Discord is a great way to interact through voice and text chat with your gaming pals for free, but there will occasionally be times when someone says something in the chat that violates the guidelines. Depending on the severity of the message, you may decide to report the user directly to Discord so disciplinary action can be taken. However, it’s not as simple as it may appear at first glance.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to report someone on Discord.
Further reading:
- How to make a Discord bot
- What is Discord?
- Discord rebrands as a chat app, distances itself from gaming
How to report users and servers on Discord
There are steps you need to take to successfully report someone who is harassing, spamming, threatening, or simply being abusive in chat. Sometimes, you might find an entire server is participating in harmful activity that violates community guidelines. Here’s what you can do to alert the moderators at Discord.
Step 1: Check if their message violates Discord’s guidelines
You don’t want to report someone unless their message violates Discord’s community guidelines. Activities and messages that are not tolerated on Discord include:
- Harassment
- Spam messages
- Violating IP rights
- Sharing child pornography
- Glorifying or promoting suicide and self-harm
- Distributing viruses
- Threatening another user
- Sharing images of gore or animal cruelty
If their message doesn’t fall into one of these categories, you likely shouldn’t report them directly to Discord. Instead, if possible, talk with the other members of the channel about their conduct. If you’re the owner or a moderator on the server, you can even kick them out and/or ban them yourself. You can also block or mute the user to avoid seeing their content while continuing to see what everyone else is saying in the server.
Please note that if the message is deleted after you send the report, disciplinary action can still be taken. However, there is no way to report a message that has already been deleted.
Step 2: Turn on developer mode and find the relevant ID codes
You can’t simply hit a “report” button on Discord, at least not on the desktop app. Instead, you have to find a few ID codes that Discord’s team can use to investigate the offending messages. In order to see the ID codes, click the Gear icon next to your name in the bottom-left corner of the screen and select the Appearance tab. Scroll down to the Advanced section of this page, and you’ll see a toggle labeled Developer Mode. Turn it on.
Next, you need to get three different ID codes. Go to the message in question and right-click directly on the user’s name. Select Copy ID, then paste the number you’ve copied somewhere and label it as “user ID” or something similar. Even if the user changes their username, the ID will remain the same.
Right-click on the message itself and once again select Copy ID. This time, you’ll get an ID number for the message and channel. Paste it and label it as “message ID” like you did the other one.
Lastly, go over to the icon for the server on the left side of your screen, and right-click on it. Select Copy ID a third time, and paste it with the two others. Label this one “server ID” or something similar.
Step 3: Send your report
Your last step will be to send your report to Discord via its Trust & Safety request center. Enter your email address, select your report type based on the option in the drop-down box that most closely applies to your situation, enter a subject, and finally describe the incident and provide all three ID codes in the Description box. You may also want to consider sending screenshots of the messages to Discord as well, which you can submit in the Attachments section of the form. Send the report along, and you’re ready to let Discord take care of the rest.
How to report on iOS
Reporting a Discord user on iOS is a much simpler process than doing it on a desktop. Maybe too simple.
All you have to do is hold down your finger on top of the message in question and hit the Report option. There’s no explanation needed, and you don’t have to submit any ID codes. Despite this, Discord’s support team says it does look at these reports like it does the other ones. You might not get a response, but you can also send an email to [email protected] to explain your situation if it needs to be taken care of quickly and you don’t have access to a computer. If you are going to send an email to Discord, you should add the message link. To obtain it, tap on Copy Message Link in the same menu above and paste it into your email to Discord.
How to clear a report from Discord
If you decide that the message you reported actually didn’t violate Discord guidelines, or if you accidentally reported someone on iOS, you can request that the Discord team clear the report by speaking directly to a support member. Head over to the Discord Twitter page and send a direct message explaining your situation. You’ll need to give your email address associated with the account along with your message, and Discord can then go into its queue of reports and clear the ones you sent.
Keep in mind that sending false reports also violates Discord’s terms of service, so you could end up facing punishment for doing so. Act quickly and Discord’s team will, too — it only took them a few minutes to respond, in our case, and the problem was resolved almost immediately.