Discord’s search-engine encore has 63,000 servers in the wings—opt out before your post goes public

Discord will begin making conversations from its largest public servers visible on the web, with individual messages in eligible channels eligible to appear in search results from mid-December, the platform said Tuesday. The change applies to Discoverable Servers with at least 1,000 members that are listed in Discord’s public directory and do not require an invitation to join.

From Nov. 16, every Discoverable Server will have a web page that may include summaries of public channel discussions. Discord said the shift from message boards to its servers had left useful answers difficult 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.

The rollout has prompted privacy concerns, while other users have welcomed the search visibility. One user in Discord’s announcement thread called the change “very much necessary,” and another said moving communities from forums to Discord had made their discussions harder to find through search. Cointelegraph found nearly 800 servers tagged “cryptocurrency,” around 1,400 tagged “trading” and more than 700 tagged “finance” in Discord’s public directory. Discord said its platform has over 63,000 total discoverable servers.

Users have until the message-sharing rollout begins in mid-December to opt out before their posts become eligible to appear online. Discord said the feature will be disabled by default for users in Australia, the EU, the European Economic Area, the UK, Canada, Brazil and South Korea, while teen users will also be excluded. To opt out, users can go to User Settings > Data & Privacy and switch off “Show my message content from Discoverable channels on web pages,” which applies to every Discoverable Server they belong to.

Users can also disable the feature after launch, but it will only protect messages sent after the opt-out. Removing an eligible message requires deleting it from Discord, and the company warns that search engines may retain cached copies for some time. Server administrators can also prevent messages from individual channels from being shared.