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Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

139 points by exists 1y ago

encom 1y ago
>Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown I was excited there for a second.
czk 1y ago
I've often thought about the amount of data that these bot services must have access to (they could log millions of private channels), data thats silo'd away from search engines/indexers and could be pretty valuable to sell to someone training an AI model, or doing other things. A while back there was a service called 'Spy Pet' that ran hundreds of discord bots selling access to searchable data logs. I wonder if discord is primarily concerned about the massive logging capability of services like these.
- haneul 1y ago
  Yea the data market from discord bots is quite a thing. Really concerning, imo.
- areyourllySorry 1y ago
  spy.pet used user accounts. botghost uses bot accounts, for which you need to enable certain intents in order to read messages.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  One of the things I found surprising is that many of Discord's bot permissions are not scoped to servers at all. I've been asked to authenticate with a bot service for one server numerous times that requests access to things pertaining to all servers I use, and that seems very wrong.
- fakedang 1y ago
  This isn't Discord doing this out of the goodness of their privacy-concerned hearts. They'll eventually try to do a Salesforce-Slack kind of play here by preventing external entities from monetizing on their platform. Tech will turn into a casino where the house (aka the platform) always wins.
- paxys 1y ago
  After Reddit's API shutdown the writing was on the wall. Services like Reddit and Discord are huge data troves, and now this data has a concrete $$ value. Offering unrestricted API access means that third parties will store and sell this data. So shutting them down (and monetizing your data yourself) is an obvious decision. Slack recently changed its ToS to disallow this as well - https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals-using-slack-data-information-reports-2025-06-11/ https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals....
- cedws 1y ago
  Some of them are absolutely up to dodgy stuff, they have access to countless private chats in servers where the users/admins are unaware messages are being sent to a third party. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these bots are ran by state actors.
- gizmo686 1y ago
  Discord locked down the ability of bots to read message contents back in 2022. For bots used in over 100 servers, doing so now requires explicit approval from Discord (in addition to the standard approval the server owner would need to give). For most bots, the rest of the bot API is rich enough for this to not be an issue. That cuts out a lot of the value for LLM training; and will reduce the blast radius if Discord ever decides to fully pull the plug on message access.
  - HWR_14 1y ago
    To read message archives or to read messages in realtime? Because I was working on a sideproject that required monitoring the messages in a channel, not just slash commands.
    - gizmo686 1y ago
      Read messages in realtime.
      - HWR_14 1y ago
        At least I know now before I put more effort into it. Thank you for the warning.
  - czk 1y ago
    this is good to know! thank you for the info
- mystified5016 1y ago
  Yup. I ran a bot a long time ago and it was pretty trivial to quietly scrape the entire history of any server it was in. I only ever did this on my own server for good reason, but still. Really a bot doesn't have any more access than a user does. You as a user can manually scroll back through the entire server history, you can check on roles, and you can see the names of channels that are hidden from you. But it becomes a problem when bots are doing this at scale and selling the resulting data. Sort of like some other bots that people like to argue are doing the same thing a human could.
koakuma-chan 1y ago
Sorry for your loss. I too virtually stopped using Discord in favor of, mostly, Reddit (lesser of two evils).
- zapzupnz 1y ago
  I'm not sure how the two are remotely comparable. I don't go to Reddit for live discussion, voice and video chat, etc.
  - koakuma-chan 1y ago
    I used to go to Discord for help, and now I go to Reddit for help.
    - zapzupnz 1y ago
      That makes sense.
- anonym29 1y ago
  The lesser of two evils is still evil. Make Forums Great Again!
  - gagik_co 1y ago
    Agree! I finally set up my own NodeBB forum for my app support and I'm very excited to move in this direction. It was a nicer experience than expected.
- immibis 1y ago
  Reddit is more evil than Discord IMO - they did this years ago, tried to shut down all bots and unofficial apps, and they heavily manipulate consensus opinion, which Discord doesn't as far as I know.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  I can't think of any way to look at this where Reddit is the lesser evil. I respect the position but I don't understand it. Reddit and Twitter reached the floor of enshittification with their respective 2023 actions. Discord and others may follow the precedent and get there, but my usage hasn't been affected yet. The Discord official client, unlike Reddit/Twitter, is still ad-free except for the occasional icon highlighting their "Shop" tab.
neom 1y ago
I'm building a lot on discord right now, I like it but I keep getting scared, then I think, eh, irc servers could have gone away too I suppose, in fact they did, much was lost. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of nuanced thinking in this though.
- LambdaComplex 1y ago
  You can always run your own IRC server. If Discord shuts down, then you're out of luck.
  - neom 1y ago
    Indeed. Discord have really nailed the... ircd, if you will, for what I use discord for (community building in non-technical abstract user bases), it's perfect, terrifying, but perfect.
  - immibis 1y ago
    You can run your own Revolt, Mattermost, or Rocket Chat server, which is basically Discord.
    - sneak 1y ago
      If you believe this you haven’t used Discord very much.
      - Nextgrid 1y ago
        You are right, neither of his proposed alternatives start you out with a sea of blinking shit and distractions all over your screen.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      and Zulip. But they do not support video and audio calls, for one.
- monkeywork 1y ago
  The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature. Sure you might use IRC for chatting and have some bots around that - but typically your long term storage of information would have been handled in something like a forum, website, email list, file repository, etc - so that even if an individual IRC server went down it wasn't a big deal to move along. IRC was/is less a platform and more a protocol. Discord on the other hand does everything IRC does but people have made it take the place of forums, blogs, file repos, etc etc. All this information is locked up in a platform that can't be searched or often even accessed without signing up for the platform. Unlike IRC however Discord is not a protocol that others can tie into - it's a platform and they can/do actively lock people out of it.
colesantiago 1y ago
Repeat after me and frame this. Never build your main business on somebody else's platform. Always assume that you will get shutdown / rugged when you do so.
- like_any_other 1y ago
  Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it, because you won't like what Standard Oil will charge you for their trains.
  - shreddit 1y ago
    That’s actually solid advice. At a certain point it’s cheaper to build your own datacenter than to rent servers…
  - macspoofing 1y ago
    >Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it You're being facetious, but OP is right. For software platforms, this has been a constant. It happened with Twitter, Facebook, Google (Search/Ads, Maps, Chat), Reddit, LinkedIn - basically ever major software platform started off with relatively open APIs that were then closed-off as it gained critical mass and focused on monetization.
    - brookst 1y ago
      And it's bigger than software. This is just vertical integration; both your suppliers and your customers will ask if they can replace you. As they should. If your only value is as a middleman that your upstream supplier can easily replace... well, that's not a lot of value.
    - like_any_other 1y ago
      I'm not being facetious, I'm pointing out a real problem - the market fraction accessible to a new business, that isn't reliant on the good will of some giant incumbent, is shrinking. This time it's Discord, another time it's Google ads/search blacklist, or Microsoft flagging your website or program as malicious, or Facebook shadowbanning you (or charging to show your posts even to people who explicitly followed you [1]), or Walmart extorting you for shelf space access, VISA and PayPal rejecting you.. If your move is to simply retreat, and give up all this ground, what market is left for you? People who get their news and ads by paper mail, shop only at tiny independent stores, paying in cash? How many businesses can survive with ~5% (a generous estimate of the described market's relative size) of their current traffic? [1] https://www.bentbusinessmarketing.com/why-your-fans-arent-seeing-your-facebook-posts/ https://www.bentbusinessmarketing.com/why-your-fans-arent-se...
pnw 1y ago
It feels to me like Discord is speed-running the developer relations playbook that we've seen happen over a longer timeframe with large platforms like Apple and Google. This is the second high profile incident like this in recent weeks IIRC. What's even stranger to me is that Discord was putting on a full-court press to get developers onto their platform over the last twelve months. This kind of response is certainly not going to help make devs feel all warm and fuzzy about continuing to build on Discord.
- PokemonNoGo 1y ago
  Has there ever been anything warm and fuzzy about discord?
- altairprime 1y ago
  Discord has a monopoly on access to its users, and so does not need to concern themselves with making it attractive to build there: the users are the draw, not the developer-friendliness of the platform. BotGhost should seek anti-monopoly enforcement; having EU users file the appropriate EU claims to appeal for Discord to be subjected to the DMA would be far more a threat to Discord’s monopoly than user support tickets are likely to persuade them.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Wait, doesn't every company have a monopoly on access to its users? Are we all monopolies?
    - altairprime 1y ago
      No? LinkedIn lost a lawsuit about prohibiting third parties tools from accessing its site, Matrix has strong interop, Elite Dangerous offers OAuth API for sign-in and player data download, and so on. There are others but that’s sixty seconds worth of thinking about it. Mastodon metastasized the user store but each site is still a tiny centralized user store. That’s how user stores work. Doesn’t mean they’re automatically monopolistic. Discord’s taking the Reddit-Apollo approach to forcing them offline — half-assed conversations for months followed by an abrupt fuck-you moment with little recourse — which given Discord’s free of charge growth mechanism, means that — just like Reddit — they’re likely going to shutdown anything by that’s providing a valuable service to a significant fraction of their users, either to Sherlock and charge money for it, or simply to terminate what they view as an obstruction.
mschuster91 1y ago
There's one thing missing from the "What you can do", although I admit it's a tough call for anyone not located in SF: actually go on the street and physically protest at the office. It's easy to dismiss blog posts, youtube videos or social media shitstorms, we've all grown accustomed to the noise. But it's hard to ignore actual people on the street in front of your office calling out your bullshit. In addition, it gives nice pictures for the press, and that's the only thing investors actually fear.
mslansn 1y ago
If you care so much about the users as you say then you will release the code in a docker image so they can continue using your product.
- areyourllySorry 1y ago
  their target audience does not know what a "docker" is, much less wants to lease a server for hosting
  - mslansn 1y ago
    You can teach someone how to rent a vps and run a docker image with one 10-minute youtube video. Then they can use the drag and drop editor and run the bot themselves. If they don’t want to pay for hosting that’s too bad. A vps to run a bot will cost a couple bucks a month.
    - swyx 1y ago
      yes but also once you let that happen there will be thousands of discord servers holding tokens, with no security updates...
    - koakuma-chan 1y ago
      It's actually pretty hard to install Docker... Add Docker official GPG key... Install a bunch of crap...
      - mslansn 1y ago
        Literally four commands that can be copypasted. https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/fedora/#install-using-the-repository https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/fedora/#install-using...
        koakuma-chan 1y ago
        Look at Debian
Banditoz 1y ago
Playing devil's advocate a bit, if this service hosts a Discord bot you create for you, that means it uses the bot token, right? The service has to store and secure hundreds of thousands of tokens, if all of those get breached/leaked, an attacker can do a lot to a lot of Discord servers assuming it has the requisite permissions. However, they do claim that Mee6 (the biggest Discord bot by # of servers, iirc) offers a similar feature but Discord is letting them slide?
- paxys 1y ago
  Discord holds user session tokens right? If those tokens are leaked then attackers will have access to Discord user data. Seems like Discord should be shut down.
  - Banditoz 1y ago
    Hmm, good point, but Discord can't control the security of a third party platform like this. Not saying it's the right thing to do, but it seems to be their reasoning.
  - sneak 1y ago
    Discord has the plaintext of every single message ever sent via Discord, including all DMs. Can you imagine the value to LLM companies? It’s probably the single largest collection of sexting content outside of WeChat (and Apple’s archive of iCloud Backups that contain all of the iMessages).
almosthere 1y ago
So it sounds like you just go open source and let people host their own bot
- immibis 1y ago
  You can already do that. People who want to do that aren't using BotGhost.
  - nubinetwork 1y ago
    I was under the impression that writing a third party client was against TOS, and don't you have to write a client to get your bot to interact with the server?
    - majorchord 1y ago
      They flip-flopped on the issue: https://0x0.st/8wYc.png https://0x0.st/8wYc.png
    - junon 1y ago
      No. Discord has an official and formalized bot API.
    - immibis 1y ago
      Well, you can do that or use the bot API, the one Discord just told BotGhost to stop using.
merb 1y ago
The biggest problem is that discord has no way to authorize these platforms without the user giving them credentials. It’s really stupid because it would be so easy to fix.
- everforward 1y ago
  I think that's because Discord doesn't want them to do it this way. I suspect Discord wants BotGhost to operate their own bot with their own credentials, and have users invite the bot to their servers (similar to how many existing bots work). BotGhost could tell which no-code workflows apply based on server and/or channel ID. I think Discord has a fair argument that if BotGhost "writes the code" (read: translates workflows to actual execution), and BotGhost operates the bot, then really it's BotGhost's bot and they should own the bot and have it be visible to users as their bot.
  - anfilt 1y ago
    Graph like coding environments like this are a form of code though, so I can definitely see the argument that they just are hosting the users bot for them.
robinhouston 1y ago
I was sympathetic up until the line > Over 3 million users and bots created which struck me as thoroughly disingenuous. Surely they know how many users they have, and how many bots have been created. Why conflate the two?
- superb_dev 1y ago
  They clearly have the data too. Their home page states ~2M bots and ~1.5M users
pavel_lishin 1y ago
> If BotGhost is forced to shut down, your bot will stop working. Your settings, custom commands, custom events, market commands, market events and any work at all hosted on BotGhost will be lost. Because BotGhost does not produce code, there is no way for us to export your bot's configuration. > BotGhost cannot export bot configurations due to its no-code structure. If shutdown happens, all bots and user data will be permanently lost. I don't think I understand this part - what does the "no-code" mean in this context? How can this data not be stored somewhere for the service to function at all? Does this mean that BotGhost also has no backups, and a technical glitch could cause a similar problem?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- paxys 1y ago
  An end user creates an application in Discord. They create a bot within that application, and Discord generates a token for the bot. They then copy the token into BotGhost, and BotGhost "operates" the bot. The application itself is still owned by the user, and BotGhost has no access to it.
  - markasoftware 1y ago
    botghost should still theoretically be able to serialize and export the bot's logic
    - lsaferite 1y ago
      They could export a DSL that captures the workflow at least.
- teraflop 1y ago
  What they mean is "the 'no-code' logic for your bot is stored in a proprietary format that's only understood by our software, and we don't want to release our software publicly, nor do we want to document the format."
throwaway7679 1y ago
There are lots of details about the technology, license agreements, service history, comparable platforms, and whatnot, which all form reasonable support for botghost. None of that matters in the slightest. They're dealing with an indifferent, capricious, unaccountable company. And trying to do it without enough leverage to even get a response. It seems like it's about to end the way it was always going to.
- out-of-ideas 1y ago
  yup, agreed- worth going over the non tl;dr (sufficient to say the tl;dr misses some good juice, but thats what the page in full is for). i was sorta curious on the policy changes over time, since botghost has been around since '18. all i can say is good luck to botgost histories of policies-ish: - from the tl;dr (they also explain #4 as well in the non-tl;dr): > Discord issued a breach notice to BotGhost, claiming the platform violates Developer Policy 4 by handling bot tokens, which has been a core part of how BotGhost has worked since 2018. - policy from discrap: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/8563934450327-Discord-Developer-Policy https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/8563934450... > 4. Do not collect, solicit, or deceive users into providing passwords or other credentials. Under no circumstances may you or your Application request or attempt to obtain login credentials from Discord users. This includes information such as passwords or account access or login tokens. - policy in 2022 (of that page, but note the random digits in the numbers make it terrible to easily see history), thanks archive.org!: https://web.archive.org/web/20221001073449/https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/8563934450327-Discord-Developer-Policy https://web.archive.org/web/20221001073449/https://support-d... > Do not collect, solicit, or deceive users into providing user login credentials. Under no circumstances may you or your Application solicit, obtain, or request login credentials from Discord users in any way. This includes information such as passwords or user access or login tokens. - and archive.org of github of the before 2022 change (mentioned in the above archive) (does not really mention collecting of user auths - as per my quick glance [i welcome a double check]): https://web.archive.org/web/20220921062136/https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/blob/main/docs/policies_and_agreements/Terms_of_Service.md https://web.archive.org/web/20220921062136/https://github.co... edit: fix copy-pasta
immibis 1y ago
General PSA: in most situations these things like "terms of service" and "breach notice" have no legal effect. (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) What they do is the same as a "cease and desist": they warn you that Discord might consider suing you or might try to ban you by technical means. It's all about business, not what the terms say. If Discord thinks BotGhost is good for Discord's bottom line, they'll let it exist. If they think it's bad, they'll stop letting it exist. I haven't the slightest clue why Discord now thinks BotGhost is bad for Discord's bottom line, but it's probably got something to do with legibility (in the Seeing Like A State sense) to investors for their IPO. Or they're working on a competitor internally.
- literalAardvark 1y ago
  Discord has been against botting personal accounts for a long time. If you want to automate, you make a bot account and ask the server permission to join with it.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Then it's a good thing that's what BotGhost does. Except Discord's saying you're not allowed to do that either now.
linotype 1y ago
Kind of lame to put competitors on blast.
- junon 1y ago
  That wasn't the point of that. I think that's fairly obvious.
  - linotype 1y ago
    Intention or not, that’s what he did.
apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
This same story plays out with every monopoly platform e.g. Apple. Basically, you are likely in competition with something they are making, or are otherwise bad for business. The specific policy violation they choose doesn't matter– you are getting dicked down because they want it to be so.
- meepmorp 1y ago
  > every monopoly platform discord ain't a monopoly in any relevant sense of the word
nxrabl 1y ago
> A recent security breach on our platform brought BotGhost to Discord’s attention. The breach in question is documented here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lUiLBBab1RY https://youtube.com/watch?v=lUiLBBab1RY I don’t think there’s a text write-up, but tl;dw a combination of missing input sanitization and no-code UI trickery made it possible to leak other users’ bot tokens, and despite patching the exploit pretty quickly on exposure, BotGhost’s developer tried to cover it up and refused to reset potentially affected tokens.
- rozab 1y ago
  Seems like this is it. They should have got Discord to revoke all the potentially affected tokens. Instead, they tried to hide it and Discord forced their hand. I really dislike the way they try and play this down in the doc: https://update.botghost.com/#-summary-of-the-breaches- https://update.botghost.com/#-summary-of-the-breaches-
- operator-name 1y ago
  The video is linked in the article, amongst the response, timeline and further fixed exploits. But it is correct that the article does not reiterate the technical details of the exploit.
- x0x0 1y ago
  Maybe uncharitable, but it seems like BotGhost comprehensively doesn't take security seriously. Not only were there bad vulnerabilities, but they didn't have the logging (or didn't use it) to see who was affected; didn't want to roll keys; didn't want to announce; and didn't even have their own bots use their own security features. So yeah. I'm a bit more sympathetic if Discord decided that BotGhost in particular wasn't going to be using Discord's platform any more. Because I'd guess the probability these are the last of BotGhost's serious vulnerabilities to be about 0%. So now botghost is doing a pentest. But I dunno... my guess at the likelihood of doing a good job backfilling security into a codebase that wasn't built with that as a core concern is also low.
  - immibis 1y ago
ranger_danger 1y ago
I have not been able to use Discord for years, even when I try hard against my better judgement. It always ends with one of these: Create new account: all servers stuck in preview mode permanently Create new account: instantly auto-banned Create new account: phone-walled immediately Create new account: banned immediately after providing phone number Ban appeal: "our automated system is working properly, appeal denied" Doesn't matter what computer/ISP/OS/browser/etc. I use, the experience is always one of these.
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  Try using a gmail account.
  - ranger_danger 1y ago
    I'm not able to create one without a phone number, been trying for years.
RainyDayTmrw 1y ago
I'm pretty sad about this all-around. For whatever it's worth, I actually think this dev is understating the impact of their security issues. They had 2 token leaks - albeit conditional and with prerequisites. Given the sorts of tokens that a user has to supply to use this sort of generic app builder, this is pretty serious. That said, I think inconsistent enforcement, when it favors them, is a really bad look on Discord. It totally looks like they're doing cover-their-ass, whack-a-mole, public relations-driven enforcement.
bunbun69 1y ago
Tokens got leaked on BotGhost and BotGhost straight up REFUSED to instruct their customers to rotate their keys. I am with Discord, as BotGhost has shown to not be able to securely store keys
- lysp 1y ago
  > At the same time, I explored how to securely reset all bot tokens. > Unfortunately, the only method currently offered by Discord involves committing them to a public GitHub repo, which is not a viable or secure option.
Bluescreenbuddy 1y ago
>THESE GUYS DO IT TOO Yup just throw everyone else under the bus.
delfinom 1y ago
$5 Discord is doing it because they realized they can "clone" the idea and sell it as a subscription service.

139 points by exists 1y ago

>Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown I was excited there for a second.

czk 1y ago

I've often thought about the amount of data that these bot services must have access to (they could log millions of private channels), data thats silo'd away from search engines/indexers and could be pretty valuable to sell to someone training an AI model, or doing other things. A while back there was a service called 'Spy Pet' that ran hundreds of discord bots selling access to searchable data logs. I wonder if discord is primarily concerned about the massive logging capability of services like these.

haneul 1y ago
Yea the data market from discord bots is quite a thing. Really concerning, imo.
areyourllySorry 1y ago
spy.pet used user accounts. botghost uses bot accounts, for which you need to enable certain intents in order to read messages.
ocdtrekkie 1y ago
One of the things I found surprising is that many of Discord's bot permissions are not scoped to servers at all. I've been asked to authenticate with a bot service for one server numerous times that requests access to things pertaining to all servers I use, and that seems very wrong.
fakedang 1y ago
This isn't Discord doing this out of the goodness of their privacy-concerned hearts. They'll eventually try to do a Salesforce-Slack kind of play here by preventing external entities from monetizing on their platform. Tech will turn into a casino where the house (aka the platform) always wins.
paxys 1y ago
After Reddit's API shutdown the writing was on the wall. Services like Reddit and Discord are huge data troves, and now this data has a concrete $$ value. Offering unrestricted API access means that third parties will store and sell this data. So shutting them down (and monetizing your data yourself) is an obvious decision. Slack recently changed its ToS to disallow this as well - https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals-using-slack-data-information-reports-2025-06-11/ https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals....
cedws 1y ago
Some of them are absolutely up to dodgy stuff, they have access to countless private chats in servers where the users/admins are unaware messages are being sent to a third party. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these bots are ran by state actors.
gizmo686 1y ago
Discord locked down the ability of bots to read message contents back in 2022. For bots used in over 100 servers, doing so now requires explicit approval from Discord (in addition to the standard approval the server owner would need to give). For most bots, the rest of the bot API is rich enough for this to not be an issue. That cuts out a lot of the value for LLM training; and will reduce the blast radius if Discord ever decides to fully pull the plug on message access.
- HWR_14 1y ago
  To read message archives or to read messages in realtime? Because I was working on a sideproject that required monitoring the messages in a channel, not just slash commands.
  - gizmo686 1y ago
    Read messages in realtime.
    - HWR_14 1y ago
      At least I know now before I put more effort into it. Thank you for the warning.
- czk 1y ago
  this is good to know! thank you for the info
mystified5016 1y ago
Yup. I ran a bot a long time ago and it was pretty trivial to quietly scrape the entire history of any server it was in. I only ever did this on my own server for good reason, but still. Really a bot doesn't have any more access than a user does. You as a user can manually scroll back through the entire server history, you can check on roles, and you can see the names of channels that are hidden from you. But it becomes a problem when bots are doing this at scale and selling the resulting data. Sort of like some other bots that people like to argue are doing the same thing a human could.

koakuma-chan 1y ago

Sorry for your loss. I too virtually stopped using Discord in favor of, mostly, Reddit (lesser of two evils).

zapzupnz 1y ago
I'm not sure how the two are remotely comparable. I don't go to Reddit for live discussion, voice and video chat, etc.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  I used to go to Discord for help, and now I go to Reddit for help.
  - zapzupnz 1y ago
    That makes sense.
anonym29 1y ago
The lesser of two evils is still evil. Make Forums Great Again!
- gagik_co 1y ago
  Agree! I finally set up my own NodeBB forum for my app support and I'm very excited to move in this direction. It was a nicer experience than expected.
immibis 1y ago
Reddit is more evil than Discord IMO - they did this years ago, tried to shut down all bots and unofficial apps, and they heavily manipulate consensus opinion, which Discord doesn't as far as I know.
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
I can't think of any way to look at this where Reddit is the lesser evil. I respect the position but I don't understand it. Reddit and Twitter reached the floor of enshittification with their respective 2023 actions. Discord and others may follow the precedent and get there, but my usage hasn't been affected yet. The Discord official client, unlike Reddit/Twitter, is still ad-free except for the occasional icon highlighting their "Shop" tab.

neom 1y ago

I'm building a lot on discord right now, I like it but I keep getting scared, then I think, eh, irc servers could have gone away too I suppose, in fact they did, much was lost. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of nuanced thinking in this though.

LambdaComplex 1y ago
You can always run your own IRC server. If Discord shuts down, then you're out of luck.
- neom 1y ago
  Indeed. Discord have really nailed the... ircd, if you will, for what I use discord for (community building in non-technical abstract user bases), it's perfect, terrifying, but perfect.
- immibis 1y ago
  You can run your own Revolt, Mattermost, or Rocket Chat server, which is basically Discord.
  - sneak 1y ago
    If you believe this you haven’t used Discord very much.
    - Nextgrid 1y ago
      You are right, neither of his proposed alternatives start you out with a sea of blinking shit and distractions all over your screen.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    and Zulip. But they do not support video and audio calls, for one.
monkeywork 1y ago
The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature. Sure you might use IRC for chatting and have some bots around that - but typically your long term storage of information would have been handled in something like a forum, website, email list, file repository, etc - so that even if an individual IRC server went down it wasn't a big deal to move along. IRC was/is less a platform and more a protocol. Discord on the other hand does everything IRC does but people have made it take the place of forums, blogs, file repos, etc etc. All this information is locked up in a platform that can't be searched or often even accessed without signing up for the platform. Unlike IRC however Discord is not a protocol that others can tie into - it's a platform and they can/do actively lock people out of it.

colesantiago 1y ago

Repeat after me and frame this. Never build your main business on somebody else's platform. Always assume that you will get shutdown / rugged when you do so.

like_any_other 1y ago
Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it, because you won't like what Standard Oil will charge you for their trains.
- shreddit 1y ago
  That’s actually solid advice. At a certain point it’s cheaper to build your own datacenter than to rent servers…
- macspoofing 1y ago
  >Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it You're being facetious, but OP is right. For software platforms, this has been a constant. It happened with Twitter, Facebook, Google (Search/Ads, Maps, Chat), Reddit, LinkedIn - basically ever major software platform started off with relatively open APIs that were then closed-off as it gained critical mass and focused on monetization.
  - brookst 1y ago
    And it's bigger than software. This is just vertical integration; both your suppliers and your customers will ask if they can replace you. As they should. If your only value is as a middleman that your upstream supplier can easily replace... well, that's not a lot of value.
  - like_any_other 1y ago
    I'm not being facetious, I'm pointing out a real problem - the market fraction accessible to a new business, that isn't reliant on the good will of some giant incumbent, is shrinking. This time it's Discord, another time it's Google ads/search blacklist, or Microsoft flagging your website or program as malicious, or Facebook shadowbanning you (or charging to show your posts even to people who explicitly followed you [1]), or Walmart extorting you for shelf space access, VISA and PayPal rejecting you.. If your move is to simply retreat, and give up all this ground, what market is left for you? People who get their news and ads by paper mail, shop only at tiny independent stores, paying in cash? How many businesses can survive with ~5% (a generous estimate of the described market's relative size) of their current traffic? [1] https://www.bentbusinessmarketing.com/why-your-fans-arent-seeing-your-facebook-posts/ https://www.bentbusinessmarketing.com/why-your-fans-arent-se...

pnw 1y ago

It feels to me like Discord is speed-running the developer relations playbook that we've seen happen over a longer timeframe with large platforms like Apple and Google. This is the second high profile incident like this in recent weeks IIRC. What's even stranger to me is that Discord was putting on a full-court press to get developers onto their platform over the last twelve months. This kind of response is certainly not going to help make devs feel all warm and fuzzy about continuing to build on Discord.

PokemonNoGo 1y ago
Has there ever been anything warm and fuzzy about discord?
altairprime 1y ago
Discord has a monopoly on access to its users, and so does not need to concern themselves with making it attractive to build there: the users are the draw, not the developer-friendliness of the platform. BotGhost should seek anti-monopoly enforcement; having EU users file the appropriate EU claims to appeal for Discord to be subjected to the DMA would be far more a threat to Discord’s monopoly than user support tickets are likely to persuade them.
- brookst 1y ago
  Wait, doesn't every company have a monopoly on access to its users? Are we all monopolies?
  - altairprime 1y ago
    No? LinkedIn lost a lawsuit about prohibiting third parties tools from accessing its site, Matrix has strong interop, Elite Dangerous offers OAuth API for sign-in and player data download, and so on. There are others but that’s sixty seconds worth of thinking about it. Mastodon metastasized the user store but each site is still a tiny centralized user store. That’s how user stores work. Doesn’t mean they’re automatically monopolistic. Discord’s taking the Reddit-Apollo approach to forcing them offline — half-assed conversations for months followed by an abrupt fuck-you moment with little recourse — which given Discord’s free of charge growth mechanism, means that — just like Reddit — they’re likely going to shutdown anything by that’s providing a valuable service to a significant fraction of their users, either to Sherlock and charge money for it, or simply to terminate what they view as an obstruction.

mschuster91 1y ago

There's one thing missing from the "What you can do", although I admit it's a tough call for anyone not located in SF: actually go on the street and physically protest at the office. It's easy to dismiss blog posts, youtube videos or social media shitstorms, we've all grown accustomed to the noise. But it's hard to ignore actual people on the street in front of your office calling out your bullshit. In addition, it gives nice pictures for the press, and that's the only thing investors actually fear.

mslansn 1y ago

If you care so much about the users as you say then you will release the code in a docker image so they can continue using your product.

areyourllySorry 1y ago
their target audience does not know what a "docker" is, much less wants to lease a server for hosting
- mslansn 1y ago
  You can teach someone how to rent a vps and run a docker image with one 10-minute youtube video. Then they can use the drag and drop editor and run the bot themselves. If they don’t want to pay for hosting that’s too bad. A vps to run a bot will cost a couple bucks a month.
  - swyx 1y ago
    yes but also once you let that happen there will be thousands of discord servers holding tokens, with no security updates...
  - koakuma-chan 1y ago
    It's actually pretty hard to install Docker... Add Docker official GPG key... Install a bunch of crap...
    - mslansn 1y ago
      Literally four commands that can be copypasted. https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/fedora/#install-using-the-repository https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/fedora/#install-using...
      - koakuma-chan 1y ago
        Look at Debian

Banditoz 1y ago

Playing devil's advocate a bit, if this service hosts a Discord bot you create for you, that means it uses the bot token, right? The service has to store and secure hundreds of thousands of tokens, if all of those get breached/leaked, an attacker can do a lot to a lot of Discord servers assuming it has the requisite permissions. However, they do claim that Mee6 (the biggest Discord bot by # of servers, iirc) offers a similar feature but Discord is letting them slide?

paxys 1y ago
Discord holds user session tokens right? If those tokens are leaked then attackers will have access to Discord user data. Seems like Discord should be shut down.
- Banditoz 1y ago
  Hmm, good point, but Discord can't control the security of a third party platform like this. Not saying it's the right thing to do, but it seems to be their reasoning.
- sneak 1y ago
  Discord has the plaintext of every single message ever sent via Discord, including all DMs. Can you imagine the value to LLM companies? It’s probably the single largest collection of sexting content outside of WeChat (and Apple’s archive of iCloud Backups that contain all of the iMessages).

almosthere 1y ago

So it sounds like you just go open source and let people host their own bot

immibis 1y ago
You can already do that. People who want to do that aren't using BotGhost.
- nubinetwork 1y ago
  I was under the impression that writing a third party client was against TOS, and don't you have to write a client to get your bot to interact with the server?
  - majorchord 1y ago
    They flip-flopped on the issue: https://0x0.st/8wYc.png https://0x0.st/8wYc.png
  - junon 1y ago
    No. Discord has an official and formalized bot API.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Well, you can do that or use the bot API, the one Discord just told BotGhost to stop using.

merb 1y ago

The biggest problem is that discord has no way to authorize these platforms without the user giving them credentials. It’s really stupid because it would be so easy to fix.

everforward 1y ago
I think that's because Discord doesn't want them to do it this way. I suspect Discord wants BotGhost to operate their own bot with their own credentials, and have users invite the bot to their servers (similar to how many existing bots work). BotGhost could tell which no-code workflows apply based on server and/or channel ID. I think Discord has a fair argument that if BotGhost "writes the code" (read: translates workflows to actual execution), and BotGhost operates the bot, then really it's BotGhost's bot and they should own the bot and have it be visible to users as their bot.
- anfilt 1y ago
  Graph like coding environments like this are a form of code though, so I can definitely see the argument that they just are hosting the users bot for them.

robinhouston 1y ago

I was sympathetic up until the line > Over 3 million users and bots created which struck me as thoroughly disingenuous. Surely they know how many users they have, and how many bots have been created. Why conflate the two?

superb_dev 1y ago
They clearly have the data too. Their home page states ~2M bots and ~1.5M users

pavel_lishin 1y ago

> If BotGhost is forced to shut down, your bot will stop working. Your settings, custom commands, custom events, market commands, market events and any work at all hosted on BotGhost will be lost. Because BotGhost does not produce code, there is no way for us to export your bot's configuration. > BotGhost cannot export bot configurations due to its no-code structure. If shutdown happens, all bots and user data will be permanently lost. I don't think I understand this part - what does the "no-code" mean in this context? How can this data not be stored somewhere for the service to function at all? Does this mean that BotGhost also has no backups, and a technical glitch could cause a similar problem?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
paxys 1y ago
An end user creates an application in Discord. They create a bot within that application, and Discord generates a token for the bot. They then copy the token into BotGhost, and BotGhost "operates" the bot. The application itself is still owned by the user, and BotGhost has no access to it.
- markasoftware 1y ago
  botghost should still theoretically be able to serialize and export the bot's logic
  - lsaferite 1y ago
    They could export a DSL that captures the workflow at least.
teraflop 1y ago
What they mean is "the 'no-code' logic for your bot is stored in a proprietary format that's only understood by our software, and we don't want to release our software publicly, nor do we want to document the format."

throwaway7679 1y ago

There are lots of details about the technology, license agreements, service history, comparable platforms, and whatnot, which all form reasonable support for botghost. None of that matters in the slightest. They're dealing with an indifferent, capricious, unaccountable company. And trying to do it without enough leverage to even get a response. It seems like it's about to end the way it was always going to.

out-of-ideas 1y ago
yup, agreed- worth going over the non tl;dr (sufficient to say the tl;dr misses some good juice, but thats what the page in full is for). i was sorta curious on the policy changes over time, since botghost has been around since '18. all i can say is good luck to botgost histories of policies-ish: - from the tl;dr (they also explain #4 as well in the non-tl;dr): > Discord issued a breach notice to BotGhost, claiming the platform violates Developer Policy 4 by handling bot tokens, which has been a core part of how BotGhost has worked since 2018. - policy from discrap: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/8563934450327-Discord-Developer-Policy https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/8563934450... > 4. Do not collect, solicit, or deceive users into providing passwords or other credentials. Under no circumstances may you or your Application request or attempt to obtain login credentials from Discord users. This includes information such as passwords or account access or login tokens. - policy in 2022 (of that page, but note the random digits in the numbers make it terrible to easily see history), thanks archive.org!: https://web.archive.org/web/20221001073449/https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/8563934450327-Discord-Developer-Policy https://web.archive.org/web/20221001073449/https://support-d... > Do not collect, solicit, or deceive users into providing user login credentials. Under no circumstances may you or your Application solicit, obtain, or request login credentials from Discord users in any way. This includes information such as passwords or user access or login tokens. - and archive.org of github of the before 2022 change (mentioned in the above archive) (does not really mention collecting of user auths - as per my quick glance [i welcome a double check]): https://web.archive.org/web/20220921062136/https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/blob/main/docs/policies_and_agreements/Terms_of_Service.md https://web.archive.org/web/20220921062136/https://github.co... edit: fix copy-pasta

immibis 1y ago

General PSA: in most situations these things like "terms of service" and "breach notice" have no legal effect. (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) What they do is the same as a "cease and desist": they warn you that Discord might consider suing you or might try to ban you by technical means. It's all about business, not what the terms say. If Discord thinks BotGhost is good for Discord's bottom line, they'll let it exist. If they think it's bad, they'll stop letting it exist. I haven't the slightest clue why Discord now thinks BotGhost is bad for Discord's bottom line, but it's probably got something to do with legibility (in the Seeing Like A State sense) to investors for their IPO. Or they're working on a competitor internally.

literalAardvark 1y ago
Discord has been against botting personal accounts for a long time. If you want to automate, you make a bot account and ask the server permission to join with it.
- immibis 1y ago
  Then it's a good thing that's what BotGhost does. Except Discord's saying you're not allowed to do that either now.

linotype 1y ago

Kind of lame to put competitors on blast.

junon 1y ago
That wasn't the point of that. I think that's fairly obvious.
- linotype 1y ago
  Intention or not, that’s what he did.

apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago

This same story plays out with every monopoly platform e.g. Apple. Basically, you are likely in competition with something they are making, or are otherwise bad for business. The specific policy violation they choose doesn't matter– you are getting dicked down because they want it to be so.

meepmorp 1y ago
> every monopoly platform discord ain't a monopoly in any relevant sense of the word

nxrabl 1y ago

> A recent security breach on our platform brought BotGhost to Discord’s attention. The breach in question is documented here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lUiLBBab1RY https://youtube.com/watch?v=lUiLBBab1RY I don’t think there’s a text write-up, but tl;dw a combination of missing input sanitization and no-code UI trickery made it possible to leak other users’ bot tokens, and despite patching the exploit pretty quickly on exposure, BotGhost’s developer tried to cover it up and refused to reset potentially affected tokens.

rozab 1y ago
Seems like this is it. They should have got Discord to revoke all the potentially affected tokens. Instead, they tried to hide it and Discord forced their hand. I really dislike the way they try and play this down in the doc: https://update.botghost.com/#-summary-of-the-breaches- https://update.botghost.com/#-summary-of-the-breaches-
operator-name 1y ago
The video is linked in the article, amongst the response, timeline and further fixed exploits. But it is correct that the article does not reiterate the technical details of the exploit.
x0x0 1y ago
Maybe uncharitable, but it seems like BotGhost comprehensively doesn't take security seriously. Not only were there bad vulnerabilities, but they didn't have the logging (or didn't use it) to see who was affected; didn't want to roll keys; didn't want to announce; and didn't even have their own bots use their own security features. So yeah. I'm a bit more sympathetic if Discord decided that BotGhost in particular wasn't going to be using Discord's platform any more. Because I'd guess the probability these are the last of BotGhost's serious vulnerabilities to be about 0%. So now botghost is doing a pentest. But I dunno... my guess at the likelihood of doing a good job backfilling security into a codebase that wasn't built with that as a core concern is also low.
- immibis 1y ago

ranger_danger 1y ago

I have not been able to use Discord for years, even when I try hard against my better judgement. It always ends with one of these: Create new account: all servers stuck in preview mode permanently Create new account: instantly auto-banned Create new account: phone-walled immediately Create new account: banned immediately after providing phone number Ban appeal: "our automated system is working properly, appeal denied" Doesn't matter what computer/ISP/OS/browser/etc. I use, the experience is always one of these.

BeFlatXIII 1y ago
Try using a gmail account.
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  I'm not able to create one without a phone number, been trying for years.

RainyDayTmrw 1y ago

I'm pretty sad about this all-around. For whatever it's worth, I actually think this dev is understating the impact of their security issues. They had 2 token leaks - albeit conditional and with prerequisites. Given the sorts of tokens that a user has to supply to use this sort of generic app builder, this is pretty serious. That said, I think inconsistent enforcement, when it favors them, is a really bad look on Discord. It totally looks like they're doing cover-their-ass, whack-a-mole, public relations-driven enforcement.

bunbun69 1y ago

Tokens got leaked on BotGhost and BotGhost straight up REFUSED to instruct their customers to rotate their keys. I am with Discord, as BotGhost has shown to not be able to securely store keys

lysp 1y ago
> At the same time, I explored how to securely reset all bot tokens. > Unfortunately, the only method currently offered by Discord involves committing them to a public GitHub repo, which is not a viable or secure option.

Bluescreenbuddy 1y ago

>THESE GUYS DO IT TOO Yup just throw everyone else under the bus.

delfinom 1y ago

$5 Discord is doing it because they realized they can "clone" the idea and sell it as a subscription service.