Discord is making a policy change that will make conversations from its largest public servers discoverable on search engines, including Google, raising privacy concerns among users whose conversations were previously limited to the platform.
The change applies to Discoverable servers — communities with at least 1,000 members listed in Discord’s public directory that do not require an invitation to join.
Starting November 16, every discoverable server will have a web page that can include summaries of public channel discussions. Starting in mid-December, individual messages posted in eligible channels may appear in web search, Discord. said Tuesday. Messages posted before the rollout will not be included, while usernames and avatars will be excluded from published messages.
Discord said that moving online communities from message boards to its servers made it harder to find useful responses. “This has led to valuable information being locked away in Discord conversations, outside of access to the wider internet. We want to fix this,” the company said.
There is action ready Criticism from users concerned about their communications reaching audiences outside their intended community, even if the servers are public in the first place.
Related: Starknet has introduced a wallet privacy feature for DeFi activity.
Others welcomed the change, saying it might make it easier to find useful answers. A user in relation to a Discord announcement Called It’s “very important”, while another said communities moving from forums to Discord made it harder to communicate through search.
The change may also affect cryptocurrency communities that use Discord for technical discussions, support and project announcements.
Cointelegraph found about 800 servers tagged “cryptocurrency,” about 1,400 tagged “trading” and more than 700 tagged “finance” in Discord’s public directory. Discord said it has more than 63,000 discoverable servers on its platform.
How to Opt Out
Users have until the start of the Message Sharing rollout in mid-December to opt out before their posts are eligible to appear online. The feature will be disabled by default for users in Australia, the European Union, the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil and South Korea, Discord said. Adolescent users will also be excluded.
To opt out, users should go to User Settings > Data & Privacy and turn off “Show my message content from discoverable channels on web pages.” The configuration covers every discoverable server to which the user belongs, according to of disagreement guidance.
Users can also disable the feature after launch, but it only protects messages sent after opting out. Users who want to remove an eligible message must delete it from Discord, and Discord warns that search engines may retain cached copies for a period of time.
Server administrators can also prevent messages from individual channels or entire servers from appearing in public web pages and search results via Server Settings > Web Presence.
They can separately disable discussion summaries, which are scheduled to begin in November.
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