Discord Ain’t It: Why We Use An Old School Forum & TeamSpeak

Let’s get straight to the point. We are making a deliberate shift away from Discord and moving back to a website / forum and TeamSpeak. It might feel a bit old school, and it might raise a few eyebrows, so I want to explain the reasoning behind it.

A More Traditional Guild Atmosphere

One of our goals is to give Attitude Gaming a more traditional guild feel. Something closer to the communities many of us remember from the mid‑2000s, where forums, shared discussions, and proper long‑form posts helped shape the identity of a group. As I mentioned in the About Attitude Gaming post, I am an 80s millennial and I have never been a fan of rapid‑fire emoji‑filled chats. I prefer thoughtful conversation and spaces where people take a moment to express themselves.

With that in mind, let’s talk about Discord and why we are choosing a different direction.

Discord’s Privacy Problems

I work in tech and run a small tech company, so privacy and data handling are things I pay close attention to. Discord has many strengths, but privacy is not one of them.

The biggest issue is that Discord does not offer end‑to‑end encryption. Every message, attachment, and voice call is accessible to Discord. If Discord can access it, then anyone who breaches Discord can access it too.

A good example of this is the introduction of age verification. It was presented as a way to “protect the children”, but in practice it meant users uploading passports, driving licences, and credit card details to a platform that does not encrypt that data. Shortly afterwards, a breach occurred that exposed credit card details, customer support messages, and images of IDs belonging to around seventy thousand users. We were reassured that login credentials were not affected, so… there’s that.

And that is only one incident. Discord also collects and stores a significant amount of data, and they do not always make it clear who they share it with.

Who Discord Shares Data With

• Service providers and vendors: These are companies that help Discord run its service. This includes Tencent, a major Chinese tech company. Once your data enters that ecosystem, it is hard to know exactly where it goes.
• Measurement partners: These are analytics companies that track how you use Discord. They help “improve the service”, which often means analysing your behaviour so it can be monetised.
• Linked third‑party services: When you connect apps like Steam, Spotify, or Twitch, you create a network of shared data between services. It is convenient, but it also means more organisations have access to your information.
• Law enforcement and government agencies: Discord will share data with governments that request it. This is not limited to one country. It applies broadly, and the threshold for a “request” is not always clear.
• Corporate affiliates and successors: Discord does not sell your data directly, but it does share it with companies it owns, companies that own it, and companies that may acquire it in the future. In practice, this means your data can travel far beyond Discord itself.

The Privacy Circus Continues

To summarise before this turns into a full‑blown privacy essay: Discord does not encrypt your data, users are asked to verify their age with sensitive documents, those documents have already been exposed in breaches, and we are told it is all for safety.

And that is just one example. Other incidents include:

• The ongoing token stealer malware problem
• The 2025 third‑party customer service breach disclosed on 3 October 2025
• The Spy.pet mass scraping incident in April 2024
• The 2022 third‑party customer support breach disclosed in May 2023
• The 2022 NFT server compromises via the MEE6 bot

It becomes a familiar pattern: “your data is fine, trust me bro” followed by “it wasn’t a Discord breach, it was a third‑party provider that just happened to have all your data”.

Why We Are Using a Website, Forum and TeamSpeak

So why are we choosing a website, forum, and TeamSpeak instead?

Partly because Discord has become a noisy, ad‑filled, engagement‑driven platform. But more importantly, using our own tools gives us control, stability, and a sense of identity.

Our forum is being built to be the backbone of our community. We control the codebase, so we can create the features we want. Raid signups, progression tracking, build sharing, archiving, and long‑form discussion are all things we can design exactly how we want them.

It also preserves our history. Forums keep information accessible, organised, and permanent. They encourage thoughtful conversation and help shape a community’s culture.

TeamSpeak, meanwhile, offers higher voice quality, lower latency, encrypted channels, and none of the algorithms, pop ups, or engagement tricks that have crept into modern platforms. It also uses far fewer system resources, which means smoother gameplay, better performance, and no random CPU spikes because your chat app decided it needed to “optimise your experience”.

Join Us If This Sounds Right for You

If you care about online privacy, or you simply do not mind using a website and TeamSpeak because you want to play games without being turned into a data product, and you like what we are building here at Attitude Gaming, then you are exactly the kind of person we want.

Feel free to create an account, say hello, join the guild, and sign up for events. We are building something with purpose, a community‑driven environment where we can enjoy our favourite games together without the noise, the nonsense, or the data‑harvesting circus.

Edited by Grumpitude on September 16th 2026 at 13:48