Rainway forces signing up to Discord in order to delete your account | Hacker News Reader

Rainway forces signing up to Discord in order to delete your account

rainway.com

77 pointshddherman39 comments

Hi, CEO of Rainway here.

You actually don’t need to sign up for Discord, emailing support@rainway.com is enough. You can also close your account from the app.

Discord is a convenient medium since our audience largely engages with us through it daily. I’ll update the article to reflect all the valid options.

And to be clear, our business model isn’t in data nor do we share data with others. Outside of basic engagement telemetry we don’t even know what games you own.

If that's the case, it should be covered in your official documentation. The thread title is spot-on if you don't happen to magically guess that that's also an option.

So what is your business model?

Enterprise customers who integrate our technology into their applications and services.

What is this company's business model?

It makes no sense to me how they plan to make money with something they advertise as completely free

Like with most 'free' services, I get the impression that they plan on selling your data. https://rainway.com/privacy/

At a guess the idea is to be bought by Microsoft

Maybe they’re just trying to get bought out?

Maybe this thread is the answer?

Maybe Discord should make their Delete your account feature being a signup to Rainway, that would be fair enough

I'd like to comment that you can use Discord without an account, but yeah that does seem a bit weird

When you click on the link supplied in the Rainway guide, you will be directed to a Discord sign-up form where you have to enter an username and check the box that says that you agree to the terms of service and privacy policy. I'm not familiar with all the configuration options Discord can offer, but in this case it seems you can't bypass account creation here.

Ah they might've changed it to combat bad actors, I haven't tried to use Discord without an account for a while now so sorry about outdated info

There are several options the 'server' admins can choose from. Some let you do everything without account, some only let you read, and others require an account for everything.

I think you are right. You can still have one off sessions but maybe depends on the privacy settings of the server.

You can view the server, but you can't write anything, and you can't use reactions, so you will actually need an account to open a ticket.

I'm not accusing hddherman of bad behaviour, but seems like this could be a decent way to advertise/astroturf without raising suspicion. Bring up flaw that, while bad, is irrelevant to most of the target market, and then splatter links over Reddit and HN.

The first thing I did after clicking reading the linked page was to go to their homepage and see what the hell Rainway even was. I don't need the service but it seems potentially useful to many.

Exactly this. This is an ad, nothing more. “Company uses discord for support system” is uninteresting.

What alternative do you propose for situations where Company A does some shady stuff? Are all the posts about Google/Facebook/Amazon doing illegal things also ads?

An ad that is essentially "company does illegal stuff, buy there"?

> see what the hell Rainway even was

What's up with all those game streaming services that seem to be popping up everywhere? Was I just not paying attention or is it the new hype of the year?

Streaming games and watching game streams is what the kids do these days.

Yes - intentional or not - the same thing happened with the bulletproof glass on the Tesla Cybertruck.

This is why I'm so glad the GDPR exists. They list their email address in the privacy policy so a quick email should suffice.

Obviously you can raise complaints if they do not delete your information as the GDPR does not mandate or expect the individual to have to agree to another parties privacy policy to exercise your rights.

You also have rights to access et al and whilst unlikely it's possible failure to act within this law might cause issues later down the line.

I also found the e-mail after searching the website for a while. It's an odd choice for the location, I assumed that such contact e-mails would be located under Support or Contact sections.

The problem with the GDPR is that there is no enforcement. At best, you're relying on the other party acting in good faith and wanting to respect the regulation.

I've had companies that breached the regulation, complained to them with no effect, raised it with the ICO, they got back to me, upheld my complaint, reached out to the company and still nothing despite them being based in the UK thus enforcing fines is trivial.

There is nothing preventing this company from getting back to you saying that "for security reasons (or other BS reason) the Discord-based process is the only way to delete your account" and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it because even the relevant authorities don't seem to care.

There has been a number of fines. British Airways is on top of the leaderboard this far with €200M.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

I'm not sure about how efficient the process is, but there is some enforcement.

> I'm not sure about how efficient the process is, but there is some enforcement.

At least in Germany, it's okay in some states, essentially non-existant in others. I've reported some serious breaches, and about half of the responses were within 5 days, the other half haven't happened yet, after > 12 months. Reminding them just lead to getting an official case number, so they didn't forget, they just can't/won't enforce.

Is there even a single fine about Facebook/Google Analytics/Mixpanel/etc tracking? This is one of the major problems with online privacy right now, should be very easy to detect (run a web crawler and look for the analytics code being loaded) and yet nothing is being done.

Discord isn't as bad as far as signups go. I believe you can still use some channels without verifying your email. Meanwhile, telegram and skype require an install. I always dread dealing with a company that only responds to skype requests.

there's a lot of places like this

scaleway force you to add your billing information to delete your account

It makes sense to a point because Discord is neat and having a ticket system in there is convenient, plus it seems to be a service aimed at gamers, most of which will have a Discord account already (if they're on PC anyway).

Why do they need a ticket system for account deletion? Won’t a normal delete button be good enough? They shouldn’t force their own internal process on to customers, they could easily have that button use the Discord API to create a ticket.

Account deletion isn't a very glamorous project and isn't something you can put on your list of yearly accomplishments for a raise. This probably rolled downhill until customer service asked the front end team to put up a static webpage with some crude instructions. I've seen worse, but rarely.

Well, it should be if you ask me. When a user wants to delete his account, it usually is because he isn't happy with the company or the service. I could imagine that by making the deletion as painless and fast as possible, a company could go a long way to regain that user later. Some "sorry to see you leave, but we try to make as easy for you as possible" message and maybe even a goody the user can use elsewhere. After all, the account deletion is an opportunity to get in direct contact with your users in a critical point of the relationship.

Customer retention is a pretty critical business function, but in my experience the people approving raises etc generally have a much tighter relationship with the sales team. New revenue is a sales function, customer retention is a operations function. A big part of Steve Ballmer becoming CEO (and also his decline) was his sales first strategy.

Windows 8 might have been a huge flop for Ballmer over the long-run (arguably why he was asked to resign), but I bet the people working on Windows 8 features saw their careers advance much faster than the equally talented people fixing driver bugs for Windows 7. And the Windows 7 driver team is probably going to think designing a new ticketing system for deleting accounts is beneath them and let that project roll downhill. And so on.

They’ve clearly went through the process of setting this up with Discord, so it sounds like they thought about this. This day and age, I almost expect every product to have a delete button.

The ticket process would involve the CS agent pressing a delete account button, so the majority of the work is already done, exposing the button to the user directly is very easy.

Discord has(had?) the worst account management system I've ever experienced. I've never seen a site that makes it so hard to log in/sign up/reset passwords, etc. I think it was fixed for the most part now but I'm still bitter about discord.

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