Anti-Nuke vs Anti-Raid: What's the Difference?
Anti-Raid watches new joins. Anti-Nuke watches for a compromised actor already inside the server. Most servers genuinely need both.
Quick answer
Anti-Raid protects against a wave of new accounts joining to spam or disrupt a server. Anti-Nuke protects against a completely different threat: one actor already inside the server — often a compromised staff or integration account — making rapid, destructive changes like mass channel deletion or mass bans. They're configured on the same Airwavy dashboard page and share a response setting, but they watch for opposite kinds of threats.
What you'll learn
- Exactly what each feature watches for
- Why 'we have Anti-Raid' doesn't mean you're covered against a compromised account
- What Anti-Nuke's protected categories actually cover
- Why exemption changes are restricted to the server owner specifically
- How to configure both without over-restricting normal admin activity
Two different threats, easy to conflate
Both problems can look similar from the outside — sudden chaos in a server — which is why it's easy to assume one protection covers both. But a raid is an external threat (new accounts arriving to cause harm), while a nuke is an internal one (an account with real access being used destructively). Protecting against one does nothing for the other.
What Discord gives you natively
Discord's own raid-protection toggle can temporarily restrict new members during an active raid — a blunt, manual, server-wide control. There's no native equivalent for a compromised-account nuke scenario beyond the Audit Log recording what happened after the fact.
How the two features actually differ
Both are configured on the same Anti-Raid dashboard page and share one response setting, but they watch entirely different signals.
Anti-Raid — watches new joins
Set a join threshold from 2 through 100 members within a 1- through 300-second window. Optional signals include young accounts, default avatars, bot accounts, and clusters of similar usernames.
Anti-Nuke — watches for destructive actions from an existing member or integration
Mass channel deletion, mass role deletion, mass role permission changes, mass bans, and webhook abuse are each independently toggleable with their own threshold. Every actor is covered by default — including admins and bot integrations — except exempted roles or accounts.
Shared response, separate triggers
Anti-Nuke reuses the same response setting Anti-Raid uses for a triggered category — there's no separate response choice per category, but the two features still trigger on completely different conditions.
Configure both together
- Open Anti-Raid in the dashboard — both features live on this one page.
- Set Anti-Raid's join threshold and observation window based on your server's normal traffic.
- Scroll to the destructive-action section and enable and threshold the Anti-Nuke categories relevant to you — mass deletion, mass bans, and webhook abuse are good starting points.
- Choose your shared response (alert-only, quarantine, kick, or ban) and start conservatively.
- Confirm any exemption roles are set correctly — remember, only the server owner can add exemptions or disable protection.
Common mistakes
- Assuming Anti-Raid alone protects against a compromised staff account — it doesn't; that's Anti-Nuke's job specifically.
- Exempting too many roles from Anti-Nuke, which recreates the exact blind spot the feature exists to close.
- Setting destructive-action thresholds so low that normal bulk admin work (a planned channel reorganization) trips protection.
- Forgetting that neither feature protects the owner's own account — that's still on Discord's own 2FA and trusted-device security.
Troubleshooting
A legitimate bulk change triggered Anti-Nuke
Raise the relevant category's threshold, or add the specific integration or role as an exemption if it needs to make bulk changes regularly — only the server owner can do this.
I can't find where to add an exemption
Exemption changes are restricted to the server owner specifically, since either adding one or disabling protection can widen the surface a compromised account could exploit.
How do I recover after an incident?
Rollback support restores the relevant protection state after staff resolve an incident, so a temporary defensive setting doesn't stay clamped down longer than necessary.
Related guides
How to Prevent Discord Raids
What a Discord raid looks like, what's protected for free, and how to configure Airwavy's Anti-Raid thresholds, detection signals, and incident workflow.
Read guideDiscord Server Security Checklist
A practical checklist covering owner-account security, role hierarchy, verification, anti-raid, and anti-nuke — the gaps most servers miss.
Read guide