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.

Thank you for looking into this! My first thought reading their story was "They must've used their discord token in some unusual way."

... which is exactly what I've been doing too: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

Do you happen to know: Is there a risk of Discord banning me for using that tool to automatically export chat logs for processing via a bash script?

Basically, it's a tool to convert discord servers into json.

Their official wiki gives instructions for using your personal user token rather than any bot / API token: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter/wiki/Obtaining...

I admit, I used my personal token without giving it a second thought, even though I should've known better. I haven't been banned, but this story reminded me that I should be careful. Am I being overly paranoid? Is it fine to use your personal token in situations like this, where it's basically a CLI tool?

Also, I run a discord server for ML with ~1k users. If I get banned by Discord, will server ownership transfer to someone else? Or will the whole server get knocked offline too?

Feel free to ignore this if you want -- I'm merely asking in case you happened to know. Happy thanksgiving!