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Comment by SeanDav | Hacker News Reader

I was a huge Discord fan, but now stopped using it for several reasons.

- I can't mute some channels completely. I have raised bug reports, tried all the various options, researched everything I could find in Google about this issue. Bottom line is that "mute" is taken by Discord to be "only mute, unless I think you need to hear this", with no way to fully mute a channel.

- I only use Discord in browser and it now has a complete and very distracting screen refresh every few seconds.

- It is a memory pig in browser and my browser seems to become unstable after a short time, while running Discord in one of the tabs.

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I'm not a fan of Discord but I think you're mistaken.

Right click on the channel icon and go to 'Notification Settings' rather than clicking on 'Server Mute'. From there you can choose whether a mention (inc./ex. @everyone/@here) counts and whether mobile notifications are enabled.

As for the client you may want to try Ripcord[0]. It uses less memory though I'm not sure you can mute people the same way. While I don't think it's ever enforced, technically using other clients is against the Discord ToS.

Either way there are plenty of reasons not to use Discord if you can.

[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

Thanks for the ripcord suggestion!

As far as server/channel mute - believe me, I have tried every option, including your suggestions. It works for most servers but I have 2 that I can't mute no matter what I try.

There's also an issue that there doesn't seem to be any way to mute @ mentions of roles you're assigned to. So if a server admin assigns you to a role and then mentions that role you'll get a notification even if server mute is on and suppress @everyone and @here is on.

I wonder if this is the reason I am still getting notifications on 2 servers. It sounds plausible, as they are game related servers, so quite possible I was assigned a role. I don't recall investigating this, although it is several months ago since I last tried solving mute issue.

This does not solve my mute issue, but great to know that this might be the cause! Thanks for this.

Yeah. You can mute @everyone and @username, but you cannot mute @role. It's really irritating in lots of gaming servers where they assign roles by game rank or something similar.

Isn't using a 3rd party client like that against the ToS and could get you banned?

The question is: is it detectable and do the devs care?

There is no way to mute "Role Pings" on Discord currently. You can mute @here/@everyone/@your name, but if you are assigned a role and that is pinged, it goes through.

That is one of my main gripes with Discord, in addition to:

1. Uploading photos/videos through the mobile app stops if you lock your phone or background the app. No other modern app exhibits this behavior.

2. Blocking users shows a large "BLOCKED" message, with no option to truly block them.

I have channels full of “1 blocked message” messages, thanks to people using stupid pointless chat bots. That is one feature I wish they could implement differently (the idea being that you can click the “blocked message” message to see the content of the blocked message)

I have EVERYTHING notification-wise turned off. I still get @everyone message pings on desktop client in channels I have explicitly muted and turned off notifications for.

I've never used the browser tab but the desktop client you can server mute where you also have to select "suppress @everyone and @here" if you want a true mute besides @yourname

The desktop client had issues with FPS drop in games. You can disable Hardware Acceleration in the Appearance section and your FPS returns to normal. I guess you'd have to find the browser setting, maybe you can do it per tab?

I'm in about 20+ channels and memory on windows is 135MB

The issue with mute is that if you're assigned a roll and the role is @'d you're still notified. There's no way to suppress it. Combine that with servers where you need a role to access channels and you end up with unmutable notifications from a role you can't opt-out of.

My Discord is sitting at about half a gig and I'm in 12 or so servers.

Hah wow, mine actually went down to 105 when I just checked.

I did some brief testing and it looks like the usage is depending on your servers activity. If people are posting lots of gifs the memory goes up. I got up to 300 going to some of the communities I just follow, rather than actively participate in daily. When I went back to my "main server" where my close friends are (we dont gif much) it slowly droppped back down to ~110. I guess eventually once it releases the in memory fluff it will drop back down.

Does doing this help your memory usage? https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/206342858--...

I'll be honest and say I've never used roles so I'm sure you are right. That is unfortunate

I'm not a fanboy, but at least for me Discord in FireFox seems very well behaved.

It's been open in a tab for a week, on a fairly high-volume server (dozens of channels, thousands of users) and FireFox reports (about:memory) 150MB usage for that tab.

Your experience seems to mirror my Slack experience though, I have to kill that tab about every other day due to live leaks.

Why is it everyone outside of programmers (and even then) always picks chat services with the worst client software available?

IRC had issues but at least the clients were decent.

Well, the alternative at the time was using Skype.

Programmers and non-programmers have very different ideas of what is "decent". Examples of things non-programmers want in a group chat app:

- persistent chat history

- mobile client

- a sane registration / nickname reservation method

Perhaps requests like those don't match your own priorities, but I don't think they're wrong.

> - persistent chat history

That's kind of misleading. "Server-side chat history" is more accurate.

IRC logs are more persistent. It's possible to go back and check them at any time. If I've read the messages, I know they've been logged, and I know they'll still be there.

Discord history, on the other hand, can be deleted from the servers at any time. Often when you go back to double check something that was written previously, it's not there any more.

Only if you run a bouncer or IRC client 24/7, which means you either pay for it or some device in your house will be running all the team. Not great for the average user.

Most channels have a bot running that logs it. If you really care to read through every message you can go read the log.

Discord has a wonderful client in my experience.

Sure people will rush to say the IRC clients of old opened in .02 nanoseconds after you thought about checking your channels, but that's not useful compared to the fact Discord out of the box has more functionality than an IRC client could ever hope to provide, and looks pleasing to the eye while doing that.

You can still put a web client with persistent chat history in front of IRC. TheLounge is one example [1] [2] and Convos is another. [3] [4]

[1] - https://thelounge.chat/

[2] - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

[3] - https://convos.by/

[4] - https://github.com/Nordaaker/convos

Setting those up isn't quite trivial for the non-programmer user and they have problems with some IRC servers (it's almost impossible to connect to EFnet via thelounge in my experience and convos had a variety of problems).

Agreed. On the upside, you need one technical friend that can set it up for many friends to use. For EFnet and several other networks, you need to get permission from NetOps/NetAdmins or an individual server operator if you don't need the fail-over resilience.

These types of arguments tickle me. Why isn't instagram just a shiny web frontend to a newsgroup?

I am not arguing, just providing alternate options. They are not for everyone.

FWIW, there are also shiny front-ends to NNTP. That would actually be a great way to have a threaded messaging system and attachments.

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