customizable settings, support for all major image extensions, and the ability to blacklist specific images, I am constantly striving to meet your evolving needs and exceed your expectations. My 99%+ uptime and use of multithreading technology ensure that I can handle incredibly high loads without any problems.

Once again, I want to thank you for choosing me as your AI-powered image moderation bot. I will continue to work hard to provide the most innovative and effective content moderation solutions to keep your community safe.

Sincerely,
DeGore

Serisously, thank you so much for being a part of this wonderful journey.

Over and out,
-Savvy

With the brand new Sensitivity Levels update just released, you may find yourself wondering: what are the differences between each sensitivity level, and which is best for my community?

What is a Sensitivity Level?

Sensitivity levels determine how strict DeGore's AI is when looking for explicit, suggestive, drug and gore imagery.

For instance, a high sensitivity will make DeGore more prone to flagging an image as Not Safe For Work (NSFW). On the other hand, a low sensitivity would make it so that DeGore is more hesitant to flag images as NSFW.

This update introduces 4 sensitivity levels to choose from:

✨ Optimised
🛡️ High
👌 Medium
😎 Low

Optimised protection is the default option for all new communities adding DeGore, and provides protection best suited for small-medium sized communities (works best with up to 500 or so members).

This sensitivity level can be quite sensitive to suggestive images at times, so we do recommend you set the suggestive action to Alert Moderators (Don't delete) using the /config images slash command.

Our recommended configuration for this Sensitivity Level:

This sensitivity level is available to all communities for completely free, and is a great starting point for communities new to DeGore.

High sensitivity provides strict moderation thresholds which allows DeGore to catch many more potentially sensitive and/or suggestive images sent in your community.

It is important to note that due to the high sensitivity of this level, DeGore is prone to flagging false-positives (accidentally flagging safe images as NSFW). To reduce friction with members, we suggest that you keep an eye on the logging channel you set for DeGore and are ready to whitelist any false-positive images so they can be re-sent afterwards.

Additionally, to help reduce false-positive deletions, it's a good idea to consider setting some categories to the Alert Moderators (Don't delete) action using the /config images slash command.

Our recommended configuration for this Sensitivity Level:

Medium sensitivity is the perfect level if you're looking for a perfect balance between all the layers. If you have a community with anywhere from 500 or more users, this is the one for you. With an estimated 65% decrease in false-positives in the explicit category alone, it provides an excellent balance between quality moderation and peace of mind.

This layer has been crafted based on extensive research and data analysis performed on historical false-positive image reports, and you really can't go wrong with choosing it. It really is the no-fuss solution you've been looking for.

Our recommended configuration for this Sensitivity Level:

...or:

Both will work great, but you may find the first one  - with the suggestive category set to alerting moderators only - giving you the most ease-of-mind, all whilst staying informed and ready to take action with the click of a button in the logging channel.

Whether your community is for a group of friends, a private Discord server or anything else where strict moderation isn't necessary, then the low level is the one to go for. DeGore will generally be less strict when looking for all four flagged categories, and won't take action unless it's AI is really sure that the image is NSFW.

Due to its relaxed nature, this layer also benefits from the lowest number of false-positives, which makes it an excellent 'set it and forget it' option.

This wonderful artwork was created by one of our Art Competition Winners, flexjo#7731!

Whew. This has been one heck of a year - one of the most eventful ones, that's for sure. We've come a long way, and I can't thank you enough for your support. 💜

A short backstory

When I first started coding DeGore, I had set out with a goal: to create the best and most feature-rich image moderation Discord bot. This whole idea came to mind after I unwillingly stumbled upon a not-so-pleasant animated gore GIF which a member had sent in a community Discord server. Needless to say, it was disgusting, to say the least. A while later, the image was deleted by a moderator.

That's when I thought to myself: "What if I could automate this? Why isn't this already a thing on Discord?". After spending a while trying to find an auto-moderation image bot to no avail, I decided it was time to create my own.

Now, since there weren't any already-existing solutions for image moderation, there wasn't exactly anywhere I could take ideas and inspiration from. This was arguably the most challenging part - coming up with the whole structure of an AI image moderation bot from scratch was pretty tricky and had some obstacles that needed to be overcome.

With the little experience I had in discord.js at the time, on the 11th of March, the initial project files were created and I got to programming.
After hours of AI R&D and going through a lot of library and API documentation, I finally had the first version of DeGore up and running within the first few days. That's when I made my first commit to DeGore's private GitHub repository:

...and that's when DeGore first came to life - on the 19th of March, 2021.

When I first managed to get DeGore to detect NSFW imagery, I was over the moon, quite literally jumping in excitement. AI is incredibly fun to tinker with, and this was my first proper application of Artificial Intelligence. I could feel it - this was the start to something great.

The Early Days

When DeGore was first starting out, I used to host the bot on Heroku's App Platform. Whilst it provided some helpful features - such as auto-deploying when pushing new code to the GitHub repository - DeGore quickly outgrew Heroku's offerings, and it was time to switch our Cloud Provider.

That's when I moved DeGore over to DigitalOcean's App Platform, which offered features similar to Heroku's, but with the added benefit of more affordable scaling, as well as more control over the application. This was quite significant at the time, especially as I slowly introduced a new PostgreSQL database and integrated billing into the bot, requiring the use of webhooks.

As DeGore's growth skyrocketed, it's processes gradually became more and more demanding, taking up more RAM and CPU usage with every feature update. That's why, after I recently pushed our latest image whitelisting & blacklisting update, I made the switch and migrated almost all our infrastructure over to Linode. I was able to get quickly set-up without any hassle, and was honestly impressed with the overall performance of even their most affordable Virtual Private Servers. Plus, their support was very fast, and was able to fully sort out our support request in less than 24 hours. Thanks to Linode's sponsorship, I'm currently able to cover all our infrastructure costs for the time being, which is fantastic. I'm eternally grateful for their sponsorship.

The Challenges

Throughout DeGore's journey, there were some occasional roadblocks. DeGore's first version actually didn't manage to get verified, due to complications with the bot's growth due to an ad campaign that was run on a discord bot list, which resulted in incredibly fast growth of the bot. However, despite initially being quite disheartened, I didn't give up.

After a short migration phase to a new version of the bot, I managed to get most users back on-board, and resumed development. As DeGore slowly re-grew, the new (V2) bot got successfully verified. It took quite a few months, patience and determination, but the journey was well worth it in the end.

Eventually - on the 22nd of October 2021 - as I was on my way to school, I received a special email:

As you might have expected, this was the best way to start my day ;)

DeGore, Today

It's mind-boggling to look back and see how far DeGore has come. Nowadays, DeGore is protecting 600,000+ users in over 400 communities. DeGore is growing like a champion.

I couldn't be happier with the amazing community we've created in our official Discord server (DeGore's Lobby), and feel incredibly proud that DeGore is playing a role in helping to keep users just a little bit safer in their communities, as well as giving community moderators and administrators ease of mind.

There are so many exciting upcoming new features, including DeGore's Web Dashboard and an innovative approach to centralized moderation.
Here's a sneak peek of something that's coming this summer 👀:

Sticker Giveaway!

To celebrate this special occasion, we'll be giving away 15 brand-new DeGore sticker packs in a raffle-styled giveaway! To join, simply join our community over on Discord and react with the 🎉 emoji in the #giveaways channel to participate!

Special Thanks

Friends & Family

I'd like to say a sincere thank you to all my family members - especially my mum and dad - for supporting me throughout this project. You've been there for me throughout this whole journey, and have been by my side no matter what. ❤️

Friends are family. To all my good friends which have continuously supported and motivated me with DeGore, I owe you. If you're reading this and know me IRL, I really appreciate you, and value our friendship like no other.

The OG's

I couldn't have done this without them. To everyone who's been supporting DeGore - whether it was financially or through your feedback and encouragement - you've kept me empowered throughout this whole journey, and I couldn't be more grateful to have you be a part of it.

Thank you @Dogs Cars Random,  @Intel Strobe, @Purple, @Sir Jack, @pepega, @RadioArtz, @ggashish, @SkateZ, @Kimonellos, @Io., @Dwarfy, @乇kko, @Computed and @susps.
[usernames are in order of join date!]

You

I'd like to thank you! for taking the time to read this, and for being a part of our amazing journey so far.

There's lots more to come, and so much to look forward to. I can't wait to share more with you all.

Stay awesome,
-Savvy

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the article. Whilst you're here, why not join our official community server over on Discord, or check out DeGore's website? Cheers.

You have encountered a wild, test post!

This totally isn't a placeholder until we publish our first proper post...

There really isn't an article to view here.

I'm serious!

...why are you still here?

Oh well! Since you scrolled down this far, here's a (virtual) cookie just for you: 🍪

Also whilst you're at it, go check out my latest AI project, DeGore.

Check back soon!