The one Discord security setting everyone should know about

So you’ve decided to dive into the NFT world, which means you’re probably spending more time on Discord, okay, a lot more time on Discord. That means you’ve also probably also been overwhelmed by the volume of DMs you’re getting from people you’ve never met.

Discord spam is a real problem, and it’s also one of the main ways new NFT investors find themselves getting scammed out of their ETH, NFTs, or both. Scammers have been getting more clever by the day, often messaging users who join a new Discord and pretending to be a mod, sending them to a fake minting site that well, doesn’t mint anything, it just steals everything in their wallet.

First things first – never trust anything that anyone sends you via DM on Discord. If you don’t know the person, assume it’s a scammer. Of course, that doesn’t solve the problem you’re probably running into now which is the impossible task of sorting through the sea of random DMs you’re getting.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to solve this problem, all it takes is one small change and all those random DMs are gone. Here’s how to do it.

First – click the gear icon at the bottom of Discord, on Desktop it looks like this:

Next select “Privacy & Safety” from the menu on the left:

Finally, turn off “Allow direct messages from server members”

Poof, that’s it. Once this is turned off random people can’t continue to DM you and you’ll experience a much more calm and peaceful Discord experience.

Now there is one important thing to know about what happens once this setting is off, and this is where I see a lot of people get confused. With this setting off, bots like Collab.land will not be able to DM you to authenticate you on other Discord servers.

So, if you join a new server and want to authenticate with a service like Collab.land, you’ll have to pop in, turn this on for a minute, and then turn it off when you’re done.

Personally, I turn this off, outside of the Bored Ape Yacht Club Discord, I don’t really care about seeing my Discord username change colors, I’d rather not take the risk, and yes, anything you connect your wallet to anything, there’s a risk.

If you do decide to connect Collab.land to your wallet, I would recommend not using a wallet with all your NFTs in it but instead moving the one NFT you need to have in your wallet to authenticate in there. Overly paranoid? Sure. But with NFTs I honestly think you should always error on the side of caution.

I hope this was helpful, stay safe out there!