Why I built Discord Viewer
From TeamSpeak and Mumble viewers to Discord Viewer
My gaming nick is [RaW]Rebel, and many years ago I started a gaming community called RAW Recruits.
In the early days we used TeamSpeak to communicate. It worked well and supported up to 32 users for free, but as the community grew we eventually moved over to Mumble, a free open-source alternative. Both did the job, but neither gave us quite what we wanted on the website side.
TeamSpeak had plenty of third-party web viewers and community-made skins, but Mumble did not have the same level of support. One of our members built a viewer for our website, and I designed skins for it so our site could show who was online, which channels were active, and what was happening in the community without people needing to open the voice app first.
Years later, our members started nagging me to move to Discord. I had never heard of it at the time, and after enough nagging I eventually said to one, “You want this Discord thing? Fine — you install it then.”
He did.
And, as it turns out, they were right. Discord became the better all-in-one community hub, and I should probably have listened sooner.
Discord also had something TeamSpeak and Mumble did not: an official website widget. The problem was that it was deliberately simple. I wanted the same kind of website viewer we had been used to before — something that could show whether friends were online, idle, busy, in voice, or possibly up for a game, without having to open Discord and get distracted on the way.
That is where Discord Viewer came from. It is not about replacing Discord. It is about giving gaming communities and website owners a more flexible way to display their Discord server on their own site.