What are Verified and Unverified Activities?

Dread Pirate Wumpus
  • Updated

Contents

Introduction

The Difference Between Verified and Unverified Activities

When to Keep your Activity Unverified

When to Verify your Activity

How to Change the Public/Private Settings

Introduction

Discord offers two distinct settings for Activities: Verified and Unverified. These settings provide different levels of visibility and functionality, each suited for specific purposes. In this article, we'll delve into the characteristics and benefits of both Verified and Unverified Activities, helping you understand when and how to use each effectively.

The Difference Between Verified and Unverified Activities

Verified and Unverified Activities have several distinct characteristics:

Verified Activities

These Activities are:

  • Visible to everyone on Discord (There is no longer a server member limit.)
  • Allowed to enable discovery through Discord Discovery Surfaces
  • Playable in any server, regardless of size
  • Eligible for monetization, provided Premium App requirements are met

Unverified Activities

Unverified Activities have the following features:

  • Only visible to you, your development team, and app testers
  • Not discoverable by the general Discord community
  • Limited to servers with less than 25 members
  • Great for testing and development

The key difference is accessibility and visibility. Verified Activities are open to all Discord users, while Unverified Activities are restricted to developers and testers.

When to Keep your Activity Unverified

While you are developing and testing your Activity, keeping your Activity unverified is the best option as they are only playable by the developers on the team and app testers who are explicitly invited to test them. They are also only able to be launched in servers with less than 25 members.

⚠️ It's crucial to only test Activities from developers you trust. For more information on Unverified Activity Safety, check out this article.

The best practice for development, testing, and adding new features is to use an unverified Activity. Meanwhile, maintain a separate verified "live" Activity for your stable build.

When to Verify your Activity

When you are ready to release your Activity to the world, this will open up the doors to discoverability and monetization. But first, verification is a necessary step to enable both discovery and monetization features for your Activity.

Verification

Once your application is verified, you will not be able to turn off the public setting in the Developer Portal. For development and iteration, we suggest having a unverified Activity.

To learn about how to get your Activity verified, please see the How Do I Get My App Verified article

Discoverability

There are currently 3 surfaces where people can discover your Activity once it’s verified and discovery has been enabled.

To learn more about these surfaces and how users can find and launch your Activity, please see this article.

⚠️ Note that after enabling discovery for your app, it can take up to 30 hours for your Activity to show up in the search bar.

Monetization

You can now monetize your eligible Activity through both In-App Purchases and Subscriptions!

To learn about the eligibility criteria and how to monetize your application check out this article.

When you are ready to release your application to the world, you can toggle on that public switch in the bot settings and get your app verified!

How to Change the Public/Private Bot Setting

In the Developer Portal, find the Application you wish to modify. Navigate to the Bot tab and scroll down until you see Public Bot. Toggle this switch on to set your bot to Public.

If your application is already Public and you want to turn that setting off, you can only do so if the application hasn't been Verified and if the Install Link on the Installation tab is set to None.

Additional Resources

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