Discord’s Profile Picture That Shouldn’t Exist

This article was originally written by Kyfex

A file, hidden inside Discord’s servers

When you first created your Discord account, you may remember the default profile picture Discord gives you: a solid color with the white Discord logo superimposed on top.

However, what if I told you there was an unreleased sixth version?

The basics

Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is the language of the internet. It delivers websites, logs in users, uploads images, and everything in between. And if you want to make a Discord Bot, mastering HTTP requests is essential.

There are a couple different types of HTTP requests, but the two most common are the GET and POST methods. Put simply, the GET request gets information from Discord, and the POST request “posts” or sends information to Discord.

How I found out

The story begins with these HTTP requests. I was creating a discord bot and needed to get some data from Discord: namely, a user’s ID so I could send them a message through my bot. I started by looking at Discord’s official bot documentation to see how I would request the user’s ID, and came across It means of doing so. By making a specific GET request, I could not only get the user’s ID but a bunch of helpful stuff about them, like their username, what type of Nitro they had, and even if they had two factor authentication enabled.

However, something unrelated caught my eye: this specific request would also return back the user’s profile picture, or at least that’s what I thought. Discord specifically said that it would give the “avatar hash”, but what was that? Putting aside my current task, I decided to dig a little deeper.

It turns out that this avatar hash was nothing special, just a type of link. One of these types was labeled “Default User Avatar”, and I assumed it meant the randomly assigned, flat colored profile picture Discord assigned to users who hadn’t picked a profile picture yet. But after reading the specifics, it seemed like they weren’t random. I was intrigued, and decided to do some testing.

How PFPs Get Assigned

The documentation stated that the color each user was assigned was based on their discriminator, or the four numbers after a username.

Discord took that discriminator, divided it by 5, and assigned that user a certain color based on the remainder. For example, if your discriminator was 0000, 0005, 0010, or any other multiple of five, you would be assigned the signature Discord blue. But if you had 0001, 0006, 0011, or a number that, when divided by 5, gives a remainder of 1, you would be given a bland gray instead. I requested each of the five photos, and the official colors are blue, gray, green, yellow, and red, in that order.

And then I requested the photo for when the remainder was five.

Let’s disregard the fact that no number, divided by 5, can give a remainder of 5; my brain was a little dried out from all of the documentation I was reading.

Any other normal person would have just backed out of the page, because it would have given a 404 error or something like that. But I thought I was just running another test, and didn’t see anything wrong with requesting this invalid sixth image.

Imagine my surprise, when instead of an internal server error I saw an image I had never seen before: pastel pink, with the official discord logo emblazoned on top of it.

I had never seen this before, and when my brain caught up to what I had just requested I knew I was seeing something that few other people had seen.

According to the documentation, this image should not exist, and serves no purpose.

However, this just made it all the more cooler to me, and I sent off a couple excited DMs to my friends telling them about this totally cool and totally useless discovery.

At the end of the day, this hidden profile picture isn’t all that useful. But at the same time, it’s interesting to theorize about if it once existed, and why it goes unused today. I’m glad that for once, my distractedness was useful and led me to this piece of forbidden Discord lore.

If you want to see it for yourself, click here to view this pink paradox. You can change the number in the URL to see the other default PFPs.