Discord Search Change Could Put Crypto Community Chats on Google

TLDR

• Discord will make messages from large public “Discoverable Servers” searchable on Google and other search engines.
• Server web pages with chat summaries start Nov. 16, and individual messages may appear in search from mid-December.
• Usernames, avatars and messages sent before the rollout will not be published.
• Nearly 800 servers tagged “cryptocurrency” and about 1,400 tagged “trading” are listed in Discord’s public directory.
• Users can opt out in User Settings > Data & Privacy before the mid-December rollout.

Discord is changing how people can find conversations from its largest public servers. Messages from these communities will soon be searchable on Google and other search engines.

The company announced the policy change on Tuesday. It applies to what Discord calls Discoverable Servers.

These are communities with at least 1,000 members that are listed in Discord’s public directory. They do not require an invitation to join.

What Is Changing and When

Starting Nov. 16, every Discoverable Server will get its own web page. These pages may include summaries of discussions from public channels.

From mid-December, individual messages posted in eligible channels may also appear in web search results. Discord said there are more than 63,000 discoverable servers on its platform.

Messages posted before the rollout will not be included. Usernames and avatars will also be left out of published messages.

Discord said the move of online communities from message boards to its servers had made useful answers harder to find. “This has led to valuable information being locked in Discord conversations, inaccessible to the wider internet. We want to fix this,” the company said.

Some users have criticized the change. They worry their conversations will reach people outside the community they meant to talk to, even though the servers are already public.

Others support it. One user in Discord’s announcement thread on Reddit called it “very much necessary.” Another said moving from forums to Discord had made discussions harder to find through search.

The update could also affect crypto communities. Many crypto projects use Discord for technical talks, user support and announcements.

Cointelegraph found nearly 800 servers tagged “cryptocurrency” in Discord’s public directory. It also found around 1,400 tagged “trading” and more than 700 tagged “finance.”

How to Opt Out

Users can turn off the feature by going to User Settings, then Data & Privacy. From there, they can switch off “Show my message content from Discoverable channels on web pages.”

This one setting covers every Discoverable Server a user belongs to. Users have until the mid-December message rollout to opt out before their posts become eligible to appear online.

The feature will be off by default for users in Australia, the EU, the European Economic Area, the UK, Canada, Brazil and South Korea. Teen users will also be excluded.

Users can still opt out after launch. However, this only protects messages sent after the setting is changed.

To remove an eligible message that is already public, users must delete it from Discord. The company warned that search engines may keep cached copies for some time.

Server administrators also have controls. They can block individual channels or entire servers from public web pages and search results through Server Settings, then Web Presence.

Admins can separately turn off discussion summaries. Those summaries are set to begin rolling out in November, ahead of the mid-December launch of searchable individual messages.

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