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Thank you for looking into this! My first thought reading their story was "They must've used their discord token in some unusual way."

... which is exactly what I've been doing too: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

Do you happen to know: Is there a risk of Discord banning me for using that tool to automatically export chat logs for processing via a bash script?

Basically, it's a tool to convert discord servers into json.

Their official wiki gives instructions for using your personal user token rather than any bot / API token: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter/wiki/Obtaining...

I admit, I used my personal token without giving it a second thought, even though I should've known better. I haven't been banned, but this story reminded me that I should be careful. Am I being overly paranoid? Is it fine to use your personal token in situations like this, where it's basically a CLI tool?

Also, I run a discord server for ML with ~1k users. If I get banned by Discord, will server ownership transfer to someone else? Or will the whole server get knocked offline too?

Feel free to ignore this if you want -- I'm merely asking in case you happened to know. Happy thanksgiving!

Thanks for looking into it. To be honest, it didn't cross my mind that Ripcord would be the reason why, considering I've used it for years successfully. I only use it because the bloated Discord electron client makes my laptop want to kill itself, but I guess I just won't use Discord on my laptop anymore.

I was using the official client when it happened, but Ripcord was open on my laptop (which I wasn't using) at the time, so it makes sense that it might've sent requests the normal client doesn't when a DM is closed or something. Or maybe you flagged it earlier than that.

Either way, I'm glad to be unbanned now, but this customer service was unacceptably bad. I didn't get a real answer on why I was banned (until HN got the attention of a non-CS rep), and when I was told I would be unbanned, I wasn't and was ghosted afterward.

(Also I'll update the page I wrote)

Huge apologies on this one. Most of your tickets were still in the queue - and no one has gotten to them yet. Some other tickets were closed in error because it looked like the issue was resolved - as your original ticket had mentioned there was an unban.

As for the initial unban, a bug had caused the "successful appeal" macro to apply - but it did not actually unban your account. Hence the confusion.

We are definitely working on improving this and the experience - and I'd like to apologize for the quite honestly shitty experience you had. 2020 has been a wild year for us, and we are still playing catch up operationally on some things - with the rapid surge of usage on the platform.

Unfortunately the people handling these appeals don't have all the information necessary to explain exactly why you were banned - and as a general policy we try to keep those exact details under wraps to thwart attempts from people to try and reverse engineer / circumvent our anti spam. (Of which there are many, so... so many people trying to do this.)

We are working hard on improving our process around this - but it's a rather gargantuan effort. From both the improvement of automation and tooling, and also staffing in general. But we are actively working on it - and a lot of my day job is to make sure we are handling these kinds of cases in a timely manner and also making sure nothing slips through the cracks due to a bug like your tickets have.

Why ban people for using Ripcord? It’s a lightweight discord client. That seems like a tactical mistake. It’s in your interest to let users use popular third party clients that clearly aren’t malicious. Discord doesn’t make money on ads (at least, not in the server) so this also doesn’t warrant a ban.

If I were you, I would be seriously concerned by the fact that they were banned at all. They handled this thing all wrong — they should have been making noise like “Discord bans me for using popular third party client”.

Notice that this story was flagged. But if they had done it that way, it would be news. And discord would look seriously bad.

Please, consider spending an hour investigating whether (a) they were banned solely for using ripcord, and (b) are we communicating to our users that they will be banned for using ripcord?

I don’t understand why nobody seems to have noticed or cared about this angle. This is really not a great look for discord, and it’s the only piece of news that has ever made me reconsider whether it was a good idea to base our 1,000 user ML discord on your platform.

Because I could imagine myself getting banned for this. And if I get banned, as the server owner, I feel queasy not knowing whether that might destroy my server and undo a year of work.

All that said, I wouldn’t be surprised to know that OP was in fact doing something more, not merely “using ripcord”, and that you can’t discuss it publicly. But, if it’s true, I urge you, regardless of your position at the company, to nip this PR disaster before it has a chance to happen. Because literally no one will be sympathetic to any of your justifications for a ripcord ban. They have users’ interests at heart, and they let people on bad laptops use discord. Banning them for normal usage is a huge mistake — it makes no sense that you’d have to “protect” discord via a ban.

We are not banning people for using Ripcord. We are banning people for using our API in ways that our official client doesn't. This is paramount to our spam detection strategy, which is detecting quirks in requests that try and emulate our official client, in order to send spam. There is a very thin line between "scripts meant to try and emulate our client to send spam in an automated fashion" and "third party client" both try and emulate our client, but perhaps for different intent. However, our systems currently treat these as equals. It is for this reason that we have maintained that 3rd party clients are against our ToS - and most warn you before you use them. Given the vanishingly small user-base of 3rd party clients relative to the tremendous amount of spam-bots that constantly are attacking our platform, it's an unfortunate reality that this is bound to happen.

If you are a real human, and not a spam bot, our general policy is to unban and tell you "hey don't do that again." Which is the outcome that should have (and eventually did) happened here.

It seems like it did cross your mind, since your title is "Discord bans me for using their official client," which multiple people noted is rather ... unusual. :)

This was a missed opportunity to bring attention to the fact that Discord is banning people for using Ripcord, which seems kind of crazy:

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617699

It may seem like it did, but ultimately I know what did and did not cross my mind. It is shitty of Discord to do that, though.

Something that could be missing from this story is that they may have been in the official web client, but they may have executed custom code (for example, console JavaScript, an add-on, user-extension, etc), that resulted in this, since obviously the web browser will make whichever API requests it is instructed to make.

So i could imagine a user wants to do something that Discord makes it difficult to do (perhaps they want to search channel logs locally, or delete all of their messages in a channel, or amny other things), and if I wanted to do that myself I might just throw some JavaScript into the console in a for-loop, which would obviously result in irregular API requests.

No, this was not the case. A 3rd party client was very much involved here.

> So i could imagine a user wants to do something that Discord makes it difficult to do (perhaps they want to search channel logs locally, or delete all of their messages in a channel, or amny other things), and if I wanted to do that myself I might just throw some JavaScript into the console in a for-loop, which would obviously result in irregular API requests.

We don't really weigh sus requests too highly (to the point of acct termination) unless they are likely to impact other users, or be used to move laterally on the platform (join servers, send friend requests, open new DMs... etc.)

Thanks for the quick update, that's reassuring. I would still be a bit worried myself of a potential ban if I did try to perform such examples (in my parent comment), as the proprietary nature of the platform can make such actions necessary in order to have sufficient control of one's data and environment. I do acknowledge how difficult dealing with abuse at-scale can be too, so sometimes unfortunate situations are partially-necessary as compromises here. I do appreciate reassurances that things aren't as bad as some may claim though, since Discord is particularly worrying for me wrt the centralization and level of control they will have over the next years/decades of the entire online social space.

I wonder why the user didn't get a better reason for their ban? These unclear explanations make it really difficult for users to follow-up on bans.