Discord ban appeal bot
Ban someone and Appealy sends them the appeal form. If your staff accept it, the ban is lifted — the accept is the unban, not a note asking somebody to go and do it by hand.
How an appeal actually runs
- Someone is banned. Appealy sees Discord's ban event and starts the appeal itself — nobody has to remember to send a link.
- They get a DM with the reason and the appeal form, asked one question at a time rather than as a wall of fields.
- It lands in your normal review queue, beside applications, so there is no second place to check.
- Accepting lifts the ban. Denying sends the reason you wrote.
It is opinionated about appeals, on purpose
Appealy exists because a bot once told someone a decision was final and could not be appealed. The rules are shaped against becoming that, and they are enforced in code rather than promised in a policy page:
- Running out of attempts pauses appeals; it never ends them. The counter resets, and the message says when.
- A denial needs a real sentence. Twenty characters minimum, enforced by the API. If a ban cannot be explained in twenty characters, that is worth noticing before the denial goes out.
- An automated ban gets more attempts than a reviewed one. Five against three. A ban nobody looked at is the one most likely to be wrong.
Those apply to platform bans — the ones we issue. Your server sets its own policy and Appealy does not constrain it. The full reasoning is in the docs.
Setting it up
Three things, and the first is the one people miss:
- Turn on the Server Moderation intent in the Discord Developer Portal. Discord does not send the ban event until the portal agrees, and the code is complete either way — so without it you get an appeal system that is configured, enabled, and completely silent.
- Build an appeal form in the dashboard and set it to be delivered by direct message.
- Switch appeals on for the server and pick that form.
The dashboard warns about the two states that do nothing: appeals enabled with no form chosen, and a form chosen with the ban-time DM switched off. Neither raises an error, and both mean nobody can appeal — which you would otherwise discover months later, when nobody has.
What it costs
Nothing. Ban appeals are not a premium feature, because no feature is: paid plans raise throughput caps and nothing else. You can also run the whole thing on your own hardware under the AGPL-3.0 and pay for nothing at all.
That last part is the argument that matters most here. A false ban from a hosted bot is unappealable in a way a false ban from software you run yourself is not — they hold the token, you do not.
It is not only an appeal bot
The same review queue runs staff applications, and the same bot does tickets, verification, anti-raid and giveaways. If you are replacing several bots at once, that is the point.
Questions
Does accepting an appeal unban the user automatically?
Yes. Lifting the ban is what the accept does, not a reminder to somebody to do it later. Denying sends the reason your staff wrote.
Why does nothing happen when I ban someone?
Almost always the Server Moderation intent is off in the Discord Developer Portal. Discord will not send the ban event until you enable it, and there is no error anywhere to tell you — the appeal system just stays silent.
Can the appeal form be a button in a channel instead of a DM?
No, and Appealy refuses to save that combination. A banned member cannot see any channel in your server, so an appeal form behind a button in one is unreachable by exactly the people it is for.
Is the ban appeal feature free?
Yes. Every feature is on every tier — paid plans raise throughput caps only. You can also self-host the whole bot for free under the AGPL-3.0.
Can it appeal mutes or timeouts?
No. Discord has no API for appealing a timeout or a warning, so Appealy handles bans only. A bot claiming otherwise is tracking those punishments in its own database rather than in Discord.