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Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

Discord's phone verification is ridiculous, buggy, and insane. Sorry, Discord, but nearly everyone with a phone has a single phone number. Also, once you verify with one phone number there is something like a seven- or ten-day waiting period (forgive me; I don't remember the actual number) before you can use it to verify another account.

Time for Discord to be disrupted!

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Been trying to verify my phone number on my personal account for literally years. Every few months I give it a shot and it’s always the same. The fact that I used my phone number on my work account prevents me from verifying my personal account.

If Discord thinks I’m going to purchase a second phone line to verify my Discord account they’re insane.

There are sites which provide a temporary phone number for account verification for a small fee. I don't know any off the top of my head but they're easy to google. They often also accept crypto if you want to really retain anonymity. Effectively this means you pay $0.50 or whatever per extra account you want to have.

I really wish sites offered this option directly to customers so you wouldn't have to use these shady services. The primary purpose of phone verification is just to make the cost of creating a spambot greater than it's worth for the spammer, so they should have no probably simply accepting money instead of a phone number. The only service I know of that adopts this approach is Threema.

Exactly zero of those sites provide non-voip SMS numbers, which are what's required by Discord and the like. They can detect when a number is really VoIP-based and they block all of them.

Are you sure? I'm not talking about the ones that offer a permanent number that can be reused, just those for one-off verification.

I've verified with them successfully on Discord multiple times.

There are plenty that provide non-voip numbers, but Discord will randomly challenge you later on if you do things like VPN heavily or block fingerprinting and if you can't access the number your account is toast.

> There are sites which provide a temporary phone number for account verification

Wouldn't those all become blocked, flagged, or "already used" pretty quickly?

They do, if you try to verify with one it's likely your account will be locked.

The messed up thing is that I did buy a second phone number, on Mint Mobile. The verification code never came either, even after the number had been active for more than a week.

I also tried several numbers from Twilio.

All of Twilio is banned. Mint blocks some shortcode SMS.

My coworkers looked at me like I’m crazy when I refused to use my personal phone number to verify work accounts.

Unfortunately Discord is the disruptor. To me anyway. Slack and Reddit are the things it is disrupting. It is way more slick and fast than both.

You say this, either not realising or not caring that slack and reddit were the disruptors before discord.

Discord needs to be disrupted.

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