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Discord Will Put Public Messages From Its 63,000 Discoverable Servers on the Web; One Data and Privacy Toggle Keeps Yours Off
Starting mid-December, public-channel messages from Discord's big Discoverable Servers can show up on Server Web Pages and in web search, and outside six regions every member is opted in unless they flip one switch.
The switch is called “Show my message content from Discoverable channels on web pages,” and it covers every Discoverable Server you’re in at once. Discord’s post lays out the default plainly: in those six regions it starts off, and “Everywhere else, it’s on unless members turn it off.”
Timing is the catch. Messages sent before mid-December aren’t included. Messages sent while your setting is on “stay up unless you delete them from Discord.” Turning it off later only covers what you post afterward, so the window to decide is now, before the first messages go live.
Discord is rolling this out in steps. Admin controls and the member setting arrived the day of the announcement. On November 16, “every Discoverable Server will have a Server Web Page,” and automated Channel Summaries of active conversations can start the same day; the post says “Usernames and avatars will not be shown in summaries.” Actual Channel Messages begin appearing in mid-December, gradually. Admins get their own off switch under Server Settings > Web Presence, but “If you don’t change anything, public channels stay on.”
A Discoverable Server is a specific thing: “the most public spaces on Discord,” in the company’s words, with at least 1,000 members, at least eight weeks old, and meeting activity and safety rules. There are “more than 63,000” of them. “Private servers, DMs, and GDMs are always private and not included in these changes.” Teen accounts can’t turn Channel Messages on until they’re adults. What nobody has seen yet is how the pages will look to Google, and how long it takes a December message to rank.
Expect two things to follow. First, a lot of answers that used to be trapped inside Discord will start showing up in search results, which is good news for anyone tired of “join our Discord” as the only documentation. Second, expect people to treat the big public channels more like a forum and less like a chat room, and to save the half-baked stuff for smaller servers. All of this comes from Discord’s own announcement; the open question is which of those 63,000 servers’ admins turn the whole thing off before November 16.