Discord

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Discord
Free Voice and Text Chat for Gamers
Free Voice and Text Chat for Gamers
URL https://discord.com/
Status Online!
Archiving status Special case
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #discard (on hackint)

Discord is basically modern day IRC, except it's centralized. It was introduced on 2015-05-13 by the today-eponymous company, Discord Inc. The Discord server and clients are proprietary, the use of Discord is free with paid bonuses.

Discord enables users to create servers (called guilds internally), which further divide into text and voice channels. Those may have different access permissions depending on roles given to users on the server. To note, unlike IRC, Discord keeps unlimited logs of text channels. Anybody who joins a Discord server has access to full server history (except for channels with the seldom used "Read Message History" denial). Access to a Discord server is granted through invites in the forms of an URL, which may be unlimited until disabled or automatically expire.

Discord's status is essentially deep web, as Discord servers are unable to be indexed by conventional search engines and archival tools, even if invites are posted publicly. However, as it keeps history and has a well documented API, it proves possible for users, particularly admins, to create comprehensive archives of servers they have access to.

Should Discord server archives be posted publicly? This is a question worth pondering on. On IRC the implicit agreement is that you don't publish logs, but the privacy story is different on Discord, where everybody who joins gains access to years of logs. Given that closed services like Discord and Telegram are on the road to displace traditional services like message boards, there is culture worth saving. Archival and noindex publication could be appropriate. Note that Discord explicitly forbids collecting and disclosing end user data in their Developer Terms of Service (point 2.4 End User Data). See also our attitude to Robots.txt. Make your call.

Self-archival

Software for archiving Discord servers include:

Active

Software Full No admin perms Incremental GUI Available Archive format Frontend for humans Platform Source code licence
DiscordChatExporter Yes Yes No Yes .txt, .html, .csv, .json Yes (HTML/txt output, also available frontend for JSON output) C# GPLv3
Discord History Tracker Yes Yes Yes Yes SQL database Yes C# MIT
discard2 Downloads whatever the browser does; the links are also saved so you can extract the URLs if need be Yes ? No Mitmdump, Wireshark ? TypeScript with Headless Chrome MIT
Xenon
A Discord bot intended for server admins to back up servers
? No ? ? ? ? Web Service ?
Discord Backup ? Yes ? No ? ? NodeJS MIT
pullcord
Created by ArchiveTeam user moufu.
Yes Yes Yes No .tsv No Go Unlicense
DiscordChatExporterPy
Python plugin for your discord.py bot, allowing you to export a discord channels history within a guild.
? Yes ? ? .html Yes Python GPLv3
Discordless
mitmproxy addon to record and parse Discord traffic
Yes Yes Yes No .html, .json Yes Python GPLv3

A URL extractor for some of these archival tools is available here.

Please note that Discord's Developer Policy forbids you from scraping or even just disclosing user data without their consent. Additionally, using "self-bots" (using a user token in automated scripts) is also prohibited, and only the server administrator can add a bot user to the server. Using these tools with your account may get your account banned. Use at your own risk!

"Make your Discord guild public and searchable" services

  • Search-Cord Archive single channels for search-cord.com search engine by inviting their bot.
  • Answer Overflow is an open source project to bring discord channels to your favorite search engine by inviting their bot.

Abandoned

  • Zucc is a Discord bot that dumps messages and other data from a guild/server
  • discard was a high-fidelity Discord bot client that was compatible with both user and bot tokens.

Discord server aggregators

Dictionaries

Stat bots

Notes

Instant messengers
'80s

talkIRC

'90s

ICQAIMYahoo! MessengerMSN MessengerJabber/XMPPQQ

'00s

SkypeGoogle TalkFacebook MessengerWhatsApp

'10s

KikViberSnapchatLINETelegramSlackGitter
KeybaseSignalMusical.ly/TikTokMatrixDiscordInstagram