Over the past decade, Discord has become the de facto community space for gaming, and there are plenty of huge servers you can find by scrolling through its public servers page. But from November 16, certain messages present on these immense servers will be visible from Google.
In a blog post, Discord outlined its intention to publish “server web pages” for each server discoverable on Discord by default. These are tailor-made web pages that preview a server’s content before forcing users to click the Join button. There are several of these pages online already, usually for huge online games like Rust or Dead by Daylight. These pages will be discoverable on Google, and will display a summary of current discussions on the server.
But while those server web pages will go live next month, another update will be available in December that will allow answers to questions to appear in Google Search. According to the blog post, “Answers to questions sent by your members on public channels can be found in a web search, in their own words. Server administrators decide which channels participate, and server members can choose whether their own posts appear. Usernames and avatars will not be displayed alongside these posts.”
It’s important to note that only large, discoverable servers will be affected by these changes, meaning your World of Warcraft guild or group of friends will likely not be affected in any way. Administrators of discoverable servers can disable their servers or even individual channels by going to Server Settings, then Web Presence, and choosing the channels you want to see. But if you don’t change anything, the setting will be enabled by default on public channels.
If you are just a user on one of these huge servers and you don’t want your posts to be visible on Google, you can also disable your own posts. Simply go to User Settings, then Data & Privacy and turn off “Show my message contents from discoverable strings on web pages”.
Discord introduces this feature to help people find answers to questions. If you’ve searched for anything on Google in the last couple of years, you’ve probably noticed that many question search results will take you to Reddit or another similar discussion forum. It looks like Discord wants a piece of this pie.
According to the blog, “Before Discord’s launch, chat rooms were common, ranging from community forums to official forums run by game studios. These chat rooms excelled at hosting long, structured conversations about helping people, coming up with theories, and more. While they still exist today, many migrated to Discord servers. This led to valuable information being locked in Discord conversations, inaccessible to the wider Internet. We want to solve this problem.”
You’ll likely be able to find some useful information when these changes are implemented in December, but there are also privacy concerns. So if you don’t want your posts on large discoverable servers to be seen by everyone, make sure to turn off the feature today, before all changes go live. So far, these changes will be exclusive to large public servers with more than 1,000 members, and we hope to keep it that way.
Gn tech
