Automated user accounts or "self-bots" are against Discord's Terms of Service. I am not responsible for any loss caused by using "self-bots" or Discordo.
>All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.
https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248
Thus it looks like in practice you can't have a client that has local chat history, local search, or just better information density on the screen, and simultaneously hope to not have your account nuked.
You may not copy, modify, create derivative works based upon, distribute, sell, lease, or sublicense any of our software or services. You also may not reverse engineer or decompile our software or services, attempt to do so, or assist anyone in doing so, unless you have our written consent or applicable law permits it.
In the other words, they want to disallow derivative works as long as law permits. There are two possible workarounds:
1. If your software doesn't actually depend on Discord clients and servers at all, for example AutoHotKey macros, you would be probably fine as they wouldn't be derivative works. Legal 3rd-party clients may be created with this way (I haven't seen any such attempts though); create a virtual desktop where the official client runs and reconstruct an alternative interface from screen captures, in principle.
2. They can only do things allowed by the law. Reverse engineering in particular is allowed in many jurisdictions when it's necessary to operate with other programs or devices, and a virtual desktop mentioned in 1 may qualify for this (but: IANAL). If a broader allowance is desired though, the law has to be changed.
>We reserve the right to block, remove, and/or permanently delete your content for any reason, including breach of these terms, our Community Guidelines, our other policies, or any applicable law or regulation.
Subject to applicable law, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate your account and/or your access to some or all of our services with or without notice, at our discretion, including if:
- You breach these terms, our policies, or additional terms that apply to specific products.
- We’re required to do so to comply with a legal requirement or court order.
- We reasonably believe termination is necessary to prevent harm to you, us, other users, or third parties.
- Your account has been inactive for more than two years.
Given the current ToS using a third-party client already qualifies as an explicit reason for the account suspension and it doesn't seem to be wise to risk that. Yes, they still reserve the right to suspend your account for other unstated reasons, but that's another matter.
I just wish I could customize discord's GUI so:
-The GUI have so less empty space
-Have a "compact" version where it just shows the users in the channel and who's speaking, and compact view of a chat channel.
The default window is just an absolute PAIN, it doesn't go smaller than a certain size and it just has so much irrelevant information not pertinent to the voice/video call I'm in or who I'm chatting with.
Maybe I'm the boomer longing for individual/group chats a la MSN messenger 20 years ago. :O
I know, right? The thing is, the vast majority of the generation using this don't have these qualms, it works for them. This must be how it felt like when we stopped used corded phones, haha. Or hand written stuff to type writers..
Since this is relevant to the other discussion going on here: To my knowledge, Microsoft has never banned accounts for using third-party MSN clients; and there were definitely plenty of them back then. I even wrote my own and used it right up until they shut down the servers. MS had updated the protocol many times, but MS being the "good old MS", highly valued backwards compatibility and up to the day they shut down the servers, they still negotiated and worked with one of the very first protocol versions.
We currently don't intentionally block or disable third party clients or action the accounts of people who use them.
We do monitor the traffic of spammers and we build heuristics around how to identify them -- and sometimes third party clients get caught up in that. Cold comfort, I know, but it's not us trying to block/come after well-behaved third party clients.
Anyway, to OP, good luck with discordo! For one of our internal hack weeks a few years ago I tried to build an RFC1459 compliant Discord gateway... it was a fun POC, but definitely lots of rough edges because the paradigms don't exactly match up. :)
But the engineers who would be in charge of enforcing those rules do not spend time explicitly seeking out third party clients or modifications. They instead look for "non-standard behavior", which may incidentally catch either.
PS: This is why you don't speak about your employer's business unless asked to by your employer.
At a business level, can you share why the ToS forbids third party clients at all? We all know that "trusting the client" is not a viable security plan, so why does it matter what client people use?
Because if something breaks for a user and they complain, the company cannot diagnose it or fix it. Simply dealing with the complaints would be an extra cost on the company.
And when they decide to change part of the API, you have an unknown number of users that would be broken.
I have been locked out of my account, though. There was a week during which I got locked out, and had to re-authenticate with 2FA to get into my account, once a day. However, they eventually stopped doing that after enough support tickets rolled in, and Ripcord has been rippin' along ever since.