Discord Bot Verification
Not planned
Out of the blue, Discord came up with the "Verify your bot" requirement for bots in more than 75 servers, threatening bot owners to prevent their bots from joining more servers if they don't get verified before the 7th of October.
The update, while behind good intents, doesn't work as fully intended, and here's why:
1. Reddit and other platforms are full of Discord Developers complaining about this new verification system. Passports and other forms of IDs are government issued IDs that represent you. If you were to share that information to Stripe (and Stripe gets breached), your Passport and/or IDs would become in the hands of unwanted actors who could impersonate you (and steal your bank account or even your house) and pretend to be you.
2. Not everyone has a passport (although Stripe supports a wide variety of countries for passports), and Stripe does not support all country IDs (which everyone has for sure). This verification method has flaws if you're like me: no passport, and ID not supported by Stripe. Discord's response to this so far is hilarious, suggesting you to transfer the bot to someone having a document that's accepted by Stripe.
Some possible solutions in my opinion:
1. Keep everything as it is right now for the unverified Bot Developers, and give verified ones those cool shiny new features.
2. Accept other forms of verification (such as a 0.01$ transaction from one's bank account)
3. Last resort, let them hold their national ID in one hand (while covering the numbers on it and making only their name and birth date visible to prevent identity theft), a paper with a Discord generated code in a second hand, and their face should be appearing in the same image too.
4. (Suggested by Vex) Make us send (or make Discord send us) a letter containing a code generated from the developers page to (from) Discord to verify our address (aka our identity)
Verification as it is right now is a nightmare, what do you guys think?
-
Even sending a letter to their address is another idea. That's what google did with me to verify for youtube montization
7 -
Completely with you on this one. I don't want to give up my information for various reasons, but a big thing for me is that Stripe processes the data (Okay, fine) but then goes ahead and gives a copy to Discord? They say they won't keep that data but who's to say they won't mishandle it? Them? Like we're talking about Discord here, they aren't known for good privacy practices or anything. I'd rather just Stripe handle that data and give a checkmark to Discord, or better yet, not make this stupid requirement a thing at all. I really like the idea of the bank account transaction, but I don't think it will cut it for them as making people give them their ID lets them prosecute you for xyz if they wanted to.
They should just let people have bots over 100 servers regardless of this verification. If this is done just to prevent these "scam" bots it's stupid. People are idiots for adding them in the first place.
If this is what it boils down to I don't care, I'm not going to be working on my bot anymore or using Discord. It will be a nice project to add to my Resume but that's it.
1 -
Google lets you verify entire listings for organizations through a mail they send to your place with a code, so why can't the same process be integrated for Discord devs? Still though, the id photo seems to be a more convenient function.
Also, my country isn't in the Stripe support list, so? Even though if I have a groundbreaking bot, I can't put it in more then 75 servers unless I transfer it to someone who can? Excuse me, but this it outright playing yourself. I know, verification is to block off those free stuff bots who'd prune anything they got inside (in fact, I was one of the people flagging those) but this type of verification is clunky and will make Discord lose developer community from international spaces since they can't even add their bots to more than 75 servers.
2 -
Another MAJOR problem - my bot was in 1,000 servers in the amount of time they advertise as being able to verify requests..(Let alone the fact that it's been 2 weeks and hardly any bots have been verified meaning their rates may be exaggerated)...I probably would've ended up ragequitting if I sat there for a week turning hundreds of servers away each day because of discord being slow with their verification
2 -
Listen, does verification only require the bot to be on 75 servers or more? And how many years is this verification? If I am 16, can I do this?
4 -
I'm only 16 how can I get a national ID in my country before 18? Does discord want young developers away?
2 -
I completely agree, the requirement for a government ID just to verify a bot is extremely overkill and concerning, especially from a privacy standpoint. I thought about two solutions for this.
1. Increase the server count required for verification to something like 10,000 guilds rather than 100. This gives hobbyist bot devs much more room and allows Discord to verify the bots that will actually be using a lot of data.
2. Use something other than a government issued ID. I was thinking a phone number since those are unique, but the above solutions are great as well.2
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
7 comments