Built from a real clan website problem.
Discord Viewer was not created in a boardroom. It started because our own gaming clan website needed something better than the official Discord widget.
The original idea
Mostly, it is gaming clans that host these viewers, so that, without having to load Discord, members can see who is on their server and, based on which games they are playing, join them in-game.
The official Discord widget does that job, but it basically comes in one size and one colour. In my own opinion, it was rather drab, and it was not a good fit for the RaW recruits website, which at the time was loosely based on the old Windows 8 Metro design.
One of our members, Ed, had once designed a very basic viewer for our Mumble server. That gave me the idea to programme our own viewer for Discord, with dimensions that would exactly fit two Metro squares.
You can see from the image on the right how our Discord online channel viewer compared with the official Discord Widget. Ours had to be truly flexible to suit our needs, while still being able to display plenty of useful server information. Thus, the Discord Online Viewer was born.
More than a prettier widget
I had some knowledge of scraping websites, so I set to work discovering exactly what data the widget.json actually held, and how best to parse it.
I was surprised by the information it held that was not used by Discord’s own widget. That discovery shaped the viewer from the very beginning. It was never just a visual improvement. It became a more useful way to show live server activity on a website.
That first compact viewer is still represented today by the Mini Theme: small, flexible, easy to resize and built around the same strong layout idea.
From clan tool to public download
Once the Mini viewer was working, it was clear it could be useful to friends and other clans. A normal-sized viewer followed, along with a range of colours to suit different websites. That is where the Colour, Light and Dark themes began.
The early versions were made available for free, with a simple request: if people liked the viewer, they could make a small donation to help with the cost of running our clan servers. In the first year there were over 5,000 downloads, and not one donation. Gamers, eh?
Even though the donations did not arrive, support requests certainly did. Those conversations were useful, because they showed what people actually wanted from a better Discord server viewer.
Features added because people asked
Some users felt safer joining a server that already had an admin online, but had no way of knowing that from the official widget. So admin tags were added. Bot tags followed, then background themes, the option to show all channels or only occupied channels, the “More Online” dropdown for users not currently in a voice channel, auto refresh and more.
Later came the more distinctive themes. The Christmas Theme was created because many clans decorate their websites at that time of year. Halloween followed with more animated seasonal touches. Smokey came later, with a smoke reveal for the server name and a battlefield background with realistic smoke effects bellowing across the scene.
Discord Viewer V4
After the original game server and old clan website closed down, Discord Viewer sat quietly for a while. Everyone had moved to Discord, forums were no longer being used and the original site was no longer needed.
After a recent conversation with my son, Paul, a Microsoft-certified engineer, I decided to overhaul the viewer, register a proper domain and bring the project back properly.
Version 4 is the mature version of that original idea: premium themes, a Settings Panel, DV Colour Studio, live previews and customisation tools that let users shape the viewer without needing to know a single line of code.
View the themes