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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

Discord explicitly disallows third-party clients, and will outright ban you if it detects API usage that obviously originates from self-bots (eg. posting embeds as a regular user). The ripcord ban might be a temporary ban more reliant on heuristics intended to prevent nitro scams like this one[0] where it performs no out-of-the-ordinary API calls but still purchases a bunch of Nitro gifts.

0: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600683...

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I run the infrastructure department at Discord which includes our anti-spam engineering team --

Just want to +1 what you're saying and confirm that we are never trying to ban third party clients (that aren't self-bots). Honestly, it would be a waste of our time and basically do nothing good for Discord. But as you correctly point out, they do sometimes trip the ever-evolving heuristics we build that try to identify and mitigate spam on the platform.

If this happens to your account you can write in to our TNS team at https://dis.gd/request and they will usually take care of unbanning any accounts that get accidentally caught up in a spam heuristic. It sometimes takes a bit to investigate and respond to these kinds of requests but they generally come out right in the end.

That sounds like maybe Discord actually supports third party clients? Or is there some subtlety to this that I’m missing?

Define 'supports.'

It's still against the TOS -- my point is only that we don't specifically look for third party client users and we have no specific plans to do so.

Just curious -- where in the TOS are third party clients forbidden? I've read it a few times, and I'm not seeing it.

Probably:

> You agree not to (and not to attempt to) (i) use the Service for any use or purpose other than as expressly permitted by these Terms;(ii) copy, adapt, modify, prepare derivative works based upon, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, attempt to discover any source code, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise exploit the Service or any portion of the Service, except as expressly permitted in these Terms;

It's a catch-all but the best restriction that prevents third-party clients is probably 'prepare derivative works based on' and 'reverse engineer' (which you would need if you want your third party client to use any regular client API calls, or if you want to support signing in with the user-facing login page/qr login).

A third party client like Ripcord isn't a derivative work.

It also wasn't made by reverse engineering any of Discord's code. Even if it were, these rules still wouldn't apply to using third party clients.

I got banned a couple months ago seconds after joining the Discord server for a game (https://www.reddit.com/r/LoopHero/comments/lwx8m8/loopers_jo...) and lost all my account information and the servers I had joined, I tried reaching out through that form but got a mail that told that I had indeed abused (without knowing anything about what the abuse was - I barely use discord, as in, I was connecting to chat maybe once a week and am confident I did not violate guidelines, yet this is the mail I had gotten: "Your account was disabled for violating our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines. We’ve reviewed and have confirmed this violation, and we will not be reinstating your account.").

Support n° was 12080748, any chance I could get it back at some point ?

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