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..
