Server/guild Members intent

Hi,

I doubt many people are reading this but I'm going to share my thoughts regardless. Recently my bot was verified, I was super excited. "finally!" I thought. When I applied for verification I requested to have the "Server members" intent enabled, I didn't think much of it since it's such a basic function.

When my bot was verified, Discord revoked this intent, meaning I can't enable it again. As a result my bot is now completely broken, the core commands work however almost every single meaningful command is not working anymore. I could not believe it. I was told to make a "persistent database" of guild members instead. This is just plain ridiculous, the bot needs a list of guild members so users can search for them by nickname/username/id, I can't keep a database of constantly changing data especially if I can't even access the data I need to store (LOL).

This has to be the worst thing I've experienced as a Developer, being limited this harshly not by my faults but by the platform itself. I've spent so many hours, probably more than 200 hours on my bot just for it to be bricked by Discord.

Of course I immediately reapplied for this feature with many more details on why it's imperative for my application to perform it's functions however, seeing as it's corona times and my last ticket had a response time of 12 days I'm not expecting an answer soon.

At this point I'm in a limbo, do I shut down my bot or wait the 12 days explaining to all its users how Discord broke my bot?

If my application is rejected I will be forced to delete my bot since I can't compete. How am I supposed to compete with other bots if they have this massive advantage? So much time, effort and ambition lost in that case. Deleting the bot would be better than to redesign it within these crazy limitations since no one will want to use it and the shame of having a bot that doesn't work well is not worth it.

I'll update this post when Discord responds which will probably be a while.

UPDATE: 5 months later and luckily I didn't have to delete my bot, although I considered it. I couldn't delete it because at this point the bot is active in thousands of servers. I decided to make a persistent database of all the users in redis. This works but uses a ton of memory and cpu as well as being far from ideal. My bot now has to listen to every event and update the DB which is very expensive as you can imagine.

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