Unlimited cloud storage, hosted on a Discord channel | Hacker News Reader

Unlimited cloud storage, hosted on a Discord channel

github.com

17 pointsdisbox14 comments

This seems kinda unethical. This will just result in some developers at Discord spending time creating a solution to detect such abuse, or everyone will just lose unlimited message history. Of course, anyone offering a service with storage like this should expect this to happen eventually, but trying to take advantage of it in a way that wasn't intended doesn't sit right with me. I sorta understand making some proof of concept of this, but why make official "Disbox" accounts here on HN and GitHub for your service that will surely get blocked soon?

Your website even says "As free as it gets. No ads, no subscriptions, and no fees. All of our features are free to use, forever.". It seems disingenuous to market this as some kind of "service" that will be around forever.

Hi, I appreciate the feedback. Here's some clarifications:

- Making extra accounts was purely done for anonymity. I don't have any plans to make a brand out of this.

The decision to make a rather fancy site showcasing it's features was purely made because I wanted to experiment with React development and building a product page. I'm sorry if it looked as I was trying anything else.

- This is not meant to be a project that will operate at high scale and hurt Discord or cost them a lot. I understand the concerns and if Discord ever reaches out or the service gets too big I will reconsider things.

Of course, the big advantage here is that if this is how it'll end, the files will still be accessible on Discord itself.

I would be very surprised if this ever reached a scale that will cause discord to change their policy, and I hope it doesn't reach that stage.

- With that in mind, I agree the "forever" wording doesn't really fit, and I will change it.

This is why we can't have nice things.

First you wrote this code, which blatantly violates the TOS, then you shout into a megaphone that you've done this by posting your own app with clickbait title on HN. Now, because of your actions, Discord will just kill this within a month or two. Shame on you.

Update, I have reported this program:

https://dis.gd/request

While this is a pretty cool project it's also a great way to ruin free message history.

(Not really blaming OP, this was inevitable)

I can remember when Gmail was first released, someone made an app that used Gmail as storage

I remember messing around with this.

I put multiple gmail accounts into a RAID array, just to see if I could.

I declined to use it though because I didn't trust it, and it was slow, but it did work.

I hope they do ruin free message history. The lack of an option to limit Discord's message history to something sane like one year is a travesty for privacy.

Discord would probably still keep message history but lock it behind a subscription like how Slack works.

Anything that prompts Discord to provide more options regarding message retention would be a step forward. Instant messages were never designed to be a permanent storage medium for information archival. I don't think anybody should need to worry whether a data breach will unearth something they said in a private chat fifteen years ago, just because their service provider didn't offer a practical way to automatically delete old messages.

Looking at the votes though, I suppose HN does get use out of Discord's unlimited message history. Personally I'd rather have more control over my data than that.

While I don't disagree with other commenters in that if this was ever widely used it could lead to the loss of functionality for all discord users and that anyone who did use it for anything more then experimentation would be abusing the good will of discord, I also think that it was a neat project and should have been better received by the community.

This is Hacker News. Maybe I'm too old school but this project feels exactly like something that would have been written up in the/one of the original "mainstream" hacker news sources, 2600 Magazine. It is the embodiment of the hacker/tinkerer spirit taking something that was made for one thing and building something entirely different on it.

I guess the biggest feedback to the OP is maybe if things were presented in more of a proof of concept demo with disclaimers type of way rather then "use this service" type of way it would be better received.

That said, while I don't plan on actually using it, I still think it was a neat idea and kudos for getting it working. Thank you for sharing!

Thank you so much for the comment and the feedback. It really means a lot and I appreciate it.

I think you're absolutely right with the feedback, I shouldn't have built and presented like this.

This is abuse and ends in one way and one way only lol. Why did you do this?

Please do not abuse them.

This would be really nice as a plugin for rclone.

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