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Comment by zorkian | Hacker News Reader

(I work at Discord and manage our Infrastructure, Security, and Safety engineering organizations.)

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. :)

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Is it possible those heuristics could accidentally trigger for browsers other than Chrome? I had an old account where I normally used the android app, then one day I logged in with Firefox on desktop (with adblocker) and my account was banned about a minute later.

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?

> 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.

If you actually read the ToS it doesn’t forbid third party clients at all.

Eh, this reads weird to me. So third party clients are "ignored," but things like Better Discord which modify the first party client are explicitly not kosher? I'd love for better clarification around this at some point honestly.

Clearly Discord as a corporation is not ok with third party clients or modifications to the client.

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.

Which brings me back to my initial post, despite the (mind you, high level engineer)'s opinion, you should probably stay way clear. Support will just not help you in certain situations, and it's not worth the risk. Was surprised to even see a reply from him, Discord the organization has typically been _very_ clear it's not kosher.

He might not be around too much longer if it's any consolation.

disclaimer : I'm not involved in the project in any way. I just posted for publicity.

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