Last Halloween's 'spooky' Discord notifications confused so many people that it added a pop-up explaining them this year

Is it possible for any person with a computer to count the number of times Windows Update has screwed up something that was working perfectly fine the day before? It's such a bedrock computing experience that last October, when my PC's notification bleeps suddenly sounded like they were being filtered through a dirty fish tank, I made the most natural assumption in the world: Windows had gone and screwed itself up again.

Turns out for once (once!!) I was putting the blame in the wrong place.

It wasn't Windows' audio output that was messed up—it was just Discord's notifications, which had been sneakily spookified for the Halloween season. I wasn't the only person on the PC Gamer team who was completely thrown by the noise and thought their computer sound done broke. The new notification noise being enabled automatically had more than a few people searching for how to turn it off.

Undeterred, Discord has brought Halloween-themed sound effects back for another year and forcibly enabled them for everyone again as a delightful "surprise." But to head off the inevitable confusion and annoyance of holiday events past, this time there's a pop-up to warn everyone about what's happening.

If you want to disable the spooky sounds, go to Settings > Notifications and scroll down until you find the "Event Sound Pack" drop-down, which you can change from Halloween back to Discord Default.

If you do want every message you get on Discord to make your computer sound like Sonic the Hedgehog's drowning death rattle, though, no action is required. Happy Halloween!