Discord locked my account / Moving platforms

As a heads up for anyone trying to contact me via Discord, my Discord account was sent to phone verification hell and I can’t get back into it.  If you sent any private message to me there in the past month, I did not receive it.

Going forward, if you need to contact me, please use:

• Fastest methods:
  • E-Mail:  Listed in the Support section when you sign in (or at the bottom when not signed in).
  • SkyCorp Forum DM/Chat Request (beta!)
  • Matrix:  @skye:rawrly.com
• Still OK, just slower methods:
  • Patreon DM (sometimes doesn’t notify me via email, but eventually I see it when I login)
  • Twitter DM (never notifies me via email, but eventually I see it when I login)
  • FA DM (never notifies me via email, but eventually I see it when I login)

You can try to find whatever account I’m on at Discord at the time, but please do not consider it a reliable way to reach me since I may end up having to cycle through many more discord accounts in future as Discord support is useless (more on that below).

How I lost my Discord account

Discord’s faulty algorithm thinks I’m a spam bot.

I went to a convention a month ago (which was great!) and was on unsecured hotel wifi.  While this wouldn’t compromise my account as the connection is SSL encrypted, Discord probably saw 2500 people on the same IP and thought that was suspicious.  Additionally, I used a VPN on my laptop (again: unsecured hotel wifi), and apparently Discord is known to send VPN users to verification hell.

During the con, my account started acting a little odd.  During a room party at con, I was invited to join a server, and I could see everything there but couldn’t post.  The weird part of that was not even the group’s moderator / server owner (who I was standing next to IRL) could see I had joined, even in the member list.  It wasn’t until I got home that I was able to post in there, but until then, I was in some sort of lurker ghost mode where no one could see me, but I could see everything.

Back at home, I was sent a friend invite — but I couldn’t accept it.  I tried to accept a bunch of times at two different times of the day, and eventually decided to decline it and send my own back.  This immediately hard-locked my account into verification hell.  Once in the verification state, Discord demands a personal mobile cell phone.

A mobile phone number is an unnecessary and unreasonable demand for a gaming chat room

If I was buying Discord’s Nitro product (I never have), I could reasonably understand Discord asking for the same phone used on the credit card as part of the fraud check (which might even be a VOIP line).  That’s not what this is.

This is also not a two factor request.  I already have two factor enabled via an authentication app.

This is a random demand for personally identifying data that they simply don’t need.  You should not need to put your mobile phone number in order to merely chat online, and you especially should not have your social network held hostage after having sunk years into it.

It’s just not something I’m willing to give Discord.  I already have enough people trying to doxx me, I don’t need Discord selling my phone to advertising companies (which is technically allowed in their privacy policy), or it getting leaked in the next data breach.  They also have a ‘find my friends’ feature so anyone (family, co-workers, etc) with your phone number in their phone’s address book can show up in your friend list automatically.  Supposedly that’s opt-in, but social media tech companies have not always been great about that.  The FTC even targeted them during a recent report about their data collection and use, and yet, nothing has improved — or likely will.

While I do have a separate business VOIP line used for SkyCorp business stuff and somewhat less personally identifying than my mobile number (which I only give to friends and neighbors — no companies, ever), Discord explicitly blocks VOIP lines from the verification system (and I’d still be annoyed about being strong-armed into providing it anyway.)

So, basically Discord is trying to force me into doxxing myself to them, and I’m telling them emphatically, ‘No.’  I understand there are sketchy workarounds like the services who offer to sell Discord burner numbers, or trying to buy a prepaid SIM with cash, etc — but I’m stubborn and in my view, Discord created this problem, so it’s on Discord to fix it.

Many are getting locked out

When researching this problem, I’ve discovered an unfathomably large number of people have lost their Discord accounts, often times through no fault of their own.  Sure, we’ve all seen the discord account scams, but there’s a huge number of people that just lose their accounts due to Discord’s algorithms breaking.  I had always wondered why when I scrolled down in my private message list there were so many ‘Deleted Accounts,’ and I assumed that those were people that voluntarily did so.  After going through my own experience, talking with friends and reading complaint after complaint online, I realize you can lose your account at any moment, even if you have good security and don’t fall for a scam.

You can’t even post about it on discord’s reddit — topics with it are auto-deleted because it happens so often it’d just fill the subreddit.  Any thread that makes it through are filled with others commiserating about having the same problems and how they inevitably gave up and registered a new account.

If you take one thing away from my story, please let it be to spend a few minutes ensuring you have ways to contact all your friends outside of Discord.  You never know when your account or their account will go away, and you might lose them forever.  Even if you’re willing to give Discord your phone number, Discord has plenty of faulty bot-driven auto-bans and they are not willing to correct them.

Discord’s support refuses to save my account

Discord has obliquely acknowledged that it wasn’t my own doing that got my account locked, yet still refuses to unlock it:

I just checked with my team, and upon review of your account, it appears that our detection system has triggered successfully and we will not be removing the phone verification requirement on your account. You’ll be required to register a phone number to your Discord account in order to continue using it.

If you are using a VPN or proxy that was shared with other bad actors, this may have been flagged on your account. However, for privacy reasons, we are not able to share further details on this.

Any human could easily see that this account is seven years old, manages multiple 1k+ member communities, and is in perfect standing (I checked when it started acting suspiciously).  However, even spending a brief moment to verify this and unflag the account is too much for Discord Support.  They simply do not care.

I didn’t give them my phone number before, so this isn’t a security lock out or anything like that.  It’s a spam bot detection lock out — but they won’t clear the flag, even though I’m obviously not a spammer.

Discord support in general is an absolute nightmare.  I have spent a solid month trying to resolve this with them, but I may as well be talking with a brick wall.

Most of my tickets are just auto-closed, everything else is stock form letters that don’t help at all.  I’ve tried everything – support tickets, Twitter, a BBB complaint (Discord has a shocking 1.03/5 rating average on BBB (!)), even sending a snail mail to their office, but no one there cares.

Discord itself is kinda awful

In the process of this, I’ve come to a harsh realization:  I don’t actually like using Discord.  I like the communities and people there, but the platform itself has issues.

I’ve used it for years, and I’m still constantly fighting with basic UI limitations like not being able to easily open a second window.

Nitro ads keep getting more and more intrusive.  Does Discord really need to put a gift nitro button ad in the bar you type into to chat?  I get they need to upsell their premium offering, but that placement in particular is a bit over the top.  Most annoying are the youtube ads in the embedded player that started showing after Discord signed whatever YouTube deal to integrate their app.  Ugh, car ad jumpscares at max volume every time I just want to see a meme someone sent me.  (I am not in the market for a car and would never buy a brand new one, either.  This kind of marketing is just dumb.  Maybe that’s why they want my phone number — so they can target the ads better and sell more of them.  I do think given the deal between Discord and YouTube/Google, there’s likely some kind of data and ad revenue sharing going on behind the scenes.)

It’s not great on the Discord server owner side, either — especially one of my irks as a server admin, the customization options are pretty limited.  For instance, on another project for a multiplayer game server, I wanted to show a real-time counter of how many people were playing so people could join in.  I tried doing channel name updates via their API, but immediately ran into rate limits.  I ended up having to do it by having a bot user show up and updating their rich-presence data.  Which works but… it’s not ideal.  I’d much rather be able to create real widgets with real customization.  Ex, for the forum, I’m able to drop in a custom widget that shows exactly who is in the mumble.  Or put a widget on the blog with the recent forum topics.  On Discord, the customization is limited, and always will be, because they don’t want server admins encouraging users to leave the discord platform and use any other tools/sites.  It’s a miracle we got webhooks, but they scroll off quickly enough that Discord probably isn’t too worried about that.  Where’s the obviously missing option to put external links in the sidebar?  Every forum has supported external links in the category/forum list for decades, but not Discord.

The main reason I still use Discord on my new alt account is because everyone else is using it, and that’s not a great reason.  That wasn’t enough to keep me actively using Facebook once they started being creepy, so why would I treat Discord differently now that they’re being creepy, too?

Now I’m constantly worried that any benign action like joining a server or sending a friend invite will lock up my new account.  And I certainly will never install the Discord app on my phone or dare to access it while traveling.

If I’m going through this — someone with a seven year old account, who owns multiple 1k+ member communities on their platform, whose account was in perfect standing, then it can happen to anyone.  I don’t want to put other people through this hell just to participate in my communities.  I want to be able to trust that my fans will be able to reliably access my communities, and that I will be able to reliably communicate in the social channels I participate in.

Moving forward and away from Discord

After fighting them so long, I have lost all trust and faith in Discord.  I don’t believe they care about their users or hosted communities, and I don’t trust them anymore to host my communities.  I can’t do much to avoid having to use a discord account to access other creators discords, but that doesn’t mean I need to host my communities on discord, too.

I’m in the process of setting up a proper self-hosted forum/chat/voip.  You’re welcome to check out the early version here, but I’m still finishing getting it set up so the official announcement will come in a few days, hopefully.  I investigated a great many forum options (even before the account lock, as I had received a few requests for a game forum), and ended up settling on one named Discourse as it had the cleanest UI while also having real-time chat and post updating features.  I’m optimistic about the forum, and already a few of us have been having fun trying it out.  (You do not need to make a new account, it uses your existing SkyCorp account.)  I will have a longer post introducing the forums properly in a few days once it’s ready for a full launch!

Regarding the Discord — I am not going to be doing anything dramatic overnight, but going forward I’ll be directing people to the discourse instead of the discord.  Eventually, I will probably be setting the discord to a read-only state (assuming my backup account still has access to do so), though I will provide advance notice in the Discord before doing so.  Again, that will not be happening immediately, but this announcement is the first step in a long process starting with sharing my intentions to eventually wind down the discord.

[You can comment on this blog post by replying here on the forum]