Why disable Discord notifications?
Discord is loud by default. Every mention, every DM, every server you join competes for your attention with banners, sounds, and a red badge on the taskbar icon. If you work, study, or stream, that constant stream of pings is more of a productivity tax than a feature. Disabling notifications - at least for the noisy ones - gives you back the room to focus, while still letting you check in on your own time.
Some people only want to silence desktop popups but keep the in-app red badge. Others want full silence outside a handful of pinned servers. Discord’s notification system is granular enough to handle all of those cases, you just need to know where the controls are.
Steps to disable notifications in Discord
- Click the Gear icon in the bottom left of Discord (User Settings).
- Go to Notifications.
- Uncheck Enable desktop notifications to stop banners from appearing in the corner of your screen.
- Uncheck Enable unread message badge on taskbar so the Discord icon stops glowing red.
- Uncheck Message sounds, Mention sounds, Stream sounds, and Incoming call sounds if you want full audio silence. Leave them on and pick a different sound if you’d rather just tone it down.
- Decide what to do with the in-app notifications (the little popups inside Discord itself) by adjusting In-app notifications.
Per-server notification settings
Global settings affect every server you’re in, but most people only want notifications from a couple of active servers and silence for the rest. You can override the global setting on a per-server basis:
- Right-click the server icon in your server list on the left.
- Choose Notification Settings.
- Pick All Messages, Only @mentions, or Nothing.
- You can also suppress @everyone and @here pings here, useful for announcement-heavy communities.
- Repeat for every server you want to customize.
A common pattern is to set the global default to Nothing and then opt back in to the few servers where pings actually matter.
Do Not Disturb and Snooze
If you only need temporary silence - say, a meeting or a one-hour focus block - Discord has two shortcuts:
- Snooze (the moon icon at the bottom-left next to your username) silences everything for 1, 3, 8, 24 hours, or until tomorrow. Useful for short bursts.
- Do Not Disturb is the same toggle, but indefinite. Click your avatar, hit the bell with a slash through it, and the moon icon will turn red. The red badge on your taskbar icon also disappears.
Both options are server-wide. There’s no built-in “mute this server for one hour,” so for short-term per-server silence, right-click → Notification Settings is still the way.
Mobile vs desktop
The mobile apps (iOS and Android) follow the same settings structure, but there are a few differences worth knowing:
- Push notifications are controlled separately in your phone’s system settings (iOS Settings → Notifications → Discord, or Android Settings → Apps → Discord). If you’re still getting pings with desktop notifications off, that’s almost always why.
- Mobile notifications in Discord itself include an In-app notifications option that drives the banner that appears at the top of the app.
- On mobile, the Snooze button is in User Settings → Notifications instead of a bottom-left icon.
If you’ve turned everything off in Discord’s settings and are still getting pings on your phone, check your OS-level notification permissions - Discord will only respect your in-app settings if the OS allows it to send notifications in the first place.
Push notifications on mobile (extra)
For full silence on iOS, set Discord’s system-level notification style to None or Banners (off). On Android, set Show notifications to off in the app info screen. The in-app toggles can’t override what the OS blocks.
