PSA: Sending Invites to Random People Breaks Discord’s Terms of Service

Ask any moderator of a large server, and they’ll tell you that easily one of the toughest things to track down, and one of the most rampant issues, is getting rid of users that advertise in Direct Messages. And possibly the worse part: a lot of these users don’t realize that doing this is breaking the terms of service.

Let’s break it down. First, if you haven’t read the terms of service, I’d highly suggest reading it here: https://discordapp.com/terms. Specifically, let’s look at a one line copied directly from the ToS:

You agree that your use of the Service will not include sending unsolicited marketing messages or broadcasts (i.e., spam).

Next, a few definitions:

Unsolicited

not asked for; given or done voluntarily.

Marketing

the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.

This means that if you send a message that promotes or advertises anything (yes, including a Discord server), and the other person didn’t ask for it, you’re breaking the Terms of Service. So, if you’re sending invites to random people (or servers for that matter) that haven’t asked for an invite, it’s breaking the Terms of Service.

If you see someone sending an unsolicited marketing message, it is highly encouraged that you submit a report to https://dis.gd/contact with the user’s ID and the ID of the message they sent. You can find these IDs by enabling Developer Mode in your appearance settings and then right clicking their username (for their user ID) and the message (for the message ID).

Finally, yes, this is a repost of my original reddit post, which can be found here.