More Safer

Update April 27, 2017 11:48 AM: To avoid confusion, all Terms of Service and Privacy Policy links now take you to the revised version. Previously, they linked to our old version (which, at the top, pointed you to the new one). To view the old Terms of Service, click here. To view the old Privacy Policy, click here.

Update 6/14/17 5:52pm PDT: After rolling out our report button feature to a small subset of players, we noticed some flaws with the feature design. The report button has been rolled back and is on indefinite hold while we figure out how to best implement it. We’ve removed content concerning the report button from this article. Furthermore, we’ve added clarification to the Community Guidelines.

Previously, in March, we announced a round of safety improvements as part of our quest to keep Discord a safe place to play games with your friends.

A long long roughly two years ago, in May 2015, Discord began as a way for us to all play games together, better. And safer. Turns out, a lot of other people found it useful too. As Discord grew, large communities started to adopt Discord as a home. It was simultaneously surprising and amazing to see groups like /r/LeagueOfLegends create servers so people could talk together about something they love. Fast forward to today, and Discord is now over 25m users strong. Unfortunately, with all this growth and popularity, Discord has also seen some baddies show up and mess with the fun we’re having.

As a continuation of this effort, we’re launching a new NSFW channel feature. Secondly, we’ve also updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy for better clarity. Lasterino, we’ve developed a set of Community Guidelines to clearly state what sort of content and behavior is and isn’t acceptable in Discord.

Our philosophy is to empower each of you with tools to curate your own safety level on Discord. If you don’t wanna stumble across inappropriate content, you shouldn’t. The changes below help achieve this goal as well as add clarity to what content we do find objectionable.

#nsfw-channel

Instead of ham-fisting all NSFW content into the trash, server admins can now set any channel as NSFW in channel settings (which prefixes that channel). #dirtymemes becomes #nsfw-dirtymemes.

Channels that intend to share NSFW content must be marked. This gives people the choice to opt-out ahead of time from seeing content that their boss would be upset about.

Community Guidelines

In order to set a standard of safety for each and every Discord user, we’ve developed a set of Community Guidelines. These guidelines state what kind of behavior and content is acceptable in Discord servers (and in turn, how we will respond to reported content). Consider it the law of the land — when a baddie comes in trying to bring badness, we can defer to the law and deliver justice.

Similarly, when someone sends us a report, the action we take is mostly determined by the Community Guidelines. In certain no-tolerance cases, this results in an account deletion and removal of reported content (sharing illegal content, for example). In less severe instances, accounts will be warned before receiving any punishment (which may include a temporary account suspension).

In non-legally-binding summary, don’t be an ass. Easy, right? :)

Terms of Service

We also had some housekeeping to do to make sure our Terms of Service is up to date (like including some language for Discord Nitro, which didn’t exist previously).

Specifically, we now reference the Community Guidelines in our Terms of Service. Language has been added around payment (as mentioned above, due to Nitro).

And… that’s pretty much it. Our Privacy Policy got altered a little bit more than these terms, so let’s dig into that.

Privacy Policy

Much like our Terms of Service, our Privacy Policy underwent some housekeeping. The following is a non-legally-binding summary of the changes, mostly:

First, we added a specific note about Transient Voice Data (stuff we need to transmit data, not literal audio content) and how we use it to run our service.

We added a section on Cookies — again, for how we use them to run our service as well as instructions about how to turn them off (in some cases) and how to bake the finest chocolate chip cookies ever. Oh wait, the lawyers made us remove that last bit :(

The Advertisement section is added. Calm down it’s not what you think DEEP BREATH. Specifically, this section states that we do not run ads in Discord. However, it details that we do run ads FOR Discord on other services. Doing this requires some data but if you’d like you can opt out through programs listed in the policy.

A section was added about developers using our SDK and API. It specifies that they are only allowed to use their end user’s information to provide functionality within their applications or service.

Finally, you gotta be 13 to use Discord. Sorry tweens.

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If you’d like to sink your teeth into the full text, check out the updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

As always, we love your feedback and your thoughts on what we’re building, especially on a topic as sensitive as this. Please hit us on twitter or [email protected] with what you think.

We hope you continue to stay safe on the internet.

Discord Security Team (and Safety Jim).