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I wonder if discord can now be the subject of the EU interop directive. Namely, core communication functions should be available in open, simple (but good enoug

I wonder if discord can now be the subject of the EU interop directive. Namely, core communication functions should be available in open, simple (but good enough to do the job) and stable in time protocols. I guess, some core subset of xmpp should do the trick (or maybe even simpler, namely without xml?) The bit which is troublesome is account creation. Namely, it should be possible with a noscript/basic (x)html browser. Now I wonder how they "filter" click farms (with humans or human trained mouse/keyboard AIs on blink/geeko/webkit) via swarms of compromised devices or via public VPNs. A wild guess: post creation account behavior should give in enough hints at an account being "fake" or not. People with false positive won't be happy though.

pabs3 4y ago
There are already reimplementations of the client side of some of their protocols (which are just JSON HTTP requests), including account registration, without running any JavaScript (parsing the JS is needed though). These are of course against the ToS and can get you banned though. https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/librecaptcha/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/librecaptcha/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/
- sylware 4y ago
  The EU directive is supposed to do exactly that: protect against those abusive TOS and technical interop blockade (closed protocols, forcing ppl to use beyond sanity complex and huge software).
shreddit 4y ago
> The bit which is troublesome is account creation. Namely, it should be possible with a noscript/basic (x)html browser. Why should it though? Discord can’t be used without JavaScript.
- pabs3 4y ago
  It definitely can, see my other comment.
  - sylware 4y ago
    I think a TLS irc gateway should be enough for text chat. For audio/video setup signaling then streaming, I wonder what are the simplest open protocols out there, but good enough to do the job.
Natfan 4y ago
Not that this isn't a very interesting point re: open systems, I fail to see how it's relevant to the post, which is clearly just reverse engineering a "party mode" feature which was made as part of 7th Discord's birthday.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> (or maybe even simpler, namely without xml?) I implemented a fair amount of XMPP for a web client back around 2012, and I gotta say, the XML wasn't a problem, at all. Actually the whole thing was a lot easier than comments about how awful XMPP is might lead one to expect—I know a lot of the complexity is in extensions, which I barely touched (but some!), but some people paint the whole protocol as unworkably bad, and that's simply not true. As for the XML side of it in particular, XML compresses well, isn't slow to write by hand with modern editor features, and working with it in a browser is great because—and maybe this isn't common knowledge?—you can tell the browser to build a DOM out of XML, not just html, so you can let it handle parsing and constructing or modifying messages, meaning you can get pretty damn far implementing XMPP with surprisingly few lines of code and no external libs.
- MattJ100 4y ago
  Indeed. I work with XMPP daily and share your views. However XML can be horrific, and I do dread working with it in many applications (remember SOAP?). I assume people transfer these experiences easily. One thing that can be annoying is that some environments don't have streaming ("SAX") parsers readily available. That's less of a problem these days, but framing would have helped implementers in that regard. However we do have XMPP-over-websocket defined these days (which doesn't have to be used only in a browser) and that has framing.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > Indeed. I work with XMPP daily and share your views. However XML can be horrific, and I do dread working with it in many applications (remember SOAP?). I assume people transfer these experiences easily. Oh, sure, XML can be a nightmare, it was just good enough in XMPP's case that I doubt anything else would have been much easier/better. There were some minor annoyances and awkwardness, but that's hard to completely eliminate in that kind of thing. Its using XML wouldn't have made any list of notable challenges on that project, for sure. > However we do have XMPP-over-websocket defined these days (which doesn't have to be used only in a browser) and that has framing. Oh wow, nice. IIRC I used Comet(?), which was my only big client-side dependency, to talk to a very simple bridge I wrote (probably Nodejs?) and OpenFire for the daemon, solely because it was stupid-easy to write a custom auth class (it's Java) so it could share accounts with our broader product without needing to modify any other parts of the system. Having some of that—at least the HTTP-bridge portion—already covered would have made it even easier.

pabs3 4y ago

There are already reimplementations of the client side of some of their protocols (which are just JSON HTTP requests), including account registration, without running any JavaScript (parsing the JS is needed though). These are of course against the ToS and can get you banned though. https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/librecaptcha/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/librecaptcha/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/

sylware 4y ago
The EU directive is supposed to do exactly that: protect against those abusive TOS and technical interop blockade (closed protocols, forcing ppl to use beyond sanity complex and huge software).

shreddit 4y ago

> The bit which is troublesome is account creation. Namely, it should be possible with a noscript/basic (x)html browser. Why should it though? Discord can’t be used without JavaScript.

pabs3 4y ago
It definitely can, see my other comment.
- sylware 4y ago
  I think a TLS irc gateway should be enough for text chat. For audio/video setup signaling then streaming, I wonder what are the simplest open protocols out there, but good enough to do the job.

Natfan 4y ago

Not that this isn't a very interesting point re: open systems, I fail to see how it's relevant to the post, which is clearly just reverse engineering a "party mode" feature which was made as part of 7th Discord's birthday.

yamtaddle 4y ago

> (or maybe even simpler, namely without xml?) I implemented a fair amount of XMPP for a web client back around 2012, and I gotta say, the XML wasn't a problem, at all. Actually the whole thing was a lot easier than comments about how awful XMPP is might lead one to expect—I know a lot of the complexity is in extensions, which I barely touched (but some!), but some people paint the whole protocol as unworkably bad, and that's simply not true. As for the XML side of it in particular, XML compresses well, isn't slow to write by hand with modern editor features, and working with it in a browser is great because—and maybe this isn't common knowledge?—you can tell the browser to build a DOM out of XML, not just html, so you can let it handle parsing and constructing or modifying messages, meaning you can get pretty damn far implementing XMPP with surprisingly few lines of code and no external libs.

MattJ100 4y ago
Indeed. I work with XMPP daily and share your views. However XML can be horrific, and I do dread working with it in many applications (remember SOAP?). I assume people transfer these experiences easily. One thing that can be annoying is that some environments don't have streaming ("SAX") parsers readily available. That's less of a problem these days, but framing would have helped implementers in that regard. However we do have XMPP-over-websocket defined these days (which doesn't have to be used only in a browser) and that has framing.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Indeed. I work with XMPP daily and share your views. However XML can be horrific, and I do dread working with it in many applications (remember SOAP?). I assume people transfer these experiences easily. Oh, sure, XML can be a nightmare, it was just good enough in XMPP's case that I doubt anything else would have been much easier/better. There were some minor annoyances and awkwardness, but that's hard to completely eliminate in that kind of thing. Its using XML wouldn't have made any list of notable challenges on that project, for sure. > However we do have XMPP-over-websocket defined these days (which doesn't have to be used only in a browser) and that has framing. Oh wow, nice. IIRC I used Comet(?), which was my only big client-side dependency, to talk to a very simple bridge I wrote (probably Nodejs?) and OpenFire for the daemon, solely because it was stupid-easy to write a custom auth class (it's Java) so it could share accounts with our broader product without needing to modify any other parts of the system. Having some of that—at least the HTTP-bridge portion—already covered would have made it even easier.