Is it possible to opt-in to message indexing as opposed to display?
As I understand it, the user must opt-in to having their messages publicly displayed, but can only opt-out of having their messages indexed. Is there a way to add opt-in for indexing as well as display?
7 Replies
Currently it isn’t and it isn’t planned
The problem with having messaging indexing opt in is we’d have to refetch all of the data whenever someone changes their preferences which isn’t feasible with Discords API limits
As a few alternatives to opt in to indexing:
- Making a new channel with indexed in the name, I.e “indexed-questions”
- Making an announcement post after you add Answer Overflow, some like:
Hey
@everyone we’ve added a bot to index our content on the web, before it starts indexing you can disable it storing your messages with /manage-account, message indexing will start in two weeksI understand the reason for the current design choice
They make sense
👍 I’d love to be able to support the other way but unfortunately it just doesn’t quite work
Is this a limiting factor for you adding it to a community of yours? If so maybe we can brainstorm some alternative ideas and I can add them to the bot
It’s not explicitly limiting but a lot of our users are pretty privacy-conscious and I’d prefer to not collect their data without their consent if I didn’t have to.
Just to confirm: I assume that the data is appropriately anonymised if the user deletes their Discord account?
Yep, if you poke around on the website in a few places you’ll see “Deleted User” and it looks the same way Discord does where it’s Deleted User and then the message content
We also sync message deletions, edits, channel deletions, server deletions, etc - the goal is to keep parity with Discord
Sounds good
I had a bit of trouble spinning up a development environment earlier but I'm now doing something else so I'll have to come back to that
Feel free to send any bugs / questions my way - our onboarding / docs are a little bit rough at the moment - I’ve stopped doing feature development while I focus on improving those so it’ll get better 