Discord.io

» see discord.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Discord hands every server an invite code made of random characters. Discord.io sold you a readable one instead. You got discord.io/yourservername, a link you could print on a poster or say out loud, and the service quietly redirected it to the real invite underneath.

It was not Discord. The footer said so, the way every third-party Discord service has had to say so since 2015, and the two shared nothing except the name and the thing the links pointed at. Alongside the links there was a searchable directory of public servers and a premium tier that paid for it.

The first archived capture of discord.io is from 25 November 2015, six months after Discord itself launched. By 2018 the site had dropped its own password system and logged everyone in through their Discord account instead, a detail that mattered enormously five years later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four minutes ~

The notice that replaced the site carried a timeline in CET. A preview of the user database went up on BreachForums at 00:51 on 14 August 2023; the operators were told about it at 16:30 and confirmed it was genuine six minutes after that. At 16:40 they began shutting down every Discord.io service. Ten minutes separate the first of those entries from the last.

~ what was in the file ~

The notice itemized the breach in two columns. The harmless one held internal user IDs, avatar details, account status flags, coin balances and minigame streaks, registration dates and payment dates. The sensitive one held usernames, Discord IDs, email addresses, billing addresses for the small group who had paid before the site moved to Stripe, and salted and hashed passwords for the smaller group still carrying logins from before 2018.

Payment details were not in it; those sat with Stripe and PayPal. What made the email addresses matter was the Discord ID printed next to them. A Discord ID is visible to anyone who shares a server with you, so the two together link a public handle to a personal inbox.

~ the foreseeable future ~

The wording was careful. Operations were stopping for the foreseeable future and premium subscriptions were canceled. A complete rewrite of the site's code was named as the thing that had to happen before any restart. The apex kept serving that notice until 31 August 2023. The Internet Archive has nothing after it, and the name itself went out of DNS some time later.

~ the servers it left behind ~

One thing the operators did on the way out deserves recording. They published the list of servers that had been public in the directory, so anyone trying to find a community again had somewhere to start, with a warning attached that most of those links were probably stale or dead by then.

Every server that had put discord.io/something on a banner or in a video description lost that address on a Monday afternoon, with no notice and no way to forward it. DiscordList.me, a directory of the same species run by a different unaffiliated team, had closed four days earlier on 10 August behind a goodbye letter that never explained itself. I was not running a Discord server in 2023 and did not register either departure. The people who did were the ones holding a link they had spent years telling other people to type.

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