Troubleshooting · App Fixes
Discord Status Icons Explained: What Each One Means
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Discord's status icons, shown at the top right of your Discord app and other users’ profiles, show a number of statuses that indicate your availability. These are essentially controls you can use to change how your presence is represented online — for example, whether you want others to disturb you or not.
The options available in Discord’s status system are seven total. While the names may imply that they’re just “presence” indicators, these aren’t just static images; they represent notification controls that can be changed at any time. They also influence the way others interact with you via messages and voice chat.
These include:
• Online
• Idle
• Do Not Disturb (busy)
• Invisible
• Custom (for specific apps and websites) [1]
• Offline
• Unknown
If you’re encountering one of these status icons on another user’s profile, it indicates the status of that user as per above. However, there are more details to the status system, particularly around custom status icons, which will be covered in the next section.
Custom status icons
Custom status icons are created specifically for a website or application to represent a state or condition associated with that application, such as if someone has a specific game or program open. In many cases, this would mean setting up a custom icon for a site like Steam, allowing others to know if a user is playing a particular title.
However, in some cases, developers have been known to create their own custom status icon that shows something more unique than what is normally displayed by default. For example, we’ve seen people set up a custom status to indicate when they were listening to a certain album, watching a TV show, or simply to let others know they were offline and didn’t want to be disturbed.
In fact, Discord introduced its own persistently visible custom status feature specifically for this reason.
Accessibility
At one point, Discord’s status icons had previously been identified as inaccessible, as well as a proposal put forward on how to improve upon it. As a result, Discord implemented the new persistently visible custom status feature.