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I can affirm the arbitration thing, as well as several other headaches I have had as an admin on another guild when it comes to interacting with Discord staff. There's a couple of incidents, but the one I'll focus on is a case of "shadowbanning" as it seems to be a shared issue Discord refuses to elaborate on. This happened to three people I know online. I won't give names for anonimity, but at least one user has had to wipe his account because at the time there was no known way to get around it. In summary, in some occasions, a user was forcibly removed from a guild. Attempting to get them to join said guild would just show an invalid invite. These users had no known alts that got banned on the guild, yet were unable to join. They weren't in the banlist either. Contacting Discord staff proved futile. The only way in which it was possible to make the user able to rejoin a guild was to manually ban them and then unban them again. Contacting Discord staff yielded the following answer (send twice, once to me, once to another guilds mod team): "The user might have been banned for using an alt. The only way to get the user to rejoin would be to clear the entire banlist as we don't give out IP adress info on accounts." Real helpful and basically dodging around this server glitch. There's more to talk about, including cases of Discords administration seeming to selectively enforce harassment reports, the odd case of my Hypesquad application going unmarked on my account but still getting their newsletter (had to bug them on Twitter to get the application to work properly) and so on and so forth. Within regards to their trigger happiness for banning underage, this is basically COPPA. It's the dumbest law ever that doesn't massively dick the internet since it's basically impossible to enforce. COPPA is about privacy collecting on kids online. They have to enforce it, otherwise they get in legal trouble. If you as an admin knowingly keep an underage user on the guild, you are breaking their TOS. It's kinda simple to explain and a lot of sites really don't want to risk anything surrounding this law (related fact: GameFAQs used to ban people for being underage thanks to users making jokes that they were a fetus.) and Discord is hardly unique in that manner. FWIW, if you want some solid alternatives, maybe check these out: - Matrix is a program that's basically selfhosted Discord. It's got pretty much all the main features down pat. You can use a client like Riot to make it resemble Discord a lot. It's also federating, which means that users don't need accounts on each instance they wish to join but can join from a "central" account. - There's also good old IRC. Get a good client and it doesn't look like it's from the 90s. Something like TheLounge or Kiwi are good clients if you want a modern interface and if the interface doesn't matter, Hexchat will always suffice. Only disadvantage is no message history, but bouncers or public loggers can work around that. ~noirscape

Posted on 12-13-18, 08:33 pm in Why I dislike Discord