If you’ve been curious about how to check your Discord stats, chances are you have used Discord’s feature of requesting user data.
This feature sends you a zip folder containing all relevant information about your account, like the messages you sent and exchanged with others, your account information, and even the servers you joined.
While getting your data is easier, the harder part comes in trying to make sense of it.
This is because data in Discord is stored using Java which consequently is used and sent to you, making it difficult to read if you do not know to program.
You would assume you would need to learn Java to read your data, but all you need is to know what each entry represents.
Here in this article, we’ll cover a secured method (without having your Discord data leaked out) on how to read the Discord data package with the basics of .JSON files with minimal coding knowledge added to the mix.
How to Read your Discord Data
The are three steps to read Discord data packages that you have , you need to first extract the zip file’s contents; installing notepad++ to read .JSON files; Navigate through the Messages and Servers Folders & Reading .CSV Files to get your personal data.
As soon as you extract the zip file’s contents, you will be greeted with five folders and a txt file. Some of the
The text file contains a brief description of what was inside the zip file and a link to Discord’s help article for Data Packages.
The five folders on the other hand, would contain all the related data about your account, and each folder would contain the following:
- Account – This folder will contain data and information about your account like your username, friend list, and even sensitive information like your payment information.
- Activity – The activity folder contains a record of your actions in Discord. This is further divided into four sub-folders, namely analytics, modeling, reporting, and TNS (Trust and Safety)
- Messages – as the name implies, this folder contains all the DM’s you’ve received and messages you sent to any server before requesting your Discord data. It doesn’t include messages you manually deleted as it is not stored in Discord anymore.
- Programs – programs refer to Discord’s partnership programs that you are applied to and are a part of.
- Servers – servers contain all the servers you have joined and are a member of. While it doesn’t contain every message sent and the like, it does contain all relevant data when it comes to a server. For example, a list of banned users, emojis you uploaded, and information and settings for the server and channels.
Let’s go over how you can read data from each folder and how you can navigate your way around them.
But before we get started, you need to have the programs that can read the files inside each folder. JSON files can be opened using Notepad++, or you can use any other text editor like Notepad.
While .CSV can be opened using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. You only need these two applications to start reading the Discord data package.
1. Setting Up Notepad++
By default, to read .JSON files in Notepad++, you would need to open the file from Notepad++ or drag it to the app.
While this is fine and all, it can become annoying when you have to repeat the sequence every time you want to open a new file.
You can skip all this by changing it in Notepad++’s Preference option underneath Settings.
In the File Association tab, you will find a list of all supported extensions. In the “web script” category, you can find. JSON is one of the options.
Highlighting the option and clicking on the right arrow will register and associate all .JSON files in your computer to Notepad++, making it the default application when you double-click the file.
.CSV files are automatically associated with Excel or can be immediately uploaded to Google Sheets without much hassle or intervention.
2. Understanding How to Read .JSON Files
For this step on how to read Discord data packages, we’ll be using data inside your account folder. When you open the account folder, you will be greeted with two files with the avatar you used and a file that says “user.”
This user.JSON file contains all relevant data about your account.
Opening the file will immediately show you a single line of text which contains all the information about your account. As seen here in this screenshot, you can view each data entry with its corresponding value.
You can distinguish the category and the entry by looking at the color and placement of the text.
By default, each data category is purple and placed before a colon with its respective value following after in red, orange, or green.
For example, if you want to view the email link to your account, you have to look for the data entry that has “email”. In Discord, it is stored as “email”: “youremail.@gmail.com” like this:
Each data entry is separated by a comma (,) and is defined through a corresponding value. Values can be any valid data entry that Discord stored as part of your user data.
They are distinguished by three colors, namely red, green, and orange.
The red text strings are any data entries placed inside quotation marks (“”).
Green texts are Boolean values that can only be true or false;
While orange colored text are whole numbers like 1, 2, and 3 otherwise known as integers.
All values here follow the standard formatting for arrays and data in a .JSON file which all succeeding files in the same format will follow.
It can be a bit disorienting to read data from a single line. You can move each entry to new lines by pressing the Enter Key on your keyboard after each entry/comma to make it easier.
3. Navigating the Messages and Servers Folders & Reading .CSV Files
When you open either folder, you will be greeted by a collection of folders with a combination of numbers as their names.
The numbers aren’t random but are IDs that are used to categorize each data entry.
For example, for messages, they represent each person you had a DM with, and for servers, they are each server’s ID in Discord.
To navigate and find the right folder, you can refer to the .JSON file in the folder, found at the bottom named index.JSON.
Opening the file will show you the ID combination used in naming each folder as data entries, with their values being the type of message.
As seen here, it can be direct messages, messages sent to a discord text channel, or messages from a deleted server/text channel (which are named null).
You can use this to cross-reference between each folder if you want to explore them.
For example, for the servers folder, you can find just about all relevant information about the server; otherwise, you can only find the audit log and the server’s guild description.
In the messages folder, you have two files in each folder, a .JSON containing information on where and how the messages are sent.
The other file is a .CSV containing a message log of all of your messages. It will show your entire conversation for DMs, while server messages will only show messages you sent.
As seen in the screenshot, there are four categories for each data entry which are as follows:
- ID – Contains the message ID as each message sent to Discord has its unique ID. Since the number is above the millions, it is usually shortcutted with E+, which stands for exponent.
- Timestamp – Shows the date and time the messages were sent. The time follows the 24-hour format.
- Contents – The message that was sent in verbatim
- Attachments – data entries here are hyperlinks that redirect to any attachments used for messages. These can be pictures or actual files like documents or zips.
