Discord is a social media platform allowing users in various user-created groups, called servers, to chat with each other through text or voice chat and stream video of themselves or their screen, all in real time.
Text messages are stored on the server forever and aren’t automatically deleted no matter how old they are or currently relevant they are.
There are many reasons why you would want to delete the messages you’ve written on a Discord server, here’s just a few:
- You’ve changed and so messages you’ve sent in the past might not accurately reflect your current thoughts and beliefs. I believe that we all should have the right to be forgotten and being able to easily delete all your messages on a platform like Discord is a part of that.
- You don’t want any person on a server to be able to gather and search through all the text messages you’ve written and use that for their own benefit. It’s bad enough that Discord itself has access to all of this data (that us users of the “free” service willingly inject into it) and can do anything they want with it (including sell your data to the highest bidder) but handing this data over to any person or bot masquerading as a person who joins the server seems questionable.
By default, when creating a server, users can delete their own messages and most servers keep this default setting (which is good for us).
But, you can only delete messages one by one (three mouse clicks each). This is a problem if you’ve got thousands of messages you want to delete.
How to delete all your messages on a Discord server ¶
Thankfully, someone else has solved this problem for us.
If you want to delete all your messages on a particular Discord server, follow the steps here https://github.com/victornpb/deleteDiscordMessages and you’ll be golden.
There’s a few things to keep in mind here:
- Be wary of executing code you find online whether that’s through browser extensions or executable files you download off a torrent website. Executables you run can do anything they want to your computer. Like encrypt your data preventing you from accessing it (ransomware), installing a keylogger to steal your important passwords, install a crypto mining process on your PC, among other things. Would you give the keys to your home to anybody who asked for them? Probably not. As I write this, it seems unlikely that the code linked above would do anything like this but use it at your own risk and change your Discord password after you’ve made use of it to be safe.
- This tool is powerful. If you’re an admin of a Discord server (with permission to delete any message), this tool makes it easy to accidentally wipe out every single message on a server, including those written by others. So be careful!
- Even though you might be able to delete your own messages on a server under normal circumstances, you won’t be able to delete messages you’ve written in archived threads. To get around this you’ll need to unarchive each thread you want to delete messages from by sending a message in it. There’s no way to unarchive a thread without other users noticing and, maybe, getting annoyed about it. Ideally (I wish I would have done this but I didn’t know ahead of time that this would happen), think about warning people in advance with a message like “Hey I’m going to be unarchiving some threads for science, please ignore it, thank you for your patience kekw”.
And that’s pretty much it. Enjoy!
Let me know if you run into any problems following this process.
Follow these instructions at your own peril (I won’t be held liable for any consequences you might run into as a result of this, eg. being banned by Discord and/or power-hungry server admins, being sent to Hell for crimes against humanity, etc).
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