When you’ve got a lot of friends and conversations in the many reaches of Discord, it can be tricky to keep track of everything and @everyone. Did you read your latest mention? Or did you lose track of it in the dozens of tiny red notifications across your server list? Maybe you’ve finally hit an epiphany and feel like you actually don’t need to be notified of EVERYTHING at any time.
No matter if you’re looking to organize every notification better or are looking to serene silence so you can focus on your conversations, here are nine things you can do right now to make hanging out with friends on Discord even easier.
Text Formatting
Look at this announcement post:
There’s just way too much text. If we were logophobic, we’d be having a screaming fit right now.
But we’ve got a solution: there’s a bunch of options within Discord for bolding, italicizing, spoiler tagging, bullets for quick looks, and even for marking something as a quote to make things easier to understand for your friends.
You can quick bold by enclosing any desired text in double asterisks (**word**), or quick italicize with single asterisks (*word*).
Friend Request Management
Here’s a quick one: Go into your User Settings page, and then into “Friend Requests.” Here, you’ll find that there’s an easy way to decide whether or not you want “Everyone,” “Friends of Friends,” or “Server Members” to be able to send you friend requests.
Direct Linking to Calls, Channels, or Messages
Are you tired of trying to give people detailed directions to find a voice channel in a server, or refer to an important message?
There’s actually an option to right click on a call, channel, or specific message and copy the link to it. Once someone clicks that link, they’ll be taken right to the place in question and remove a whole lot of yelling and migraines in the process – guaranteed, or we’ll send you a free toothbrush*.
*We won’t send you a free toothbrush.
Inbox
Bet you didn’t know there was an Inbox in Discord! If you go to the top right corner of the app, you’ll notice a little envelope button – that’s the Inbox.
Here, you’ll be able to easily access all direct mentions of you in DMs, GDMs or servers, or mentions of roles that you have in any servers without having to hunt through all your notifications.
You’ll notice different tabs in your Inbox, such as the Mentions tab: this tab lets you filter your @mentions by removing “@everyone” or “@role” mentions if you’re specifically looking for times that your username has been directly mentioned.
If you ring the bell next to unread messages from a specific server, you can also access and manage your notification settings specifically for that server and its channels if you decide that you no longer want to be pinged by a certain channel or server for the next hour, the next day, or never again.
Easy Notification Clearing
This is sort of an extension of the previous feature, but it’s so big that we just thought we’d give it its own headliner. Let’s say you’ve done the unthinkable: you’ve been AFK on a week-long vacation to place your dermis on some shrubs, and you come back to a nightmare of 999+ notifications.
Well, there’s an easy solution: when you’re in your Inbox, if you go to the “Unread” tab, you’ll find a really nice button that lets you “Mark All as Unread.” Boom, 999+ notifs are gone.
You should probably still reply to some of them when you can, but… you can cross that bridge when it comes.
Custom Notification Settings
Heading over to User Settings > Notifications, you’ll find literally every option you could possibly imagine for customizing how you receive Discord notifications.
From straight up disabling the unread badge icon like a complete maniac to disabling push notifications to your phone while you’re on Discord on your computer, to literally telling Discord which specific types of mentions that it’s okay to sound off on with the iconic little sound.
Or, whether you even want to hear any sounds that play for things like disconnecting or joining calls, you’ll find every possible option that you can think of when it comes to making your notification experience as personalized and stress free as you want it to be.
Want to customize your notification settings for a specific server? Hover over the icon for the server you want to adjust, right-click on it, and select “Notification Settings” to manage options specifically for that server. You can even disable mobile push notifications for a server if it’s extremely active or gets a lot of ““““funny guys””””” spamming @here.
For example, let’s say you’re in a server called “Hydration Club” but really only care about the #coffee-drinkers channel because all my homies hate tea. There’s a way to customize your notifications in that server specifically for that by muting all channels except for that one.
You can add “override rules” in your notification settings for specific channels, letting you truly tailor your notification experience for every server that you’re in. It’s like your own little taste of divine power without any of the responsibility.
You can also turn off @role mentions specifically for that server, like if you’re assigned a role automatically when you join a server but you don’t want to be pinged about news specifically related to that role.
Server Folders
This is one that a lot of you probably already know about, but if you don’t… we’re so sorry, your server list must look terrifying.
If you just drag-and-drop any one of your servers on top of another server and hold it there for a second, you’ll have the option to group them together into a folder. And if you right-click on that folder and go to “Folder Settings,” you can even color code or rename that folder.
You can organize all your servers by most important, less important, and ones that you’ll join once and never return to again.
Fix Your Friend’s Audio in Voice
Ever been bothered in a voice chat when there’s one person with a barely-audible microphone and another who sounds like they’re ingesting their entire rig? If you hover over another user and right click on them, you can actually manually adjust that user’s volume — this will let you mix everyone to just the right levels, without having to ask one person to buy a new microphone and another if they can stop eating theirs.
If you’re having issues with your own microphone, you can go into User Settings and adjust Krisp noise suppression. Here, you’ll find options for Krisp vs standard noise suppression vs none, as well as an option for “Echo Cancellation.”
Feel free to turn everything on and off again, and eventually one of the permutations will do the trick.
Voice Channel Status
Want to quickly let others know what exactly is going on in a VC so that you don’t have the entire friend group messaging you asking if they’re missing out on something important? Well, you’ll notice under the VC name, there’s an option to “set channel status.”
You can use this to describe what’s going on in the VC so that you can either provide an accurate description to your friends, or an inaccurate one if you’re the practical joker of the group.
So there you have it, nine things that can make it easier to hang out with your friends on Discord right now. If you liked this and want to see more, let us know, because we crumble without constant validation.
If you made it this far in the blog without watching the supplementary video, first off: that is EXTREMELY impressive, and two: you seem like the type that learns through reading. Most of these features have their own support articles or blogs, so if you want to read even more, here’s a whooole bunch of resources learn more about everything we’ve covered today:
