 Hello everyone, my name is John Hammond and in this video is a tutorial on Discord. It's Discord 101 because this year DEF CON is being hosted virtually, all online using Discord as their communications platform. So because some people might be new to this platform or they just aren't familiar with it, I wanted to put out a video that can showcase the interface, all the interaction that you have with it and what you can do to make DEF CON 28 an awesome and incredible conference as DEF CON always is. So first let's dive into the interface that Discord presents to you. On the very very left side you have kind of a column based outline as to what servers you are actively in. The one that is highlighted with a little white bar here is the one that you are currently working in and you can see that open over on the rest of the interface of Discord. Right beside that on the left hand side is ok, the server title and maybe a banner for that specific server and a breakdown of all the channels that that server has. And there are two different kinds of channels that Discord offers. Discord has a regular text-based channel that you might already be familiar with between Slack or IRC and that's where you're just going to be sending text-based messages. Discord might allow you to offer some reactions and emoticons and emojis that you can send or embed images or videos, but that will all happen within a text channel. And those are denoted here with kind of that hashtag or pound symbol. Discord also has voice channels where you can interact with and chat with other people through voice using your microphone or even sharing your webcam or sharing your screen or other video. We'll dive into that in just a second, but I still want to talk about the interface here because the center pane you can see kind of illuminated when I hover over it is where all of the messages in that channel will be displayed. You can simply type your message in here and on the channel that you are currently selected or have highlighted, you'll be sending messages in there with this kind of input box down on the bottom. So if I could say hello everyone, we'll send that message with just the enter key and you can see my profile picture displaying that message just there. On the right hand side, you can actually see all of the users that are in that server, whether they are online or offline. This might break down to specific roles or permissions that each user has being a moderator or administrator or in the case of Defcon, maybe a goon or a village worker or a speaker. That will be determined by their roles and colors that will be displayed here. In this case, it's just me in the server and I have that little crown because I'm the server owner or the server admin, but that's displayed always on the right hand side. If you don't really care about that or you just don't need to see that anymore and it's taking up too much space, you can go click this little person icon for the member list up here and that will toggle that display if you click on it on or off. Now that message that I just sent, it's a text-based message in a text-based channel, but if I were to hover over it, I can do some specific things, right? I can add a reaction clicking on that little emoticon plus here and maybe it made me laugh and I could click on that rolling on floor or I could simply type in something like smile. If I wanted to actually type what other emoticon I'd be using, I could just type that in and it will match, okay, whatever keywords that might match that emoticon, Discord will suggest them for me. If I wanted to use that here, sending it in a message, I could simply click on that option here or I could type in with a colon and then the name of the emoticon that I might want to use. Discord will prefix and kind of suffix emoticons with these colons here. Send that. Also, I could simply edit a message or delete it. You can see that option with kind of little pencil and eraser here. If I click on edit, I could say, hello, myself, because I'm talking to myself in here. If I were to hit escape, then I won't actually make that change or I could simply hit edit and enter to save that. There we go. You can see that's kind of noted as when that message was edited and the fact that it is. I could, of course, if I click on that kind of ellipsis here to open more, I can edit that message just as I did earlier or quote it to be referenced later and tagging or mentioning a specific user if I'm quoting someone else or I could go ahead and delete it with that delete message down here. And that will remove it. It'll say, hey, are you sure you want to delete this? And absolutely, let's go delete that because we don't need it. Another option that we have while we're checking out those more options is pinning a message. So pinning a message will say, hey, this message is important and I want to make sure that this is visible to everyone in the pinned sections. So I can say, yeah, definitely go ahead and pin it. And then any user might be able to go click on this pinned messages icon over the top right, and they can go see all of those important messages that we want easily accessible by any member. You could do that if you were an administrator or a moderator, but if you aren't, a lot of times the staff of the Discord server, specifically DevCon might say, hey, check the pinned messages and now you'll know, okay, that's right up there at the top right with the pin option here. To demonstrate some other features and functionality, I've invited someone else to the server so I can showcase what all these new messages and notifications look like and some other things that might be worthwhile and important. So Dave Murphy has just joined the server and maybe he would go ahead and mention us. He would just say, hi, John Hammond. And he'll go ahead and ping me. You can see he's typing down below in our notification side. And when he notifies me or at mentions me, I'll get a little notification and it will be displayed in that yellow highlighted notion. If you were to ping me in another channel, if you were to just say, hello, John Hammond off on the side, you can see I have that notification up here. Just a one telling me, oh, I was pinged one time. I could do it one more and all you can see, oh, that number just increased because now I have more notification in that channel and the server icon will update accordingly with all those messages that are trying to get my attention. So I'll move over to the announcements and I can see Dave Murphy here. If I were to go ahead and click on him, I could message him individually and start up a DM or direct message. Hello there. And I could send that to him or I could add reactions just as we've done before. Obviously, I can't edit his messages, but because I'm the server admin, I could delete his message. If you aren't the server admin or you don't have those privileges or roles and permissions, you might not be able to do that. Another good thing to know is if you're being mentioned a lot or you have a lot of pings and notifications coming at you, you can always check out the mentions tab over on the top right. And that will to say all the mentions that you were in recently. So if Dave were to mention me one more time, I can ping myself there and that will be noted and brought up over there and where that was actually referred to on the server and the channel there. OK, one last tidbit in the text based channels before we move into the voice channels, I mentioned, OK, you can move around to different channels by clicking on them. But if you right click them, you might be able to do certain things like mute a channel or turn off all of those notifications and those mentions that you're receiving. We could turn it off for maybe 15 minutes or an hour or eight hours or 24 hours or until you turn it back on and you're willing to receive those notifications and those messages and pings again. You notice when I do that, that bell icon over on the top right has now been crossed out because we have muted that channel. We could use this as a shortcut to go ahead and click on that to now allow that those announcements and those mentions to come to us again or mute the channel into a ready, et cetera, et cetera. Note that when you have a channel that is muted, it's going to be displayed in a lighter gray color than the other channels that are notified over in that left hand breakdown of all the channels on that server. Now, all the channels are broken out into different categories. So on another server, like on Defconn server, you might notice, OK, there's a specific section or drop down for a specific village or for a specific event or a different capture the flag. You can always toggle whether or not this category has collapsed or unfolded by clicking on that kind of left hand arrow on that category. If you are focused in in one channel within that category, of course, that's still going to stay notified. Or if you have new messages in a specific channel, it will display that for you. So I'll use my little Dave Murphy account and say hello over on one side. Now you can see I have a notification and that will be kind of displayed and accessible for me that this channel is highlighted in brighter white and it's bold text. So I could go click in there and see what that individual might have sent. It's not going to give me that red little circular indicator that I've been pinged or I was mentioned. But because there was communication in there and that's just going to be displayed within that channel, that'll still be shown even if that category is collapsed and closed down. OK, now let's chat about those voice channels because I saw my friend Dave Murphy suddenly went and joined one and I want to go chat with him. I can see because of the little arrow indicator here that the voice channel's category is closed up. So we can again go ahead and click on that and unfold all of those. And I can see the voice channel here. You can tell it's a voice channel because it sort of has this audio megaphone icon when all the text channels have the simple hashtag or pound symbol here. So Dave Murphy is currently inside of the general voice channel. I can kind of tell by the unfolding here. He's just beneath that. And it looks like he is muted and he's also deaf in that room so that others he can't hear anyone else speaking as they join. That's totally fine. I just kind of wanted to use that as the proof of concept. Let's go ahead and chat with Dave Murphy or go join that voice channel. So I'll go ahead and click on that general channel here. And you can see that Discord kind of changed its interface just a little bit over on the server icon. Now I have this little green notification that I am actively in a voice channel. This is important to know because you don't want to accidentally be lurking in a voice channel when maybe you don't want all that audio going through your microphone transmitted to everyone else that's in that channel. If that's the case, you have our kind of mute deafen and other options and settings down below by our name here. If I were to click on this unmute icon, now you can see that my name is illuminated whenever I'm speaking. You'll have that kind of green indicator or circle around your profile picture because audio is coming through my microphone and everyone within that voice channel can hear me talk. If I didn't want that to be the case, I could simply click that microphone to mute myself and now there's no audio coming through for me. That is very important because you don't want to have a hot mic. If you don't want to be able to hear everyone else around you in that voice channel, then you'll use that deafen or that kind of headphones and headset icon here. If you were to click on that, you'll be deafen everyone around you. And it's like you're taking your headset off. You just don't hear them anymore. Once you're done hanging out in that voice channel, you'll want to simply disconnect by kind of hitting that phone icon, maybe hanging up just like that. Now you're no longer present inside of that voice channel. There were some other options that we had as well, though. You could see as we're voice connected and discord will kind of tell us our ping or how great our connection is to this channel. We could also share video or share our webcam. You could simply click on this camera icon here and suddenly we'd be able to show that up. In my case, my camera is currently being used for the video recording. So nothing's going to be displayed here, but I could toggle that on and off. While we're in this conversation, you can note, OK, I'm moving my mouse here and I could kind of see the options to turn off my camera or turn it on, just toggle that as usual. Or I could simply share my screen, choose a window or an application or a screen that I might want to go ahead and showcase. Obviously, I can mute and unmute here. And I think my face is just in the way in the video, but this red circular icon will allow me to disconnect. Other options there on the bottom right are to pop out, make that its own window itself. Maybe you want the talk that you're listening to or the speaker that you're listening to over a different monitor so you can drag that window over there or full screen where you can make that take up the entire space of your monitor. Let me hop back in there because I wanted to just touch on that screen share button as well. It does the exact same thing as we saw just in that kind of call that we were in when we were sharing our video. So I could simply share one of my screens and I could go live or present that within that voice channel inside of Discord, which is kind of cool. Now, if my friend Dave Murphy were actually speaking and he was active in this voice channel, if I were to right click his name, I could have a few other options as to how I want to hear him. I could increase his volume if he's maybe his mic is a little soft and he's not really getting the best, I don't know, amplification that he should. We could move that up or if he just has a booming voice and we just want to tone him down. We have that option as well. We could drag this slider. If he were not muted himself and we wanted to mute him, we could simply click that mute option. And if I were to move now, you could see that he has that red slash through in his mute icon because we have muted him, not him muted himself. That's something that you could always use of man. I don't want to listen to that person anymore. Go ahead and mute him. While we've been talking about this little menu down at the bottom left, I also want to draw your attention to your little profile picture here. If you were to simply click on that, you could change your online status where you might be online over on the right hand side. You could switch that to idle. And that way maybe other users or active people online will know, OK, that's not someone that I could bother or because he's away from keyboard or you maybe want do not disturb. So you don't receive any desktop notifications or if you kind of want to fly on the radar, you could switch this to invisible. So you are noted as offline and then others don't know that you're actively using Discord, but you're still actually using it. You just set your status to invisible. If you wanted to, you could set a custom status or you can say anything you really wanted to. And now that's displayed down here at the bottom. And if anyone were to also see that, that's visible to them. On the right hand side of that menu bar on the bottom left, you can find your user settings. So before we jump in the DEF CON server, I think it's a good idea to take a look through those and make sure that it has all the settings that you want for your own privacy and safety. So you could simply click on that gear, open up your user settings and it will be displaying all of the different tabs or options you can move into over on the left hand side. Currently, because I'm recording, my account section isn't going to be displayed. Discord is nice and it's trying to protect me. So while I'm recording, it's not going to be showcasing all of my information. It might show on your side because you're probably not recording. And there you can edit your kind of name, your Discord tag, your profile picture, your icon, etc., etc. So you can find that in my account of user settings. Privacy and safety, this is where you can determine who will you receive direct messages from. So while we could have direct messages, Dave Murphy or clicked on that Discord icon up on the top top left, that would allow us to see who is actually sending us messages or who do we have added as a friend, etc., etc. There are some options here you can specify. I want to scan messages from everyone and determine, OK, does this have a little not safe for work picture? Is there any graphic content in there? And that's what Discord will do while it's scanning these messages and making sure that they're safe for your eyes. If you can specify the setting, hey, my friends are nice. You'll scan direct messages from everyone else. That's not a friend of yours that you don't have added as a friend within Discord. If you prefer the option, hey, don't scan anything. I don't care what people send me NSFW or not. Let me let my eyeballs have it. Totally your call. Those are the changes you can make in the privacy and safety options here. For server privacy defaults, you can determine whether or not you'll receive direct messages from members of a server. That toggle on and off only determines whether or not you're going to be happening this to your current servers that you're in. It says, do you want to also apply this change to all of your existing servers or what you're already in place? That's an option you can set there. You can determine who can add you as a friend. It depends on how open you want to be. If you want to toggle all these off, you're more than welcome to. But hey, only friends of friends, server members, etc. Those are options that you can set in there. I'm totally fine to leave those on because I want to hear from you guys. You guys are all my friends. How we use your data. If you want to help out Discord, offer them support. Let them know what you're having trouble with. You could send your data to Discord. I think a good many of you might want that off and you can certainly toggle those off just like that. Other options you can find on the left hand side, some things that I think might be worthwhile for you. If you're interested in Discord Nitro or kind of having some more features that Discord will offer you, you could find that out with billing and subscriptions or server boosting. But the more interesting thing that you might be oriented towards is your voice in video settings when you're working inside of that voice channel or you're watching a video or you're presenting something inside of a voice channel. You're having a conversation with someone in a direct message and you call them up. This is where you can find that in your user settings, the voice in video tab when inside of the app settings. Here you can specify your input device for voice and kind of audio through your microphone. Same thing with your output. Which speakers do you want that to go through? And you can certainly modify that input volume and output volume here with those sliders. You can test your mic if you kind of wanted to see if that was seeing something you could see and hear my feedback. Probably there it can hear my mic just fine. And you could determine how you want to talk when you're talking inside of a voice channel or on a call. You could be using push to talk where you want to make sure maybe you're holding the space bar or some specific key that will activate your microphone. Otherwise, you've got dead silence or hey, voice activity. We're all automatically going to be sending in data without using push to talk. If you wanted to toggle that on, you could do that here or you might want to specify voice activity is what I really, really want. You can go make that setting change in app settings. If you want to do a recorded key binding, you could certainly do that and change the delay, etc. Personally, I like voice activity and you can determine hey, whether or not it's going to determine it and how. You could also change your webcam or your camera that you're using for video calls. As you saw when we were in that voice channel, we could specify our camera and turn on our webcam or you could do that while you're having a direct message or another personal conversation with some other Discord users. You could, of course, change some video and audio codecs or you could kind of cancel some of the echo that's surrounding you or do some noise reduction, etc. These are some of the options that Discord will give you. Also, you can change some of the notifications that servers will send you if you want to enable desktop notifications. You can turn that on or off or those unread message badges. As we saw, that kind of red icon or that notification symbol, if you want to completely turn that off, you could certainly do that here. And there is also a timeout you could set. Hey, if you're away from keyboard and text to speech is also an option that you could have. You could have a robot or synthetic voice read your notifications for you. If that's something that you would like to use. I guess personally, I don't see a whole use for it, but that's an option in the text to speech notifications. And whether or not you want to hear sounds from specific activities or things that you do inside of Discord, you can toggle all those on or off here. Other information might be useful to you, again, depending on what you'd like to see within Discord. If you don't want to see those images, all those things that people are sharing, you could totally turn those off in the text and images options. When images are directly uploaded to Discord, maybe things that are large will not be displayed. Discord, GIFs, etc. Animated pictures, etc. emojis, emoticons. There's a lot you could simply look through here if you have any interest in determining what you want to see inside of a text channel. Also, there is an appearance tab that will let you switch in between dark mode and light mode. Light mode might be a little bright on the eyes. If you can't tell, I know a lot of people are big fan of dark mode. So dark mode, I believe, is the default. And you can also change the message display. Cozy, it looks kind of nice. That's, I believe, the default. Or if you want to look a little bit more like IRC or the Internet Relay Chat, then you could simply use the compact display. And then all user profile pictures won't be displayed alongside each message. And you can fit more on the screen. For other accessibility, you can kind of change the font size on specific scales or chats, etc. And you could also enable developer mode. Developer mode is actually something that I would recommend even for anyone. If you're not considered a developer, it will allow you to determine the ID value of specific users or specific channels, because you might have noticed that sort of hashtag or pound symbol six, eight, seven, four or whatever string of numbers that would come after your username. That is part of your Discord user ID or your identification value. Every single user has one of those. Every single channel or every single abstract item within Discord has one of those. And if you need to report a specific member or you want to mention them specifically without maybe running into other nickname issues, you could use that. And I actually would and encourage you, hey, go ahead and turn on developer mode. If just so you can see more of the options and right click to copy an ID of a specific person or channel, that's very, very helpful. Finally, if you'd like to hear in the user settings, you can go ahead and log out or you can hit that big X or the escape key to close out of that window. OK, now at this point, I feel like we've covered enough of the interface. It's time to go ahead and jump into the real legitimate official DEF CON 28 Discord server. So I have that over here in the left hand side of my Discord application. Let's click on that DEF CON Discord server icon. And here we are. So this is everything that you've already learned, right? Over on the left hand side, we have the channel breakdown of all the different categories and text channels and voice channels that might be within the server. And additionally, we have all the messages that are being sent in the middle section here and all the users visible on the right hand side. Now you can see what all those roles are that might define a Discord user's color or their permissions or their privileges. So a server admin right up here between the dark tangent and Riverside or specific goon legends or other goons or village workers or speakers or any other role and permission that might be set in that Discord server. So some of these roles might be giving them just a simple label so they get a unique color, some might give them specific privileges or permissions to do server administration things like delete other users, member messages or kick them or ban them if they need to put in those precautions, etc. So if we were to check out one of these server admins, we'll take a look at Riverside, we can see these are all of the roles that that Discord user has. Some of these roles might be helpful for actually receiving some notifications or interacting within the Discord server. You can see that he has the announcements role and the DEF CON server is being smart and that it's utilizing some Discord bots that will allow any other user inside of the Discord server to receive certain messages or some certain information pertinent to what's happening during the conference. And that's set in one of those channels here. We can see all of these text based channels again, indicated by that sort of hashtag or pound symbol. Some of these might be voice channels and AFK is here. If you are away from keyboard, maybe you're lingering or lurking inside of a voice channel for too long, it will kick you into that AFK channel because you're not doing anything. And there are more inside of these categories for specific villages or groups, etc. etc. There are a lot, as you can see, a lot of channels. But before we start to tune some of those out, let me show you. If you move into the announcements channel, you can see all of these announcements that might be worthwhile for you to read or checking out these pins, right? We learned that earlier. If you want to get notified when some of these announcements come out, Def Con has done a great thing by setting up some discord bots that will mention that specific role or every user, every discord person that has that role. In this case, the announcements role that we just saw. Typically on a discord server, you can find some roles channel that will allow you, the end user, to give yourself a role by simply reacting to a message, right? So this is the Yagpdb.xyz bot, and that gives discord a little more superpower, a little more functionality. So by simply giving ourselves a role or reacting to this message, we will give ourselves a role. That's all it takes. And you saw us react to messages earlier. We could kind of do a little option and add a reaction to it here. In this case, it will show us some of the reactions. But if there is a reaction that's already in place, we can simply click it and it will add our reaction to the count there. Now you can see I got a new message from Yagpdb or that discord bot. And it said to me, hey, we gave you the role. Excellent, excellent. Let's hop back over to that Def Con server. And if I were to click that again, we'll see another notification. Oh, we've just removed that role from our user inside of the Def Con server. OK, now I mentioned, obviously, the Def Con discord server has a lot of channels and there's only going to be more as the conference goes on. So what can we do to kind of shrink this ginormous sidebar of all the different channels and categories we could be working at? Well, remember, we could if we wanted to, maybe we can hide or mute a specific channel and not get all those notifications that for the conversation that might be unfolding within each of those channels, I can go ahead and mute that until I turn it back on or again, click into one of these and just click on that bell icon up there to mute it. And what we could do if we were to right click on this category, we could mute an entire category if there were stuff that we didn't particularly care about, we could just mute the entire thing. If we wanted to also right clicking on the server icon allows us to hide the muted channels. So if we didn't care about maybe some specific channels in here, but we didn't want to close or mute the entire category. Well, we could right click on that and hide those muted channels. So those suggestions and that other channel that I have muted, it's not going to be visible to me and I can sort of clean up that long giant left hand side of channels and voice channels, etc. etc. Another option here because throughout the conference, there's going to be a ton of messages flying around and each of these is suddenly going to be illuminated with white bold text. Hey, there's some chatter going on in this channel here. You should come check it out. Sometimes that's a little overwhelming and just too much. What you can do is you can right click again, the server icon and specify Mark as red. So if there were new messages in here and there's just a ton that I can't handle right now, you can't handle right now. Simply mark as red and all of those giant. Hey, I'm here to grab your attention. White bold text messages. Those aren't going to show for you. And that might keep you sane during all of this stuff going on within the DEF CON server and everything that we just discussed still takes place here inside the DEF CON server. Go ahead and send messages, text-based messages inside of those channels that you have right permissions to work in in different categories. Go ahead and join in some of the voice channels where you can interact with other people, chat, use your microphone, get to know people, make some friends. That's what the DEF CON conference is all about. Right? We're growing the community. And honestly, I think this is really, really awesome that we're doing it virtually. It's got to be done. But I think I'm just so excited and using Discord as a platform, I think will be an absolute blast because there's so much we can do with it. And I hope you guys are excited about it. And honestly, I hope you learned something, something new from this video or if you weren't too familiar with Discord before, this is your first time using it to take part in DEF CON. Well, I really hope that you learned something from this video and I hope it helps. I really hope you enjoy the DEF CON conference and I hope to see you guys on their Discord server. Take care.