How To Clear Discord Messages

The ability to clear a Discord chat is one of the most requested features of the platform. Yet after years of requests, we still don't have the ability to easily clear out old chats or mass delete more recent ones. There are options though and I'll walk you through them.

How To Clear a Discord Chat

If you manage a Discord channel, housekeeping is one of your core tasks. You can do it manually or use bots to help. If nothing else works, you can clone your channel and shut the old one down.

Clear Discord Chat Manually

This is obviously the long and boring way to clear Discord chat. It does give you a lot more control over what gets deleted though. If you have some useful chats you want to keep around for a while longer, the manual deletion is useful.

A top tip for deleting chats manually is to hold down Shift while you do it as this will skip the annoying confirmation box that appears every time you delete.

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

Navigate to the Channel you want to clear.
Hover over each message while holding down the Shift button.
Click on the red trash can icon to delete the message.

Discord will not ask you for any confirmation that you want to clear the chat, the message will instantly disappear. It's best to start at the top if you're going to use this method. Because the next message will soon take its place you can save a lot of time by keeping your cursor in one position, using the Shift button, and clicking on the trash can icon.

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 housekeeping tasks such as this is a classic way to use them. There are a few chatbots but the most common is to use 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 won't be able to add any bots. To check to see if you have permissions, do this:

Select the server you're adding a bot to.
Click Server Settings from the menu to the right(the arrow to the right of your server name).
Select Roles and make sure either Administrator or Manage Roles is toggled on.

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

Adding the Bot

For the purposes of this article, we'll be using the Mee6 bot. This versatile and trusted bot can be used to perform many administrative tasks in Discord. Including, clearing a chat.

To add the bot, do this:

Go to this website and select Add to Discord(Keep this page open).
Authorize the bot in your channel.
Select the server you want to clear out.
Authorize the bot for that server.
Go back to the MEE6 web page.
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.
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. This is useful if someone has turned toxic or had a rant that nobody wants to see. Use the command '!clear @NAME' to clean out the previous hundred messages from the user whose name you replace NAME with.

There are other bots that can clean chat. 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 main 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:

Select the server you want to clone in Discord.
Right-click and select Server Settings.
From the menu on the left-hand side, select Server Template.
Enter a name for your template and click Generate Template.
Click the Preview Template button that was appeared below your template link.
Select Create.
When you leave the settings menu, your new server will be in your sever list.
Delete the original server.

You can use a bot to do this too if you prefer. There are a couple of them around that will clone servers. DiscordServerCloner on GitHub has been recommended a few times, as has Cloner. Both bots will save a copy of your server for you to be able 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, I 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, each 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.