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Discord bans me for using their official client

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Re: Discord bans me for using their official client

#31

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

judge2020 wrote: post #21
sour-taste wrote: post #14

Whenever it comes to gaming I just assume anyone saying they've been banned unfairly deserved it. League, Dota, FPSs, and discord too apparently all have this weird group of people who get banned for doing shady shit then go on forums and complain. People being banned from services unfairly (and without explanation) is a real problem, that doesn't mean that everytime someone complains they deserve the benefit of the…

While we won't get to know the full story and the entire history of this person's Discord account (to side with him one way or the other), this piece still serves to show the downsides of a centralized service which has to do its own abuse management - and at discord's scale[0], there's bound to be a lot of mistakes. On a side-note, running a modded client (like Better Discord) at any time is a risk to your account.…

> show the downsides of a centralized service which has to do its own abuse management

And platforms that have no censorship also have downsides. There’s no perfect solution.

Re: Discord bans me for using their official client

#34

Post by dylan604 »

AHTERIX5000 wrote: post #28
sour-taste wrote: post #14

Whenever it comes to gaming I just assume anyone saying they've been banned unfairly deserved it. League, Dota, FPSs, and discord too apparently all have this weird group of people who get banned for doing shady shit then go on forums and complain. People being banned from services unfairly (and without explanation) is a real problem, that doesn't mean that everytime someone complains they deserve the benefit of the…

Yeah. I got banned in PUBG due to their broken anticheat and it tagged my Steam account with all the games as having bans on record. Fortunately I wasn't the only one and they fixed their software and reversed accidental bans. I wonder what I could realistically do if something like that happens again and the developer doesn't notice?

Depends on how many Twitter followers you have

Re: Discord bans me for using their official client

#35

Post by sillysaurusx »

The same day, I responded to their email, stating that their explanation wasn't good enough and that I hadn't done anything wrong. I demanded they give me an actual reason and reinstate my account.

A tip for nerds like me: In situations like this, try to act like a real person. Support people especially have to deal with endless streams of annoyed, angry, or abusive people who will treat them like dirt. Anyone who's worked in a grocery store, etc will know what I mean.

Something like "Hey, thanks for looking into this, but I am very confused -- It seems like I was banned due to a software glitch. Would you mind double checking why I was banned?"

Boom, you've turned it from an unhappy angry interaction into a mystery they might be inclined to pursue. I've seen this technique work wonders.

And sure, you could argue that it's their job, so this shouldn't matter. But it seems to matter a lot, at least in my experience.

Re: Discord bans me for using their official client

#36

Post by PragmaticPulp »

sour-taste wrote: post #14

Whenever it comes to gaming I just assume anyone saying they've been banned unfairly deserved it. League, Dota, FPSs, and discord too apparently all have this weird group of people who get banned for doing shady shit then go on forums and complain. People being banned from services unfairly (and without explanation) is a real problem, that doesn't mean that everytime someone complains they deserve the benefit of the…

Unfortunately, this same cynicism can creep into the mindsets of the moderation and support teams.

I had to deal with abusive users at a past job. Some of them simply disappeared after we locked their accounts (temporarily, with explanations), but many of them would launch aggressive harassment campaigns at the company. They'd start with support, then attempt to escalate support tickets, then move on to trying to contact management via LinkedIn or guessing e-mail addresses. A surprising number of people would find creative ways to contact our CEO with carefully honed stories claiming innocence. We started removing employee's last names from customer communications after someone started doxxing support employees and arguing with their family members on Facebook.

Those who had social media clout were virtually guaranteed to use it against us. The stories they published were always distortions of the truth with convenient omissions.

The worst part was that after watching this play out 50 times, everyone starts to grow unsympathetic to any complaints. It's a challenge to maintain some empathy and perform diligence on complaints, otherwise you get legitimate errors slipping through the cracks.

Re: Discord bans me for using their official client

#37

Post by jhgg »

Hi,

I lead the anti abuse team at Discord. I've looked into this case a bit more in-depth to see what was going on. Although I can't get into specifics, given the poster was kind enough to provide us with ticket IDs, I was able to look into this a bit further to see what actually triggered the account ban.

> Discord bans me for using their official client

This statement is false, unfortunately - and our abuse detection flagged the account for using our API in ways that our official clients do not. In this case, there was indeed a 3rd party client involved. Although our rules and heuristics do not specifically target 3rd party clients, it does target things that "don't look like what our official client does" which is very effective at targeting spambots that are constantly waging war against our platform - but has the unfortunate side-effect that using a 3rd party client in certain ways may lead to account termination.

In general, appealing the ban would lead to an unban (we're humans after all, and we're trying to stop spammers/bad actors, and that's what this system is meant to stop.) I am going to following up with our T&S team to understand why this case saw such a rocky conclusion.

Re: Discord bans me for using their official client

#38

Post by millzlane »

OP claims that Discord banned him for using their Official Client. OP states they never gave them a "real" reason. But they're certain it was for using their official client. The skeptic in me thinks that the specific use of the terminology "their official client" is suspicious. How do they know?

Re: Discord bans me for using their official client

#39

Post by ve55 »

jhgg wrote: post #37

Hi, I lead the anti abuse team at Discord. I've looked into this case a bit more in-depth to see what was going on. Although I can't get into specifics, given the poster was kind enough to provide us with ticket IDs, I was able to look into this a bit further to see what actually triggered the account ban. > Discord bans me for using their official client This statement is false, unfortunately - and our abuse detecti…

Something that could be missing from this story is that they may have been in the official web client, but they may have executed custom code (for example, console JavaScript, an add-on, user-extension, etc), that resulted in this, since obviously the web browser will make whichever API requests it is instructed to make.

So i could imagine a user wants to do something that Discord makes it difficult to do (perhaps they want to search channel logs locally, or delete all of their messages in a channel, or amny other things), and if I wanted to do that myself I might just throw some JavaScript into the console in a for-loop, which would obviously result in irregular API requests.

Re: Discord bans me for using their official client

#40

Post by jhgg »

ve55 wrote: post #39
jhgg wrote: post #37

Hi, I lead the anti abuse team at Discord. I've looked into this case a bit more in-depth to see what was going on. Although I can't get into specifics, given the poster was kind enough to provide us with ticket IDs, I was able to look into this a bit further to see what actually triggered the account ban. > Discord bans me for using their official client This statement is false, unfortunately - and our abuse detecti…

Something that could be missing from this story is that they may have been in the official web client, but they may have executed custom code (for example, console JavaScript, an add-on, user-extension, etc), that resulted in this, since obviously the web browser will make whichever API requests it is instructed to make. So i could imagine a user wants to do something that Discord makes it difficult to do (perhaps th…

No, this was not the case. A 3rd party client was very much involved here.

> So i could imagine a user wants to do something that Discord makes it difficult to do (perhaps they want to search channel logs locally, or delete all of their messages in a channel, or amny other things), and if I wanted to do that myself I might just throw some JavaScript into the console in a for-loop, which would obviously result in irregular API requests.

We don't really weigh sus requests too highly (to the point of acct termination) unless they are likely to impact other users, or be used to move laterally on the platform (join servers, send friend requests, open new DMs... etc.)

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