Discord had been a huge chat software for various communities including gaming communities. It could be a clan community, server community, Esports, guilds or just your friends. This time, Discord admins had put the foot down for a huge FFXIV community and nulled their Partnership.

Partnerships

Discord had stated that they want to support communities that supported them as stated on their site, “Really, we look for growing communities and content creators that show an authentic enthusiasm for Discord (which means you’re already using Discord for your community). We want to support communities that support us. Acceptance into the program is extremely qualitative and will vary from one candidate to the next.”

This obviously comes with certain terms and conditions that the chat software maintains to ensure the integrity of the brand. That includes organised harassment, pornography that depicts minors (some other names include lolicon or shotacon) and distributing malware like viruses or worms.

These partners of Discord are expected to uphold these rules as they represent the platform as they state, “Do keep in mind that being a Discord partner means exhibiting the best behavior, as well as always upholding our community guidelines.”

So what went wrong for FFXIV server?

The server used to have the Discord Partnership until the owner of the server got an email to clean up their channels (for example racial slurs or pornographic content) in 48 hours or the server will face deletion.

After the owner and Discord exchanged a few emails to discuss the issue, Discord finalised their decision. It ended up with the server permanently losing their partnership after being cited for a number of issues such as racial slurs and a huge amount of ‘harassment’. This was even after the owner complied to clean up the issues presented by Discord.

As the owner stated in this Reddit thread, that there were a number of issues such as policy being changed without their notice. With all that is said and done, after further investigation by Discord, they decided that they will revoke the status.

Clarity on Discord ToS

The main thing to note here is the clarity of Discord’s Terms of Service. The user b1naryth1ef is one of the moderators for Discord’s subreddit and here is what was stated, “NSFW content (such as pornography) is not allowed in partnered servers. When we introduced NSFW channels a while back this was made clear to all our existing partners (since our partner policy previous to this feature was not clear).”

Basically, NSFW is not an allowance for partners of Discord to display pornography of any kind but rather for things like spoilers or very mature topics (e.g. Crime cases). It is on Discord’s failure to be clear on the subject but their ‘change’ in policy was made to be clearer on the subject itself.

So what is your view on how partnerships ‘changed’ for Discord? Did you think it was unfair for there vague emails and lack of responses or do you think they were justified?