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Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

update.botghost.com

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Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#51

Post by immibis »

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.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#52

Post by swyx »

mslansn wrote: post #43
areyourllySorry wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

their target audience does not know what a "docker" is, much less wants to lease a server for hosting

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.

yes but also once you let that happen there will be thousands of discord servers holding tokens, with no security updates...

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#53

Post by [deleted] »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #45

> 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 b…

[deleted]

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#54

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #3

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

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.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#55

Post by koakuma-chan »

mslansn wrote: post #43
areyourllySorry wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

their target audience does not know what a "docker" is, much less wants to lease a server for hosting

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.

It's actually pretty hard to install Docker... Add Docker official GPG key... Install a bunch of crap...

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#56

Post by paxys »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #45

> 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 b…

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.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#57

Post by out-of-ideas »

throwaway7679 wrote: post #48

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.

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/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-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.co...

edit: fix copy-pasta

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#58

Post by brookst »

altairprime wrote: post #21
pnw wrote: post #13

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…

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 ticke…

Wait, doesn't every company have a monopoly on access to its users? Are we all monopolies?

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#60

Post by adesanmi »

lordnacho wrote: post #40
colesantiago wrote: post #5

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.

How are you going to avoid Microsoft, Apple, Google, and AWS? The most common OS, browser, and infra platforms. You have to build on something, and there's going to be a corporation somewhere in your stack.

These companies charge money for their services and have competitors. AWS’ entire business models is providing developer services, and if I don’t like their offerings I can go elsewhere.

Discord, Twitter, Reddit, etc. that have become hostile to third parties have free APIs to reel in developers to make their platform more attractive to users, and once they’ve reached critical mass, they turn around and fuck over those developers. This is because their primary business model is serving their users, and developers eventually “get in the way”.

So the person you’re replying to should add an addendum: never build your app/business on top of third parties IF their primary business models aren’t providing services to developers.

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