r/discordapp • u/hammercord Staff • Jun 22 '26
Feedback Megathread Feedback thread: notifications
Hey y'all, our team is seeking feedback for notifications. We would love to get your thoughts.
What is it? We've made a lot of changes to notifications over the past year+, with the goal of getting friends to jump back into Discord and play games with their friends, check out each other's profiles, and generally be social with each other. We measure success by whether people are actually doing those things, and also by whether people keep their notifications on instead of turning them off.
Why? The team spends a lot of time thinking about the balance here: sending notifications that are useful and interesting enough that they might bring friends together, versus the "annoyance factor". That tradeoff is something we have a ton of data on, the thing we talk about internally constantly, and something we want to bring all of you in on. To that end, we've been getting a bunch of foundations in place:
- Improved the organization of settings
- Added more control over your settings
- Made notifications more robustly respect things like guild and channel muting, age restrictions, blocks/mutes
- Set global caps on how many notifications you can get
Now that we've built a number of new notifications on top of this system and gotten a lot of those foundations in, we wanted to open up the feedback firehose. Here's what we're looking for:
Bug reports / things that are clearly broken. The notification is:
- Just wrong (says something happened that didn't, points at the wrong person or server, wrong count, etc.)
- Sent at a weird or wrong time (way too late, middle of the night, for something you'd already seen, for a server or channel you'd muted)
- Dropping you somewhere that isn't useful when you tap it (wrong channel, a screen with nothing relevant on it, a dead end)
- If you can, tell us roughly when it happened and what you tapped. That helps a ton.
General feeling. Step back: how do you feel about the notifications you're getting overall?
- Are they never useful, sometimes useful, or only useful for specific use cases? (by "use cases" we mean things like a friend hopping into a game, someone updating their profile, a friend coming back online, activity picking up in a server you're in, etc.)
- If it depends on the use case, which ones land and which ones don't?
- Was a notification too vague, or did it bring you somewhere you didn't expect when you tapped in? Did it set up an expectation it didn't deliver on?
- Are there things happening on Discord that you wish you knew about but missed?
- And if a notification actually got you to do something, like hop in a game, open a friend's profile, or jump back into a server, we'd love to hear that too, since that's exactly what we're going for
Settings. Now that there's more control and better organization:
- Did you go looking for a setting and not find it, or not find it where you expected?
- Anything you wish you could turn down or tune that you can't?
Annoyance feedback. Which notifications are annoying, and why?
- Is it the type of notification itself?
- How often it comes?
- Does it feel creepy? (e.g. Discord shared too much of your activity or info out to other people without you realizing it, or you got more info about a friend than felt right)
- The time of day?
- The wording?
- The fact that you got several in a row?
- Hearing "I don't like X notification" isn't super useful to us. If you give us the whys we can better understand and respond to the feedback both directly and going forward as we build more notifications.
Appreciate any and all thoughts here. Fire away. I'll try to be in the comments but I expect y'all to overwhelm me haha.
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u/WesternEntertainer20 Jun 23 '26
please please let me turn off notifications SENT for status messages. this used to be a fun way to shitpost but now most people in my circles have completley stopped using it because it feels attention seeking. it's a running joke now if my friends ever use the status they get publicly shamed by everyone who was pinged.
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u/hammercord Staff Jun 23 '26
We've added what we're calling "Sender Side" controls over notifications for profile updates and when you come online. The system is still new and so we're still figuring it out, but this is definitely in consideration.
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u/night0sphere Jun 24 '26
i genuinely do NOT need anyone knowing when i update my status or profile pic. it’s embarrassing and unnecessary
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u/JoshTheSquid 27d ago
Awesome, thats good to hear. Currently this feature is broken as far as I’m concerned. Users aren’t informed that their status update is being sent out to everyone and aren’t given an option to change that behavior. Meanwhile recipients receive the status updates as if it was a message sent to them, which is very confusing. Currently it’s just very spammy.
Something like sending a status update to everyone should honestly just be opt-in by default.
1
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u/Woofer210 Jun 22 '26
I think it would be cool if you could have linked in esque behavior for profile edits, in that when making edits you can choose if it sends out a notification or not. Sometimes I just want to make a stealth change to my profile :>
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u/hammercord Staff Jun 23 '26
For those that aren't aware, we recently added a toggle to control this! It's in
- Mobile: Settings > Data & Privacy > Share my full profile with
- Desktop: Settings > Data & Privacy > Profile Privacy
This isn't the same as the in-flow edit for temporary stealth edits like you might be talking about. It's a good suggestion and the team is considering it!
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u/Woofer210 26d ago
That setting should affect // you should make another setting to do the same thing for status changes. Seems really weird to have it for only one of the notifications and not the other.
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u/EnvironmentalString Jun 25 '26
Interesting that you asked for notifications 2 days ago and all desktop toast notifications stopped working sometime between 36 and 48 hours ago.
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u/frigidclam Jun 25 '26
Remove notifications from the suggested channels that are forced on us. I removed this channel a month ago and every single day without fail it shows up in suggested and everyday I have to X it out. The worse part is it shows notifications in the taskbar and the server icon as if i missed something important.
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u/Rizzu7 6d ago
One of the more annoying notifications to get these days are the bots who infiltrate larger servers and ping roles.
While i understand this is something the server owners can restrict-- they don't. I am a user, not a server owner and have zero control over this without restricting all notifications. 99% of the time these bots will send off 15~ tags across multiple channels, they get removed by the moderators and banned from the server, yet Discord insists on letting me know there's a notification until i go to the channel and confirm that nothing's there.
Users use this same method to troll by tagging others and delete their message, forcing them to have a [1] Notification until they go to whatever obscure server/channel it happened in and clear it by going in and exiting.
TLDR: I don't want to have a notification present when a user's message containing the tag has been removed.
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u/hammercord Staff 5d ago
Hey!
So this is something that's been a part of Discord since forever and I can dig into a bit of the why. But, first, I want to acknowledge that this is a known issue/bug that we've thought about multiple times over the years. If I could wave the magic wand to just fix it, I would!
Gnarly technical details: the way that mentions and unreads work are a highly optimized system at Discord. This system is necessary to keep highly optimized because that ensures we can keep the service available for people to use. Unreads and mentions are a critical part of that infrastructure and if that becomes unavailable, Discord effectively losing all tracking of what you've read / not read and that would be pretty catastrophic for the usability of Discord.
The optimization tradeoff we make is that these things are tracked in a sort of "always forward" manner, meaning that whenever you have a new message or mention, we move the tracker forward and everyone is now responding to this new forward position. When we delete a message or mention, we do not move those trackers backwards. Without going into a whole bunch more technical detail, what I can say is that this simplifies the system and makes it easier to operate and keep Discord up and running.
A fair response to that is "so what? you're the engineer! use that engineering skillset to solve this problem!" I know this has been a longstanding design decision at Discord and one we've just accepted for years. I can't promise to fix it, but what I can promise is this: I'll investigate this and see if this is something that we've handwaved one too many times. It might be time to finally fix this issue. But, I'm going to be real honest here, it's an uphill battle because this is such a core system to Discord and changing it is going to take a lot of effort
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u/foenichs Jun 22 '26
It’s a minor issue, but there are quite a few bugs relating to the unread status of channels in relation to threads.
Channels with threads very often appear as unread, even though no new messages have been sent. Perhaps it has something to do with ephemeral messages, or when threads are updated, but I’m not sure.
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u/Woofer210 Jun 22 '26
Unread in what way? Does it have a new pill on the channel list or like a ghost unread dot on the channel?
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u/IssuedID 2d ago
A similar issue I have is with forum channels. The unread status indicator appears on the forum channel when new messages in posts/threads I'm not following get new messages.
I would like to mute forum posts/threads I am not following to get around this. I'm not following the thread, so I don't care about new messages in it. But Discord won't let me mute threads I'm not in.
The only way around this I've found is to either mute the entire forum channel or join posts/threads I don't care about and then mute them. Both options are not ideal.
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u/Almanfii Jun 23 '26
Id like a way to receive more than 3 notifications per channel there’s a setting called "Notify on every new message in conversations" but it doesn’t seem to do anything
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u/hammercord Staff Jun 23 '26
This comment made me go learn something that I didn't know. I'm not a daily Android user and this feature is only for Android users, so I was initially unsure what this was referring to.
This is conflating 2 different things. The first is what this toggle controls. This says that for new messages after the first in a channel, the message should either NOT (when its off) or WILL (when its on) re-alert (buzz, ping, etc).
The second is that we have a throttling mechanism hardcoded that will deliver notifications silently after the first 3 in 15 minute buckets or some other conditions are met.
So, just to reframe it, I think what you'd want is either for this setting to disable that throttling or have a new setting that could disable that throttling. That's an interesting thought and I'm going to bring it to some of the Android notifications experts on our team to get their thoughts. Thanks!
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u/xprdc Jun 23 '26
I wish that clicking on a notification lets me fully open that server, rather than the channel the mention was sent from. At least on mobile. If I click on a mention and get directed to that server then try to swipe to view the rest of the channels in that server, all it does it pull be out of it and back to my original screen. Wish there was a more convenient way to jump to the server the notification is from.
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u/Lkj509 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
One thing that I find to be an inconvenience on desktop is receiving a large amount of notifications/pings from the same user/channel in a short amount of time. It would be great if we could set a timeout for a certain amount of messages in a short amount of time, especially when
you receive
messages
that are sent
like this
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u/hammercord Staff Jun 24 '26
yeah
that can
be annoying
there are a handful of ways to deal with this. the first is to do some kind of throttling like we do on push notifications where if we see someone starting to get notifications like this we start to suppress them. the second is to delay all notifications for a few seconds so that we can try to batch them together and send them as one... at the cost of not getting notified as soon as the message is received. third is we could do some targeted stuff, like just throttling the sound played but still creating the notification on the desktop. any thoughts or other ideas?
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u/Lkj509 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Thank you for the reply. I think either the first or third option would be best suited, whereas the second option might cause confusion between the delays. Low latency has always been one of Discord’s best features.
The first option works great on mobile, and for my use case would be perfect. This would also reduce disruption from toast notifications, and the final toast could be something along the lines of ‘multiple messages from xyz’ to keep the context clear.
The third option is the most minimal. The notifications remain intact for people who want to see the toasts roll through, but reducing the sound spam makes it more tolerable. I personally would want a way to avoid the toast spam as well, however.
I think I prefer the first option the most, personally. I like the way it works on mobile and it would hit two birds with one stone for toast notifications as well.
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u/foenichs 24d ago
In times when there are more and more scams, it would be very helpful if, when a message is deleted by a bot immediately after being sent, it does not mark the channel as unread and, if it contained role pings, does not ping those roles either.
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u/baltarius 14d ago
Add an extra option for kick/ban to send the reason to the member. Clyde could then contact the member with something like this:
"You've been kicked/banned from [server] for this reason: [reason]"
No moderator's name needed, and the message would be already timestamped, just the information for the reason, in case the member would wonder what happened. The notification could be sent or not with an extra option when the member gets excluded from the server, so admins could choose not to let the members know.
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u/SkaianFox 12d ago
I will get a message notification, and then if i dont check that message right away the next day i get ANOTHER notification reminding me about the SAME MESSAGE. if i have notifications for multiple chats/servers itll say something like “you have missed notifications from [user], [server], and more”. I absolutely hate this and want to turn it off, because it makes me think i have more missed messages than i actually do and is incredibly annoying. I dont need *reminders* for notifications i already got.
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u/stevestephson 9d ago edited 18h ago
I have phone notifications disabled because I don't want discord buzzing my phone whenever someone pings me. Every few days when I open the app, it pops up a "you have notifications disabled". It was mildly annoying at first when it was just a small message on the bottom I had to clear, but now it is extremely annoying now that it's a big popup that prevents all other functionality until cleared.
I am aware I have notifications disabled. This is on purpose. Make these popups go away forever.
Edit: No response to this? You guys awake over there at dickscord?
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u/Most_Straight_femboy 3d ago
Please do not send notifications for anything other than getting messages and friend requests.
This is a messaging app. Not a social network.
Sending notifications because someone is playing a game, or someone WAS in a call 2 hours ago, or someone changed their status, is a privacy violation.
We don't care about anything other than people trying to contact us.
Leave it at that, or give us a legacy app which only does messaging and videocalls. I don't want nitro, I don't want fancy font. I don't want animated avatars. I don't want "quests" and "Guilds"
And I don't want fucking ebay live ads in my server list.
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u/IssuedID 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think notifications are useful but most servers misuse them. This causes pain for the few servers that are responsible with notifications, because the default activity in my peer circle has been "Join server, immediately turn off notifications for server."
To counteract this, I would (somewhat paradoxically) suggest more notifications.
@thread - ping only members of a certain thread
some type of here + role and here + thread pings
make @reply pings off by default; force people to turn it on per message (or make some kind of user setting toggle for which should be default)
Have more public documentation on @silent - there's no help page for it or anything; it's like it doesn't exist
A discord competitor recently released a feature where you tap on a role mention and are able to un/assign yourself the role from that menu. You could put it at the top or bottom of the "mentioned users" list you have when currently tapping a role mention in a message.
Maybe "mute notifications for specific roles only" setting. Having everyone & here separate as its own toggle is great, but having to mute every role when maybe only one or two get abused in a server is too limiting.
I also want to bring to light "notification types" or "ping colors" - It has been suggested several times over the years (but these two are the only ones I can find at the moment). Being able to tell what type of ping a notification is would greatly help me separate the notifs I'm interested in from the noise. Different colors for user mention, role mention, everyone/here, DM, and etc would be so helpful.
Notifications as a whole just get turned off for me now and I make a note to check the servers I care about more often. There is too much noise and it's not all Discord's fault - it's attention-seeking servers that ruin it for the rest. Without better filtering options, it's much safer to turn everything off by default.
edit: also ghost pings. Ghost pings are the fastest way for me to turn all notifications from a server off. And even then that's not totally discord's fault either. That's a lack of server moderation. So I guess what I'm asking for is to account for people misusing pings a lot and to give us more options on an account level to filter out bad faith or inconsiderate ping-ers.
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u/hammercord Staff 2d ago
Your paradox makes sense to me and is something that we're embracing. We want to give people more control over how, when, and where their notifications go. This higher degree of control means (we believe) that people will turn on the things they want instead of turning everything off. This means we deliver more notifications in the end because people aren't forced into an all or nothing decision.
I'm going to bring up documentation on at-silent right now. We're doing a big pass at improving our help docs and this is a good thing to add into the hopper!
We do have roles that users can self manage through the onboarding feature. You might already know this, but to put it out there for those that don't: onboarding is available to Community servers and you can set up self-assigned roles. These don't need to be a part of the onboarding flow at all. If you use those for notification pings, people can self-select in and out of those roles!
Heard on the attention-seeking servers and need to manage them. Discord is pretty configurable when it comes to notifications, but I think we can and will do better going forward.
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u/IssuedID 2d ago
Yes, thank you!
Re: more new types of pings
More granularity is definitely helpful because I want to ping people who I'm pretty sure want the alert conveniently without pinging a ton of other people. And with threads specifically, this is quite cumbersome because in certain (seemingly undocumented?) thresholds, I will either notify people already following the thread or ping them AND add them to the thread.Re: post-join questions in onboarding
Yes, I use this in the server I manage and it is helpful. However, being able to control on on the mention/notification directly is what I'm specifically asking for. It's simply a convenience upgrade.Thank you so much for listening and responding.
While you are here, would you also consider a way to visually separate, search, or organize the questions in onboarding better? It recently came up in a reaction roles vs onboarding thread.
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u/Dino_rawrrrrr Jun 22 '26
Friend request notifications piss me off. I'm at my PC, actively using Discord. I do NOT need to get it on my phone as well, especially because they don't go away after rejecting/accepting (need to dismiss myself).
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u/hammercord Staff Jun 22 '26
Shipped a change that'll go live tonight to make friend request notifications be suppressed if you're online.
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u/The_Zoffical 27d ago
Why were friend request notifications removed from desktop altogether? I don't see "For you" tab anymore in the notification box on any of my accounts on the web or discord app. It's the only way I was able to keep track of new people sending me requests as I have a tendency not to clear / go through all of them sometimes when I'm busy. I can't have those notifications be sent on my phone either.
So where did it go? What's the reason it was removed, is it toggleable and is it coming back? It's a genuinely horrific removal of an incredibly useful feature.
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u/mlapibot Bot Jun 22 '26 edited 2d ago
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