How To Clear a Discord Chat

The ability to clear a Discord chat is one of the most requested features of the platform. Yet after years of requests, we still can’t effortlessly clear out old chats or mass delete more recent ones. There are options, though, and this article will walk you through them.

Housekeeping is one of your core tasks if you manage a Discord channel. You can take the time to manage each channel or use bots to help. This article will help you with the clearing chats part of your administrative role.

Clear Discord Chat Manually

Clearing a chat manually is the long and tedious way to clean up a Discord chat. It does give you a lot more control over what gets deleted, though. The manual deletion method is appropriate if you have some valuable conversations you want to keep around for a while longer.

Here’s what you can do to clear a chat using the built-in deletion process in Discord.

1. Navigate to the Channel you want to clear.
   
   
   
2. Locate the message you want to delete and click on the three-dot menu to the right. Or, hold the Shift key.
   
   
   
3. Click on the red trash can icon to delete the message. Or, click Delete Message.
   
   
4. A pop-up will appear asking you to confirm the deletion. Click Delete.
   

As you can see, it isn’t easy to mass-delete messages using the platform’s native functions. Fortunately, there are simpler methods to delete all of the messages in your channels.

Clear Discord Chat With a Bot

By far, the easiest way to clean your channel is to use a bot. There are bots for everything on Discord, and they’re perfect for housekeeping tasks, such as clearing chats. There are a few chatbots, but one of the most common is the Mee6 Bot.

To add a bot to Discord, you will need to be an Administrator or have Manage Server permissions in your role. If you don’t, you can’t add any bots. To check to see if you have permissions, do this:

1. Select the server where you’re adding a bot.
   
2. Click Server Settings from the menu to the right(the arrow to the right of your server name).
   
3. Select Roles and make sure either Administrator or Manage Roles is toggled on. You may need to click on Default Permissions at the top to find the Administrator roles.
   

If you don’t see Server Settings or cannot toggle Administrator or Manage Server, you don’t have sufficient permissions and need to speak to the server owner. You can add the bot if you have permissions and one of those settings is enabled.

Adding the Bot

For this article, we’ll be using the Mee6 bot. This versatile and trusted bot can perform many administrative tasks in Discord, including clearing a chat.

To add the bot, do this:

1. Go to this website and select Add to Discord (Keep this page open).
   
2. Sign into your Discord account.
   
3. Select the server you want to clear out.
   
4. Authorize the bot for that server.
   
5. Go back to the MEE6 web page.
   
6. Select the server you just added it to from the upper right-hand corner. If it isn’t already selected, then click on the Moderator option and click Yes when prompted.
   
7. Go back to your server and type !clear, !clear10, or !clear100. Whichever is most suitable.
   

You can also clear chats from individuals if you need to. Clearing a chat by the user is helpful if someone has turned toxic or posted a bunch of messages nobody wants to see. Use the command ‘!clear @[NAME]’ to clean out the users’ previous hundred messages.

Another helpful and popular Bot is CleanChat. It works much the same way.

Clear Discord Chat by Cloning and Closing

If the bot isn’t doing enough for you, it is possible to clone a server and shut down the original. That way, you keep your users and settings but get rid of the chat history and clutter. It’s a convoluted way of clearing chat, but it does work. You can manually clone your server or use a bot.

To manually clone a server do this:

1. Select the server you want to clone in Discord.
2. Open the Server Settings.
   
3. From the menu on the left-hand side, select Server Template.
   
4. Enter a name for your template and click Generate Template.
   
5. Click the Preview Template button that appears below your template link.
   
6. Select Create.
   
7. When you leave the settings menu, your new server will be in your server list.
   
8. Delete the original server.

You can use a bot to do this too, if you prefer. There are a couple of bots available that will clone servers. DiscordServerCloner on GitHub comes highly recommended. The bot will save a copy of your server for you to recover as required.

Whichever method you use, you will need to re-add any bots you had in your original server, but everything else should be just as you like it.

Of all of these, the chat clearance bots are probably the easiest. They are limited in that they can only clear chat from the previous 14 days but make short work of clearing chat and general housekeeping. If you’re fortunate enough to have a lively server, we thoroughly recommend having one of these bots around anyway.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you have more questions about moderating a Discord chat, we have the answers here!

Can I remove someone from the server?

If you’re an administrator, you may need to ban or kick someone who consistently violates your Server’s standards. By visiting the violator’s profile, you can click on the option to block that person.

Can I have multiple Bots on one server?

Absolutely! Bots make it easy to customize and manage your servers on Discord. You can add several bots with different roles and tasks for a more seamless experience.

Can I delete just one message?

Yes, locate the message and click the three horizontal lines all the way to the right. Select ‘Delete Message,’ and it will disappear after confirming your selection.

Can I select multiple messages at one time?

Unfortunately, no. Several users have requested the feature, but Discord has yet to respond.

How do I delete all messages in a Discord DM?

As opposed to servers, you can’t add bots to Discord DMs (private messages). This leaves us in the unfortunate situation of deleting each message individually. However, there is a process using the keyboard to make deletion easier. Here’s what to do:

1. Click on the first message you’d like to delete. Then, click the Up Arrow to highlight the message. The text box may highlight instead. If it does, click the Up Arrow again.

2. Click the Backspace button (or the Delete button on a Mac). Then, click the Enter key to confirm you’d like to delete the message.

3. Repeat the process for each message you’ve sent.

There are a few drawbacks to this method, but unfortunately, it’s all we can do with Discord’s chat deletion limitations. This may take a while depending on how many messages you’re trying to delete, you can’t delete messages you’ve received, and this won’t delete the messages for the other person in the chat.