how to delete discord channel

How To Clear A Discord Channel

Last Updated: September 14, 2020

Discord may be a voice chat platform but text chat makes up a huge amount of traffic. We all type messages to each other, admins use text to communicate to the server members and even the platform uses text for system messages. If you run a busy server, all that text soon builds up. This tutorial will show you how to clear a Discord channel both manually and by using a bot.

Gaming

While predominantly used for gaming, Discord is also used by individuals, groups and organizations for non-game chat. Visit Discord.me or one of the other third-party channel lists and you will see a huge range of categories there, many of which have nothing to do with games. Again, a lot of chat is through voice but there is also a lot of text chat too.

Text chat in Discord

Text is very straightforward. You have Direct Messages which are the same as they are in Twitter or elsewhere which is messaging privately between individuals. Then there's general chat on a channel which is displayed in the main channel window of Discord. As a server admin, you only really need to worry about general chat as Direct Messages are between members and won't clog up your channel.

Individuals can delete DMs though and I'll show you how to do that in a minute. For now, we'll concentrate on channel messages or open chat. It is these that you see when you first join a channel or log into your server. The center screen will be full of them and depending on how lively your channels are, you will see a steady stream of text scroll up as new messages are added.

Discord does a decent job of keeping the latest messages visible but there will soon be a whole lot of text in that pane to navigate or clear up.

Clearing text from a Discord channel

You have two main options if you want to clear your Discord channel. You can do it manually or use a bot to do it. I suggest doing it manually first so you see how the process works. You can then use a bot if you like to keep on top of things. The bot I usually suggest is MEE6. It is a top class bot that can do a whole lot more than just clear your chat.

You will need to be the server owner or administrator to clear chat.

To clear text manually, do this on desktop

Open the channel you want to clear out.
Hover over the message you want to clear until the three dots appear on the right.
Select those dots to access the menu and select Delete.
Rinse and repeat for all the messages you want to delete.

do this on mobile:

Select server from discord.
Open the channel you want to clear out.
Long press on the message you want to delete.
Select delete message.
Confirm your choice to delete it.
Rinse and repeat for all the messages you want to delete.

If you don't see the dots appear when you hover, you don't have sufficient privileges on that server or channel.

As you can see, that's going to take a while if you have several hundred text messages to clear. This is more useful for if someone says something unusually dumb or rude and you just want to delete particular messages.

If you're having a clear out, you should use a bot.

Use a bot to clear text from Discord

There are hundreds of Discord bots and they all perform various tasks to make your life on the platform easier. One of the more useful tasks bots can do is housekeeping. Keeping your channels clear and deleting messages are just two of the many admin tasks you can have a bot perform.

I tend to use MEE6 as it's tried and tested over thousands of Discord servers. It can perform a whole range of tasks, including clearing your texts.

Log into Discord and navigate to the server that contains the channel(s) you want to clear.
Navigate to the MEE6 website.
Select Add to Discord and authorize it when the popup menu appears.
Link MEE6 to your server(s) and give it permissions to work.
Navigate to the MEE6 control panel and enable Moderation.
Give it the command '!clear 1000', '!clear 100' or something else to begin clearing chat from a channel.

You can enter any number between 1 and 1,000 in the '!clear' command. The bot cannot clear more than that in one go so you will have to perform this a few times if you have a particularly busy channel.

Using a bot is a good way to maintain control of a channel by keeping it clean and tidy. If things have gotten more out of hand, you can clone your channel and delete the old one to clear it. I'll cover how to do that another time.