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.
Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
121–130 of 135 posts
Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
It's also funny how selective-enforcement the discord TOS and dev policies are -- they turn a blind eye if not even encourage third party/modified first party clients "because retro" / "haha discord on windows 95 funny" (and even encourage it in some cases), yet those modified clients are explicitly banned in the TOS.
Rules are there for a few reasons, but precisely enumerating the things you can and cannot do isn't one of them. (That's why programmers definitely shouldn't litigate pro se.)
One purpose is to try to indemnify the institution making the rules: "See, we said you're not allowed to do X. Damages resulting from X aren't our fault." Another purpose is to deter bad behaviour: if they say you're not allowed to do X, you're less likely to do X. A third purpose is to provide cover for their actions - most easily by writing a rule that literally everyone breaks and then selectively enforcing it, or by writing vague rules you can selectively interpret. If they can punish you and then point to a rule you allegedly broke, you're more likely to accept it and less likely to retaliate. Notice how all of these purposes have to do with manipulating other people. (Are you reminded of any countries?)
You should do it too, if you want to be successful in an amoral business environment. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Unless your customers pay extra for well-defined rules to create a stable environment for themselves. In that case, you should do that, and take their money. That sort of thing is, for example, why some people would rather pay more for a technically inferior Fairphone or Librem than a flagship Android phone or iPhone.
Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 automatic…
So my small app that had maybe 50k users at peak never allowed third party integrations. How is that not a monopoly by this definition? Would it have been more or less of a monopoly if I had allowed third party integrations?
Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
#124I'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 disc…
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.
Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
#125The 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.
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 wor…
Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
#126Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 was…
That logging you want (every command and response) would have been a huge GDPR violation. I suppose they could have logged only if a bot token was detected in output. But if you'd think to do that, then why not also just block the output?
Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
So my small app that had maybe 50k users at peak never allowed third party integrations. How is that not a monopoly by this definition? Would it have been more or less of a monopoly if I had allowed third party integrations?
The DMA has language defining thresholds below which it doesn’t apply. At 50k users, I would not expect or call for the DMA to apply. Discord has slightly more than that and I would expect the DMA to apply to them, assuming the EU found them to be an in-scope platform. Given their recent introduction of gaming and such inside their ‘we’re not just a chat server anymore’ feature expansion, one could argue that they’re…
You can see the list of covered companies at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act#Identified...
It's basically Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Bytedance and Microsoft.
Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
#129Tokens 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
> Unfortunately, the only method currently offered by Discord involves committing them to a public GitHub repo, which is not a viable or secure option.
Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DMA has language defining thresholds below which it doesn’t apply. At 50k users, I would not expect or call for the DMA to apply. Discord has slightly more than that and I would expect the DMA to apply to them, assuming the EU found them to be an in-scope platform. Given their recent introduction of gaming and such inside their ‘we’re not just a chat server anymore’ feature expansion, one could argue that they’re…
For consumer products the DMA focuses on companies with at least 45m monthly active users in the EU. They also exempted some categories that might otherwise qualify e.g. the DMA doesn't appear to cover video gaming consoles because they are "special purpose hardware". You can see the list of covered companies at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act#Identified... It's basically Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta…