How To Send A Message To Someone Who's Not Your Friend In ...

Safe Direct Messaging

Navigate to your User Settings and find the Privacy & Safety tab. There, you’ll find Discord’s comprehensive list of privacy features, meant to allow you to customize your privacy and security settings to keep yourself safe on Discord.

The first section in this tab is Safe Direct Messaging. This section allows you to adjust how safe you’d like your DMs to be, allowing you to have Discord’s automated systems scan your messages for explicit and inappropriate content and delete them if they contain bad content.

You have three options:

1. Keep Me Safe – This option will scan your direct messages from everyone, even your closest friends. This is the option we recommend that you enable if you won’t be sending or receiving any potentially explicit content.
2. My Friends Are Nice – This option will scan your direct messages from everyone unless they are on your friends’ list. This is useful if you want your friends to send you content that might be considered explicit or inappropriate in normal conversations.
3. I Live On The Edge – Enabling this option will completely turn off Discord’s scanning feature. This means that messages you receive won’t be scanned at all, putting you at risk of receiving potentially inappropriate or explicit messages.

Take Note of the ‘Allow direct messages from server members‘ option. If the recipient has that toggled off, our first option to message from within a server will not be successful.

Other Privacy And Safety Settings

Apart from Safe Direct Messaging, there are a number of other options in the Privacy & Safety panel that will allow you to fully customize your privacy and security settings. The most important one is probably Server Privacy Defaults, which is a simple but powerful privacy option.

Turning this option on (the default setting) will allow anyone from any of your servers to send you Direct Messages without being on your friends’ list. It will open up your DMs to anyone and everyone who shares a mutual server, which may be ok if you are only in small servers, but can get very dangerous very quickly if you’re in one or more public servers, exposing you to potential DM advertisements and spammers.

If you choose to toggle this option off, thus blocking people not on your Friends list from DMing you, you will be given the option to apply this setting to all servers you’re in. We recommend doing this, as you can right-click on each server you’d like to allow DMs from and manually override the setting for each of them, while still keeping you safe on the majority of your servers. This server by server customization makes this simple option an extremely powerful privacy tool.

The third and final Privacy feature is “Who Can Add You As A Friend.” As the name of the section suggests, these options allow you to customize who exactly is allowed to send you a Friend Request on Discord, whether it’s everyone, Friends of Friends, or people who you share a server with. These three options are all able to be toggled on or off:

1. Everyone – Turning this on allows anyone on Discord to send you a friend request.
2. Friends of Friends – Turning this on allows anyone who share mutual friends to send you a friend request.
3. Server Members – Turning this on allows anyone who shares a server with you to send you a friend request.

We generally recommend that you leave these settings at their defaults, because even if someone sends you a friend request, you have the option to decline it after screening it. However, if you’re the admin or moderator of a large server, or a famous figure on the internet, you may want to customize these settings to avoid receiving a deluge of random friend requests from server members or well-wishers.

Below are several miscellaneous options which deal with how Discord uses your data. Discord collects a large amount of data on how and where you use Discord, including your usage habits, your servers, what platforms you use Discord on, and more in order to improve and customize your Discord experience; if you don’t want Discord to collect and store your data, you can toggle options that allow you to prevent Discord from using your data for improvements or customization, or even request a copy of all the data they collect on you.

We generally recommend you keep these options on to keep your Discord experience the best it can be; however, if you’re someone who’s concerned about the collection of personal data, you have the option to disable these at the cost of less customization. Additionally, we recommend that you regularly request copies of your data and look through it to ensure that Discord’s not collecting any overly intrusive data on you.

How Do I Block Someone On Discord?

If someone has been sending you unsolicited messages on Discord, you can make use of the block feature to keep them from continuing to do so. After you block them, they won’t be able to send you messages or friend requests until you unblock them.

Here’s how you can block people:

1. In your DM list, right-click on the user you’d like to block and click the “Block” button.
2. Click the red “Block” button again to confirm that you’d like to block them.

After you block the user, you’ll no longer be able to see the messages they’re sending unless you choose to do so, nor will they be able to send you DMs or friend requests.

Find Your Voice with Discord

Discord is a fantastic chat platform to use if you are someone who plays games or just wants to find people to talk to online. It’s quickly becoming extremely popular as well, even in the non gaming community, for uses such as online communities, clubs, and more. But for all the good people and new friends you meet, there’ll always be a bad person or two, so it’s important to learn how to navigate Discord’s privacy settings to keep them from invading your privacy.