will you get banned for using it like you will for every other alt client?
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.
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.
Note that this is a slightly different way to phrase the actual ToS [1]:
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.
This is a wrong paragraph to cite, because "your content" does not include an "account" (the ToS is very clear about this). The relevant paragraph would be the following:
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.
Yes, you likely will. They have heuristics that will snuff out custom clients, and it's frequent to see people get nabbed by this. It's unfortunate, because from an abuse perspective I understand why (they have issues with spam from user accounts joining guilds and spamming users with "Free Nitro" (premium membership for Discord)).
(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. :)
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.
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.
I would better understand why if I wasn't still seeing people's accounts getting hacked regularly and spammers going around with botted accounts. Spammers also generally don't care if their accounts get shut down after a few days.
That's the really frustrating part about this - I understand they want to keep their walled ecosystem/garden/whatever for whatever reasons they want.
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 think the really frustrating part is that tons of knowledge and discourse is getting blackholed into Discord's walled dumpster where it's not searchable and likely to disappear forever within a few years
FTR there is a compact setting for discord. I use it together with 80% zoom so that it has a "normal" font size. Turns it into an actually usable product :).
Maybe I'm the boomer longing for individual/group chats a la MSN messenger 20 years ago.
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.
> 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..
Yes, I remember when this happened. Everyone who got banned had their accounts unbanned (I was not banned however, and I've used Ripcord daily since 2018). You were also just as likely to have gotten banned if you used an outdated Android client.
If they're willing to lie about using a third party client (which is what they did to initially reach front page here many moons ago), I'd wager they were actually attempting to automate their actions instead of "BANNED after manually pressing 6 buttons".
What prevents Discord from doing a synchronized change of their web client and server APIs and using accesses to the old API to detect Ripcord users, then banning them?
Nothing, but in doing so, they'll likely ban non-Ripcord uses who are using outdated clients as well, followed by a bunch of support tickets by confused users.
Yeah, this is what I use, and I've not been banned or anything.
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.
