Discord doesn't ban third party clients, only illegal stuff like spamming.
From the people at Discord:
> I run the infrastructure department at Discord which includes our anti-spam engineering team --
Just want to +1 what you're saying and confirm that we are never trying to ban third party clients (that aren't self-bots). Honestly, it would be a waste of our time and basically do nothing good for Discord.
Mind you, Discord's ToS do not specifically mention third party clients at any point. They do say that they can ban your account for whatever reason, however.
Also technically you can get banned from Discord for using third-party clients. Some people have used it and gotten away, some people weren't so lucky.
Discord explicitly disallows third-party clients, and will outright ban you if it detects API usage that obviously originates from self-bots (eg. posting embeds as a regular user). The ripcord ban might be a temporary ban more reliant on heuristics intended to prevent nitro scams like this one[0] where it performs no out-of-the-ordinary API calls but still purchases a bunch of Nitro gifts.
Third-party clients will often fail to act like the first-party one, causing them to be detected as userbots and banned automatically, among many other things. Modding the official client is usually looked past, as long as it doesn't touch the websocket/REST APIs in any way, but custom clients are verboten.
Obligatory "I don't work at Discord, just actively develop against their API" goes here.
It's nothing specific to bots. Discord's TOS doesn't allow you to use a thirdparty client. This has been the case since day 1 (I think) but they haven't been enforcing it. Now the creator of this client has had their account banned, so it seems that Discord may be cracking down on the use of unofficial clients.
(I work at Discord and manage our Infrastructure, Security, and Safety engineering organizations.)
We currently don't intentionally block or disable third party clients or action the accounts of people who use them.
We do monitor the traffic of spammers and we build heuristics around how to identify them -- and sometimes third party clients get caught up in that. Cold comfort, I know, but it's not us trying to block/come after well-behaved third party clients.
Anyway, to OP, good luck with discordo! For one of our internal hack weeks a few years ago I tried to build an RFC1459 compliant Discord gateway... it was a fun POC, but definitely lots of rough edges because the paradigms don't exactly match up. :)
Are third party clients allowed? One thing that has made me avoid discord and most of these sorts of chat apps is that they really hate users having customized clients. There's a lot of cool features that people have made for unauthorized discord client modifications which are technically forbidden which is not ideal.
From the people at Discord:
> I run the infrastructure department at Discord which includes our anti-spam engineering team -- Just want to +1 what you're saying and confirm that we are never trying to ban third party clients (that aren't self-bots). Honestly, it would be a waste of our time and basically do nothing good for Discord.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28438440
reply