Why Is AutoMod Rainbow?

On occasion, folks will enquire as to why AutoMod has a rainbow visage. They’ll question if AutoMod is gay, or why it is gay, which is frankly quite a curious thing to ask of an inanimate collection of code.

The story of AutoMod’s rainbowosity started several years ago. AutoMod first released in October 2021, and from the beginning its palette was a dark grey with a red accent colour. It was pleasant, looked good, and fit with Stoat’s (then Revolt’s) design language. One year, for pride month, AutoMod got a rainbow touch-up. The red was replaced with a lovely rainbow-coloured set. When Pride Month came to its conclusion, the logo was just never changed back from the rainbow version to the one with the red accent.

The logo was still rainbow when I overhauled all of AutoMod’s brand assets and launched this website in late 2024, so I decided to keep it and ingrain the rainbow into the brand as a proper, permanent feature of its presentation. The bot had been rainbow long enough that it felt like part of its identity.

One reason I decided to keep the rainbow appearance is because of the positives of representation. I’ve had people from countries such as Russia, where LGBTQ+ rights are severely restricted, voice their appreciation for AutoMod’s rainbow from the simple perspective of it being a small but welcome amount of representation where ‘promotion’ or expression of LGBTQ+ identities is otherwise illegal.

The earliest adopters of Stoat were people who value privacy, have interests in technology, and are looking for community. In other words, queer folks and furries. It has always been a safe haven for such groups, and tools like AutoMod have helped ensure this by keeping communities safe from miscreants.

Stoat has always prided itself on moderation. Particularly the strengths of a capable team of human moderators. In the earliest days of the platform, AutoMod was one of the only ways to enforce moderation on a server level, with Stoat’s provided moderation capabilities being in their infancy, much like the rest of the platform.

The rainbow also triggers many a bigot. Evidently nothing scares hate-filled bigots quite like a small, unassuming rainbow at the corner of their screen which has no impact on a tool’s operation. AutoMod’s rainbow has proved a wonderful and very effective way to filter out undesirables from the community surrounding it without any required effort on my part. The rubbish takes itself out.

Beyond the LGBTQ+ representation, the other reason for the rainbow brand identity is that it is very much representative of the bot. AutoMod is a general-purpose moderation bot and attempts to cover the spectrum of capabilities that the descriptor ‘general purpose’ implies. A rainbow with the full spectrum of colours describes this nicely. AutoMod covers it all, from banning/kicking/muting/warning to filtering messages, to logging actions, to removing spam, and more.