Discord Datamining — The Source of Feature Leaks, Explained
Many Discord features are leaked before they are announced by Discord. One important source of information like this is through the Discord Datamining process.
What is Discord Datamining?
In many Discord-related Discord servers, you may or may not have seen a channel named along the lines of # datamine-updates
. These channels are powered by a Discord bot with the same name.
The bot only sends latest updates from the much-larger GitHub repository maintained by user ThaTiemsz. “Datamining is done through comparing the JavaScript files served to the Discord Canary client which have different hashes per build change”.
Discord Canary
Discord Canary receives updates from Discord much more frequently than the normal Discord client. Canary is a separately maintained Discord client. Because of updates being pushed too early, this client is considered the most unstable among the other two. It is when the new features are pushed in the “Alpha” state of production. Quite unstable.
The other two Discord clients are — Discord Stable: where updates are pushed after careful testing and finalizing. Discord PTB (Public Test Build): is where the updates are in the “Beta” stage. This client of Discord is equivalent to the BETA program on Discord mobile.
To learn more about the official clients of Discord, consider reading this article by Discord.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035675191-Discord-Testing-Clients
How Feature Leaks are Found
Moving back to the GitHub repository. The repository compares the JavaScript updates files in the latest Canary updates. These newly pushed updates have their own Hash Comments, clarifying what had changed in this particular update. This comments by the developers at Discord are picked up by this Git repo and sent to the bot. Which eventually reaches our Discord servers.
For example, here’s the latest Datamining update at the time of writing this article. Here’s what the updates say in this comment.
Any sentences starting with —
refer to that specific VARIABLE getting removed. Similarly +
refer to that VARIABLE being added. When the same variable is getting removed and added, it means the value of the variable was changed.
In the given example, one can assume that a “See More” button is being added to something called “FORUMS”. From more and more updates, we have received more and more information about these forums.
Where to Find Discord Datamining Updates?
The main source of these updates is the GitHub repository which you can find:
Another way you can get these updates is through the Datamine Updates Discord Bot.