Discord has been adopted by many NFT projects, DAOs and other Web3 ventures. One of the things that is often seen (at least in the more “helpful” Discords) are tips on how to stay safe from predatory behaviors. A common tactic for scammers is to operate via Discord’s direct messaging (DM) system. Many times, the blanket advice when entering a new server is to “turn off your DMs!” Fortunately/unfortunately, I’ve been using the Discord chat platform for over 6 years now and “turning off” my DMs is not really an option I’m willing to entertain in most servers. But there are a few things I do to make sure I don’t get rugged.
My default is NOT to turn off DMs, but often when joining a big server, there bots and people in there who aren’t looking to make real and lasting connections and are just looking for a quick buck and a place to shill. 2-3 “shill” DMs from a specific server is all it takes for me to turn it off.
But how do I know they are from a specific server? Let’s take this image of a bot called Giveaway Boat.
Scrolling to the very top of your message history with someone, (or somebot), you will see there are some icons and it tells you how many servers you share. The 3 icons you see are the 3 most recent servers you joined that that other account is also in. This can help identify which server you might need to turn off.
This especially comes in handy if you know you share servers with a particular person and someone creates a similar account pretending to be that person. If something seems fishy with a message, checking the mutual servers can be a clue as to what is going on.
To “turn off” DMs, you will need to go to the downward pointing arrow in the upper left of the screen, near the name of the server. Clicking that will provide you with a dropdown and you want to find the “Privacy Settings” option.
When clicked, there will be only one thing to choose, whether or not people in that server can send you direct messages. Green means yes, they can. Gray means no, they cannot.
With all the amazing integration potential that Discord has to offer, there do need to be some bots that are needed for interactions. Some of these include the above, Giveaway Boat, Collab.Land, POAP-Bot, Captcha.bot as well as others used for giveaways and human verification purposes. Bots to prevent other bots. etc.
There is a NOTES feature in Discord. On a computer, you can right click on an account and put in a note. This note is only visible by you. For some of the bots I will just type in a simple message into this note, such as “This is CollabLand. -RLPD” I include my initials so I know that I am the one that made that note. You can make this note anything you want, you could called each bot THE REAL SLIM SHADY if you so chose, but make it something that you will recognize as your entry.
In the first point, I mention “turning DMs off.” Here I’m specifically say “close” them. What’s the difference? Turning them “off” means that if we only share one server, and I’ve chosen the option that people from that server cannot message me, you will not be able to send me a message. “Closing” the DMs means that we can talk, have had conversations, but I’ve removed that conversation from my active list.
This does not mean that I have miles and miles of people in my DMs that I have to sort. Discord has a feature where you can “close” a DM. This does not delete it, but removes it from your active scroll list on the left. If you know a person’s handle, you can find the DM and read it again. However, do note that the person who sends a message can also delete it. If you are messaging a particularly information-conscious individual, you might go back to a conversation and find only your replies. BUT, this indicates that you did have previous interactions with them. Why is this useful?
In the case of some of the bots mentioned above, they are from trusted developers and many servers use them. If you have interacted with it before, you will have that history and can usually trust that it is safe to interact with again. Sometimes those bots can be hacked, so it is not always guaranteed to be safe.
Alternatively, as mentioned above, sometimes people will create fake accounts impersonating other people. If you have had a conversation with that person before and their picture and name pop up, but not the message history, that is a big flag that this message is from a fake account attempting a phishing scheme for money or to send you a malicious link or a host of other ways to get your info and digital valuables.