How to Spoiler Text and Images on Discord
Two pipes for text, a checkbox for images
Staff Writer · · 2 min read
Spoiler tags hide content behind a gray block that has to be clicked to reveal it. They're meant for plot spoilers, but they work just as well for anything you'd rather people opt into than see immediately.
Spoilering text
Wrap it in two pipe characters on each side, so ||like this||.
The pipe is usually above the Enter key, and on most keyboards you type it with Shift and the backslash key.
You can also select the text as you're typing it and press Ctrl+Shift+S, or Cmd+Shift+S on a Mac.
Spoilering an image
Attach the image as normal, but don't send it yet. In the upload preview you'll see an eye icon or a Mark as Spoiler option on the image. Click it, then send.
On mobile, tap the image in the preview before you send and choose Mark as Spoiler.
The image then sends as a blurred block labeled SPOILER, and it stays hidden until someone taps it.
If you've already sent an image without the spoiler tag, there's no way to add one after the fact, so you'll need to delete it and send it again.
Spoilering a whole message
There's no per-message spoiler toggle, but wrapping the entire message text in pipes achieves the same thing, and it works across multiple lines. Put || at the very start and || at the very end.
Where spoilers don't apply
Spoiler tags don't always hide the content in a notification preview, so a spoiler in a message that pings someone can still leak in the popup. If it genuinely matters, don't ping.
Channel names, topics, and usernames can't be spoilered at all.
Using spoilers for games
Spoiler tags turn out to be useful well beyond what they were built for. They work nicely for trivia answers, so people can guess before anyone reveals, and for puzzle and word games where you don't want the first answer posted to end everyone else's turn. They're also good in social deduction games like Werewolf or Mafia, where roles need to be recorded publicly but not read yet.
If you run game nights in your server, this is worth telling people about once. It turns a channel where the first correct answer ends the game into one where everyone gets to play. Bot-run games like Gamebot handle turn order themselves, but for anything you're running manually, spoiler tags do most of the work for you.