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Discord bans me for using their official client
- danuker 6y agoTime to check out Mastodon, Pleroma, and other distributed social networks. Walled gardens with chilling suppression begone!
- stormcode 6y agoMastodon can de-platform you just as easily as Discord if they don't like what you say.
- jdu9 6y agoMastodon and Pleroma are Twitter alternatives, not Discord alternatives. The chat functionality for them is awfully implemented last time I checked. But then again it's a different target audience.
- danuker 6y agoYou are right. XMPP and IRC then.
- danuker 6y agoYou mention GDPR. You do have a right to your data as per EU rules. Feel free to talk with your state data protection authority.
- londons_explore 6y agoYou also have a right to have access to the data they used to make the decision to ban you, and an explanation of it in a way a reasonable person could understand. Articles 13–15 provide rights to 'meaningful information about the logic involved' in automated decisions.
- jolmg 6y agoThis might have been downvoted because it seems the user in the US, and the company is also in the US. GDPR doesn't seem to apply here. Or maybe you were being sarcastic by saying "state data protection authority", but it's not obvious enough.
- that_guy_iain 6y agoI did a GDPR complaint because GitHub locked me out of my account because the 2fa failed. It took the dutch authority 18 months for them to decide they couldn't be bothered to make GitHub provide my data. GitHub also lied and claimed my repositories weren't personal data even tho my name and email are all over them. Also if you talk to your agency you can't actually appeal the decision because your agency didn't decide anything, they have to follow it on to the agency that is responsible for that country based on which country the company is based in.
- danuker 6y agoWell, there go my hopes.
- rgbrenner 6y agoDiscord is american; and Anna's github says she's in Michigan. She's not covered by EU laws.
- atian 6y agoThe author seems to have used the auth from the official client for some application. Discord indiscriminately bans due to API abuse.
- millzlane 6y agoHow did you come to that conclusion from the OP? I've read and re-read it. That's a good guess, but nothing indicates the scenario you mentioned.
- pyr0hu 6y agoWhat? The author used the QR scan feature from the official Discord mobile app to try to log in on the desktop client.
- atian 6y ago> After closing maybe around seven of them, Discord booted me back to the login screen. This seems to have occurred after the account was banned.
- judge2020 6y agoThe Discord client will do a full reload if it starts getting bad status codes from the API, eg. 403 or 401 (due to a password reset or account termination), so that's probably what happened here.
- gumby 6y agowhy do you think this? I didn't get this from the article.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ubercow13 6y agoIt's probably not related to what you were doing when it happened (closing DMs). It's just that their ML batch job happened to run then, and aggregating your previous behaviours and network access patterns across the whole app and maybe other things it 'observed' about your use of your computer after you gave its client unmitigated access to everything on your PC (I digress), it decided based on some opaque trained model that you were a spambot.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoI agree this (automated abuse detection lagged realtime, flagged some past behavior) is likely. I also suspect whatever else may be the case, the lack of detailed explanation is probably because whoever is fielding support simply doesn’t know (and may not be able to know) what was flagged.
- snuffaluffagus 6y ago10166788 what does this mean? some sort of timestamp? date? Timestamp 1016678800 Time (UTC) Thu Mar 21 02:46:40 2002 UTC Time (-0800) Wed Mar 20 18:46:40 2002 -0800
- ubercow13 6y agoIt's a support ticket number
- snuffaluffagus 6y ago::tips hat::
- ch33zer 6y agoWhenever it comes to gaming I just assume anyone saying they've been banned unfairly deserved it. League, Dota, FPSs, and discord too apparently all have this weird group of people who get banned for doing shady shit then go on forums and complain. People being banned from services unfairly (and without explanation) is a real problem, that doesn't mean that everytime someone complains they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
- judge2020 6y agoWhile we won't get to know the full story and the entire history of this person's Discord account (to side with him one way or the other), this piece still serves to show the downsides of a centralized service which has to do its own abuse management - and at discord's scale[0], there's bound to be a lot of mistakes. On a side-note, running a modded client (like Better Discord) at any time is a risk to your account. Some people have reported getting banned for year-old messages that used a plugin which allowed creating embeds inside the discord client (you otherwise can't create custom embeds on a non-bot account)[1]. 0: https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Our%20metrics https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Our%20metrics 1: https://github.com/Fraserbc/BetterDiscord-Embeds#user-content-disclaimer:~:text=It%20is%20possible%20that%20Discord%20will%20ban%20and%20delete%20your%20account%20for%20using%20this%20plugin https://github.com/Fraserbc/BetterDiscord-Embeds#user-conten...
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago> show the downsides of a centralized service which has to do its own abuse management And platforms that have no censorship also have downsides. There’s no perfect solution.
- threatofrain 6y agoAnd when others shame, criticize, or shun you for your speech, people also consider that within the framing of censorship. The only speech which is safe from blowback is to yourself.
- 6y ago
- judge2020 6y ago> Discord did not deign to reply to my last ticket at all, but I'm filing another one today This doesn't do much anyways. Whether it be Discord or any other support helpdesk, their tier 1 support will just merge the new request into your already-existing request and you're back to square one in getting a reply. After doing this enough times they might just completely block your email since it really is spam at that point.
- woah 6y agoWhat's up with the odd focus on "using the official client"? Why would anyone doubt she was using the official client? What else would someone be using? To me it sounds like maybe she had been accessing Discord with something other than the official client, but not at the exact moment she was banned.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- devmor 6y agoThat's the feeling I got as well. 9 times out of 10 when I see "I was banned for doing NOTHING wrong" it's just a lie.
- michaelhoffman 6y agoThis is weird. This person may not know the reason they were banned or there may not have been any reason. But clearly "using their official client" isn't the reason for the ban and I don't see any indication that was stated or implied by Discord.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoThe same day, I responded to their email, stating that their explanation wasn't good enough and that I hadn't done anything wrong. I demanded they give me an actual reason and reinstate my account. A tip for nerds like me: In situations like this, try to act like a real person. Support people especially have to deal with endless streams of annoyed, angry, or abusive people who will treat them like dirt. Anyone who's worked in a grocery store, etc will know what I mean. Something like "Hey, thanks for looking into this, but I am very confused -- It seems like I was banned due to a software glitch. Would you mind double checking why I was banned?" Boom, you've turned it from an unhappy angry interaction into a mystery they might be inclined to pursue. I've seen this technique work wonders. And sure, you could argue that it's their job, so this shouldn't matter. But it seems to matter a lot, at least in my experience.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 6y agoThe other technique to try is to ask a question about how the support worker would go about it: "I don't know your systems and I don't know how to navigate your procedures, so if you were me in this situation what would you be saying, and where would you be sending those messages?"
- jhgg 6y agoHi, I lead the anti abuse team at Discord. I've looked into this case a bit more in-depth to see what was going on. Although I can't get into specifics, given the poster was kind enough to provide us with ticket IDs, I was able to look into this a bit further to see what actually triggered the account ban. > Discord bans me for using their official client This statement is false, unfortunately - and our abuse detection flagged the account for using our API in ways that our official clients do not. In this case, there was indeed a 3rd party client involved. Although our rules and heuristics do not specifically target 3rd party clients, it does target things that "don't look like what our official client does" which is very effective at targeting spambots that are constantly waging war against our platform - but has the unfortunate side-effect that using a 3rd party client in certain ways may lead to account termination. In general, appealing the ban would lead to an unban (we're humans after all, and we're trying to stop spammers/bad actors, and that's what this system is meant to stop.) I am going to following up with our T&S team to understand why this case saw such a rocky conclusion.
- ve55 6y agoSomething that could be missing from this story is that they may have been in the official web client, but they may have executed custom code (for example, console JavaScript, an add-on, user-extension, etc), that resulted in this, since obviously the web browser will make whichever API requests it is instructed to make. So i could imagine a user wants to do something that Discord makes it difficult to do (perhaps they want to search channel logs locally, or delete all of their messages in a channel, or amny other things), and if I wanted to do that myself I might just throw some JavaScript into the console in a for-loop, which would obviously result in irregular API requests.
- jhgg 6y agoNo, this was not the case. A 3rd party client was very much involved here. > So i could imagine a user wants to do something that Discord makes it difficult to do (perhaps they want to search channel logs locally, or delete all of their messages in a channel, or amny other things), and if I wanted to do that myself I might just throw some JavaScript into the console in a for-loop, which would obviously result in irregular API requests. We don't really weigh sus requests too highly (to the point of acct termination) unless they are likely to impact other users, or be used to move laterally on the platform (join servers, send friend requests, open new DMs... etc.)
- millzlane 6y agoOP claims that Discord banned him for using their Official Client. OP states they never gave them a "real" reason. But they're certain it was for using their official client. The skeptic in me thinks that the specific use of the terminology "their official client" is suspicious. How do they know?
- xnyan 6y agoOP omitted “at the time” most likely. It’s a bad idea for anti-abuse engines to ban in realtime because it’s too strong of a signal to those trying to circumvent it. OP most likely used a 3rd party client in the past and got banned later.
- Brian_K_White 6y agoThe new hell, same as the old hell. At least when github ('s inscrutible AI) banned me in error they answered the email and reinstated the account in about a day. I had only just barely cloned everything to gitlab and edited a bunch of links to s/github/gitlab before github was working again. Maybe that is factor, that an effortless drop-in replacement existed, and the original of all the content I cared about was still on my own machines and github only hosts a copy, so they have meaningful competition. They never did say what I supposedly did wrong though, other than a vague suggestion about possible spamming. Merely when a human looked at the case they corrected it. I asked a couple times what triggered it and they simply didn't asnswer that part. So it was some ML black box. They themselves don't even know why they did it. Same thing is probably the case here, only with even fewer or shittier humans in the loop, and holding something hostage that you can't take elsewhere. Actually hostage isn't even the right word because even kidnappers/hackers respond to the email and return your stuff for a price. These guys aren't even doing that.