Discord forever revolutionized the concept of instant messaging and group chats when it was created. You might have used AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, or the newer Skype a decade ago—two of which are no longer available, and the latter of which has suffered considerably due to Discord’s popularity.
We had never experienced what it was like to have a messaging service that saved our chat history in the cloud forever before Discord. You’ll need a third-party plugin to save running logs on AIM or MSN locally. Text logs on Skype are now only kept in the cloud for 30 days.
To some, retaining message history indefinitely is a wonderful thing. It’s a nightmare for others. In a blog post from January 2017, Discord explained how they’re able to keep billions of messages, and it doesn’t appear that this policy will change anytime soon. Users on Discord also have no ability to remove their DM history in bulk.
So, what if you’ve sent thousands of direct messages and decide you don’t want them to be archived indefinitely? There are a few options, but none of them is ideal.
Using Discord Hotkeys to Delete Discord DM History
The most natural approach to delete a Discord message is to click on it.
- Hovering over it will display the hamburger menu symbol on the right side.
by selecting the icon - clicking the Delete option.
- simply clicking the Delete button to confirm the deletion.
However, this necessitates the usage of the mouse on a regular basis, which significantly slows down the process. As a result, you should be aware of the keyboard commands that replicate this method.
The sequence is broken down as follows:
- Make a Discord DM.
- To choose your most recent message, press Up once.
- To activate the editor, press Up one more.
- To select all of the text in the field, press Ctrl + A.
- To erase the text, press Backspace.
- To confirm the edit, press Enter once again.
- To finalize deletion of the prompt, press Enter once again.
This may appear to be a time-consuming and stressful task at first, but if you get into a routine, deleting each message takes only a second. It takes a lot less concentration to click several buttons than it does to move your cursor to different parts of the screen.
Using AutoHotkey to Delete Discord DM History
Now that we’ve demonstrated that DMs may be erased without the use of a mouse, we can use a simple AutoHotkey script to automate the procedure.
We’ve covered AutoHotkey before, such as in our HelpDeskGeek post on five of the most helpful AutoHotkey scripts, and it’s completely free and takes less than a minute to set up. However, because AutoHotkey does not work on macOS, this option is only available to Windows users.
Ideally, your AutoHotkey script should include the following features:
- It has a toggle key to turn it on and off.
- The entire keyboard sequence, with breaks in between.
- A way to keep older messages loaded indefinitely
Here’s an example of a script I wrote:
F1::
Toggle := !Toggle
loop {
if not Toggle
break
if WinExist(“ahk_exe discord.exe”)
WinActivate
SendInput {Up}
Sleep 100
SendInput {Up}
Sleep 100
SendInput ^a
Sleep 100
SendInput {Backspace}
Sleep 100
SendInput {Enter}
Sleep 100
SendInput {Enter}
Sleep 100
SendInput {WheelUp}
Sleep 200
}
return
The F1 key is used in this script to enable or disable message deletion. To make this function, you must first be in an active DM window before turning on the script. The pauses (Sleep) between keypresses aim to prevent machines with limited processing capability from getting ahead of themselves and missing a key. If the script runs but behaves weirdly, try raising the value of each Sleep in 50-point increments.
However, there is a catch to this script: it will break if it reaches a Discord call message. Here’s what they appear to be:
When you get to one of these messages, you won’t be able to pick your prior messages by using the Up key. However, it’s likely that modifications to the script will allow for a workaround.
Using Bots to Delete Discord DM History
First and first, let us state that we will not be providing instructions on how to utilise a Discord bot to remove your DM history, but we will inform readers that it is feasible.
Discord has gone from forbidding the usage of self-bots to explicitly declaring it a violation of its terms in the last few years.
Using self-bots, however, puts your account at risk of deletion, thus we don’t recommend it. However, several users claim that employing self-bots for non-public, disruptive, or destructive objectives has never resulted in a Discord punishment. Make your choice at your own risk.
A self-bot is essentially a user account that uses a Discord API token to communicate. Discord now requires bots to be tracked and labelled via its Developer Portal. A self-bot gets around this by letting a regular user account to make API queries, allowing them to automate a variety of tasks. One of them is deleting messages.
A POST request that fires a Message Remove Bulk gateway event is presently supported by the Discord API, allowing bots to instantly delete all messages that are less than two weeks old. Messages from the past can be queued and erased separately (at a rate limit).
Discord appears to be content with retaining our messages indefinitely, so it’s up to us to figure out how to mass remove them and maintain our privacy. The three solutions listed above are all a little substandard, but they’re the best we have until Discord comes up with a solution.
