Discord is once again facing criticism from its community after users discovered that banned and blocked accounts remain visible through the platform’s activity feed. Despite being removed and fully restricted, these users’ online status and current activities can still be seen — a clear violation of what users expect from Discord’s privacy and block systems.
A Serious Oversight in Discord’s Presence System
Usually, when a user is banned from a server or blocked on Discord, all forms of presence data — including online status, “Playing…” or “Listening to…” activity, and mutual friend references — should be completely hidden. However, multiple users are now reporting that these details still appear even after bans are issued, suggesting a backend presence desynchronisation or caching issue.
One person explained to us that he has seen a user playing a game, that he has no contact with anymore in the past 3 years. That’s pretty disturbing in my opinion. Especially if you have them banned for a reason.
This apparent flaw undermines the purpose of Discord’s blocking and banning system. If someone you explicitly banned or blocked can still have their activity visible to you, then the privacy barrier expected by users is ineffective.
Community Reports Indicate a Widespread Problem
While Discord hasn’t publicly acknowledged this specific issue, users have documented symptoms and shared them:
- A user who’s both blocked and banned from all mutual servers still appears in the Friends tab or activity feed.
- Clearing caches/logging out doesn’t always resolve the issue — indicating the root cause likely lies with how Discord’s servers handle presence states.
- Some threads on Reddit confirm similar behaviour: “Actually you still can see their activity as long as you are in a mutual server however big or small.” Reddit
And more forum threads show longstanding frustrations with Discord’s ban system bugs.
Silence From Discord Raises Accountability Concerns
Beyond this incident, Discord’s response—or lack thereof—to transparency and user-safety concerns is troubling. Here are some red flags:
- Users regularly report lack of replies from support when submitting tickets about serious issues.
- The platform recently came under fire for a major breach involving a third-party vendor exposing sensitive user documents.
- Now, this presence-leak issue suggests a flaw in core privacy functionality, not just an edge-case exploit.
When a service platform purports to provide safe spaces—but fails to guarantee that banned users are truly invisible—the trust contract is broken. And when users report problems but receive no explanation or visible corrective action, it reinforces a pattern of neglect.
A Call for Accountability
Discord must immediately investigate and publicly acknowledge this presence-leak issue. Key actions should include:
- Confirming the scope and cause of the bug.
- Providing a transparent communication to users describing what happened and what will be done.
- Fixing the underlying system so that bans + blocks guarantee the expected invisibility of the banned user.
- Improving support responsiveness so that users reporting issues aren’t ignored or left in limbo.
Until Discord takes these steps, users should remain cautious: review visible connections, unlink or minimise shared external accounts, and monitor whether banned users still appear in activity feeds.
