Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active.
Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called “Searchcord” based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories.
Seriously. It’s beyond painful when some open source project only uses Discord for communication. You have to hope that you post your question at a time when the right people are online, and that there’s not a more interesting conversation going on, otherwise it just gets lost. Index that whole dataset.
Given some similar issues, why is it some projects still use IRC then?
For projects I am involved with all irc chats are archived and searchable. There is nothing private, no registration needed and searchable.
Quite a bit different.
That would be equally annoying. Probably a better signal to noise ratio on IRC though; Discord descends into memes almost instantly.
Because IRC is awesome, always has been
I’ve always wanted to contribute to The Cutting Room Floor wiki but they hide registration behind a Discord server bot that will give the registration code.