Discord - Worst tech support ever. How Discord trolls, mocks and doesn't help.

Discord tech support is literally the worst tech support I've encountered in 15 years.

 

Half a year ago, my account got blocked.

 

Somehow I got called into the discord community. Upon entering the community I was asked my age. I didn't expect that this check might make any difference. I figured it was for statistics or some sort of captcha.

I had friends waiting for me in the chat and game lobby, a stream was going on and I was in a hurry to get into the discord channel, so I picked a random year of birth... So, I indicated that I was 7 years old... That's the only reason for blocking an account that's about 5 years old.

 

It was June 4. It's been half a year. I sent over 10 emails, pictures, personal information I gave many explanations and my account has never been restored.

 

Discord account (according to tech support) has infinite value and it can't be taken and just restored. Discord tech support needs to mock you, send you meaningless answers, mess with your head, send you contradictory emails, spit on you and ignore you for months. They will not help you. They also really need your passport information and photo.

 

A few years ago I moved to another city with my girlfriend. I was working, walking, playing sports and any video games no longer mattered to me. Before I moved, I set up two-factor authentication for my Steam account and email service. But if you don't use the SIM card for more than half a year, it gets blocked, the contract with the operator is terminated and the phone number becomes available again. When I moved to another city I bought a new local sim card, but I forgot about my old sim card. And it was blocked...

It took about a year and a half and I needed to get into Steam. I was horrified to find that my phone number was blocked, which meant I couldn't get a confirmation sms code to go into my inbox and couldn't log into my Steam account. I thought it was a hopeless situation and I lost access to both my Steam and my main mailbox forever (because I no longer have the right phone number and it cannot be recovered).

 

I decided to try my luck and write to Steam tech support and my email service.

I hope you understand the seriousness of my situation? The login is tied to a phone number, which I don't have. But I explained them everything and after a couple of days I got both access to Steam and my mailbox back. It took only two days. And I sincerely wanted to help, I got answers from real people and they tried to solve the problem in the way that was comfortable for me.

And I have accumulated a lot of such examples in my life, this is just one of them. We are all ordinary people and we can lose a phone, a bank card, forget a password or a secret word - this is normal. Our memory and attention span are imperfect. That's what tech support is for, to solve people's problems.

 

Probably I don't need to explain you the difference in value of the Steam account (which has a lot of paid games), the main mailbox (to which dozens of different services, accounts, etc. were connected) and the Discord account, which is not 1/10000 of the value as Steam or mailbox?

It's just a voice application and a new account can be made in a couple of mouse clicks.

 

But it really isn't. A Discord account is much more important than anything you've ever had, so it won't be recovered even if you provide all of your personal information, such as your password, phone number, date and reason for blocking your account, and other data.

 

In order to restore my account, they asked for my passport data to make sure I was over 13 years old.

1. this is very funny because if you are under 13 years old, you will just make a new account in 1 minute.

2. There is no age verification system at the account creation stage. All the kids on the planet can make themselves 20 accounts and there's no way to stop it. And Discord won't be able to verify their real age.

 

Have you ever created a new account? I have about 5 new accounts, its very easy to make even in your browser. No one will check your real age, you don't need a phone number and it seems like you don't even need to verify it through your mailbox.

 

It would seem - the main sticking point is that Discord thinks I'm under 13 and therefore can't unblock my account. So what's the problem? There's no problem here.

 

I have repeatedly suggested in emails that:

1. Show my picture (and I have sent them these pictures). I am no longer young (I am 35 years old) and I have gray hair on my temples, wrinkles on my face and sadness in my eyes. It would be impossible to mistake me for a 13 year old boy.

2. Connect by video link with the webcam on and talk to the cameraman or whoever.

3. Go to my live stream on Twitch.

4. Talk to a live operator via discord (not through email correspondence).

5. Any other method of verification.

 

But I refused to send my passport data. And I have my reasons for that.

I can't trust tech support.

 

Above I told about how I restored my mailbox and Steam account. Even in that case they didn't ask for my passport details because I said: "I'm sorry, but I don't trust you. I can provide any other data other than my passport." And they agreed with me. They helped me without a photo of my passport, even though we were talking about services of serious and tangible value.

What is tech support? It is an operator who will see my passport data and can sell it to criminals. How do I know it's an honest person?

My passport photo will have all my personal information on it:

1. Passport series and number,

2. Surname and first name

3. Date and year of birth

4. Place and date of passport issue

5. My personal signature.

 

I think everyone knows that personal data can be sold to intruders who will use it for personal purposes.

If someone uses my personal data, I cannot prove anything. Where can I go, who can I contact and who can I complain to? I may suffer serious financial losses and I also want my privacy to be protected. I do not want to give my personal information to strangers. Why should I trust someone I have never seen? I don't even know his name, what city he is in, how old he is. Maybe this operator is working with crooks (but maybe he is the most honest person on the planet). But I don't know anything about this man. I can't trust him. Maybe tomorrow someone will hack the discord database and leak it on the net and my personal data will be in the public domain. I don't want to risk it, I want to keep my privacy and I don't want to hand over my passport data.

 

In addition to the desire for privacy and preservation of your personal data (so that no one can use it for selfish purposes), there are other inconveniences/problems with the passport photo.

 

1. I have a very old phone, it has a very bad front camera. You won't see anything on it.

2. I have a crack on the main camera's protective glass, so the photos come out bad because the camera can't always focus on the subject.

3. The resolution of the main camera is not very good either.

 

According to the instructions I need to take selfies that show my face, a piece of paper (with my name Discord) and my passport (which shows my date of birth). This is absurd!

I have to hold my passport and piece of paper with one hand, and I have to hold my phone with the other hand and try to catch myself and all the papers in the frame, while my hands are shaking and my camera won't see a damn thing.

First of all, my passport has a lot of watermarks (holographic marks) that reflect light and so I need to catch the right angle so that the glowing holographic marks don't overlap the text in the passport and second, I need to photograph the passport so close and with the resolution of the front camera that I can see anything in the photo. If I reach out and take a picture of my passport, it's impossible to see the font. So no one can tell what date of birth is in that photo.

 

Even when I put my passport on the table and put my elbows up to keep my hands from shaking, I barely managed to catch the right angle to take a picture of my date of birth. And that's on the main camera very close to the passport.

Personally, and for my situation, this condition is physically impossible. But they require it. It's a terribly stupid rule and whoever came up with it didn't think through all the nuances and complexities one might encounter. Whoever came up with it didn't use their imagination to imagine themselves in this situation.

 

I wrote all this to tech support, I explained it all to them. I asked what I should do.

I offered to close some of the personal information in my passport and separately take a picture of my passport on the main camera up close, then separately take a picture of myself with my discord nickname.

I did not get any response. There was just silence in response.

 

In general, all this turns into absurd, given that the meaning of verification is lost, because you can use Photoshop, you can download from the Internet someone else's passport photo. All this is not a 100% verification. The best verification would be to contact them by video link, and I offered them that. They will see me, I will give them a personal intimation and everything will be over in a couple of minutes.

 

 

Also, I find it completely idiotic to have to send a passport photo at all if I am sending a photo of my face along with it. What is the point here?

Let's imagine an old man who is 60-70 years old, with a gray beard, with gray hair, with a wrinkled face and a toothless mouth.

I have no doubt that even in this case, the tech support discord from this old man a passport photo to make sure that the old man is more than 13 years old.

This is all completely absurd, these are idiotic rules, and the tech support operators are incapable of independent thought, they have no logical thinking. Their intellectual capacity is limited to CTRL+C + CTRL+V.

I can imagine a situation with a teenager where it is difficult to determine the age of a teenager, such as in the 10-16 year old range. But looking at a 35 year old dude you will have no doubt that he is no longer 13 years old.

 

What are we talking about here? A discord account, not a bank card. 2022, soon to be 2023. It's easier to restore a bank card, Steam account and mailbox than a voice app account (a new account can be crafted in a minute). This is complete nonsense.

 

It's weird... You can make an account without passport information, and you have to send a passport photo to restore it. I can create an account at 2 years old, and I can only restore it after 13 years old.

 

By the way, there is a lot of absurdity in this idiotic rule:

 

There is no check on the date the account was created. I indicated when I logged into the community that I was 7 years old. I don't know how long ago I created this account, but my subjective feeling is that it's been about 5 years. I created an account 5 years ago (or maybe more) where I indicated that I was 30 years old.

So I created my account at 2 years old? Well if it's been about 5 years since the account was created, and now I suddenly decide to be honest and indicate that I'm 7 years old, then I created the account at 2 years old, linked it to my phone number, and linked it to my mailbox. After 5 years, I indicated that I was 7 years old... That's bullshit.

It doesn't matter that the discord account is tied to a verified phone number. Why is this being ignored? Maybe 7 year olds have their own phone number, I don't know.

It doesn't matter what date of birth is set on the account (I have it 1987). I don't care. It won't make any difference when you specify an age when logging into the community. It will be ignored.

 

 

And no one will ask you, "Hey, kid, something doesn't add up here... Your account says you're 35 years old, but now when you log into the community, you say you're 7 years old. You didn't mix anything up? Maybe you made a mistake or rushed it? Think carefully, because if you indicate that you are under 13 years old, your account will be deleted and you won't be able to restore it."

No confirmation message, no warning, you just get blocked instantly. Why don't they give you a temporary ban if something doesn't add up: the date of registration and the age you just stated?

 

Why is the date of account creation, activity, valid phone number, specified data and so on ignored?

This is all idiotic. This system was designed by an incompetent person. This system is not flexible to changes and non-standard situations. The system doesn't try to adapt and try to help.

 

Well, if I'm really 7 years old, why would I knowingly indicate that I'm 7 years old? Why did I specify a different age when I created my account a few years ago? Did I suddenly just decide to be sincere today and honestly state my real age?

 

There is another important detail I want to share. It also reflects how deeply Discord tech support doesn't care about users. When you write an email to discord tech support via the request form on discord's website and they respond to your request, discord copies all the attachments you have attached via their website in your reply email. This means that your email service will receive all the photos that you uploaded through the site... And I don't trust my email service, I don't want it to collect information about me. This means that if I attach a photo of my passport through the request form on the discord website, this photo will come in a response letter to my mailbox... I asked them several times not to do this: not to send a photo and personal information to my mail service, which I shared through the discord site. They spit on my request and my desire for privacy. They keep doing it anyway. I asked for some other way to contact them, like a live person, but they wouldn't respond to me. I asked for the ability to send photos through discord apps, in private messages (then the photos wouldn't come to my email service). I did not get an answer.

 

 

They just ignore you. But if they write to you, they write all kinds of nonsense.

 

So I wrote: "Excuse me, but I will not show my passport. You need to make sure that I am over 13 years old? I can send you a picture, it shows that I am not 13 years old.

 

I sent my photos (which even showed my gray hair), I sent clips from the Twitch channel, I gave many arguments, I offered other solutions, I asked questions.

 

I also provided the following information:

- My picture (sent through the website)

- I sent them a passport photo with blacked out personal data (I blacked out: passport series and number; name and surname; personal signature) on which you can see the date of birth (exactly the same as in my account)

- Account name.

- The name of the mailbox to which the account is linked.

- Account password (current and previous)

- Reason for blocking the account - The age of 7 was specified when you logged in to the channel.

- Date of account blocking - June 4

- Date of birth specified in the account.

- The phone number the account was tied to.

- I suggested they tell me what other information they might need to make sure the account belongs to me.

 

Who else would have that much information?

 

I asked them what they would need to verify my age (other than a FULL passport photo), because I am willing to go along with any other terms.

It's been 33 days and they still haven't answered me.

 

No one texted me, "Okay, dude, no problem. You're right, your picture will be enough for us."

 

Then I texted them again a few times intermittently. I didn't do it too often, out of respect, and because I thought they had a lot of work and couldn't review all the appeals quickly. So I didn't spam emails every day.

 

In response I received either CTRL+C + CTRL+V emails with instructions about the passport photo or instructions on how to delete my account.

 

 

It's an amazing situation.

Several times I received this:

 

"Clyde, Discord Support Bot here, sending you an automated message here first before I escalate you to one of our support specialists since I noticed you were writing in about an account deletion!"

 

I got a reply from the discord bot. Here you should pay attention to these words: "I noticed you were writing in about an account deletion!"

But I wasn't writing about an account deletion! There were no words "deletion", "delete", "del", "deleted" - nothing like that in my letters. Why would I write about it at all? But I did use the word "restore" many times. I don't know what talentless programmer wrote a bot that can't tell the difference between the words "delete" and "restore", but he should be fired, hired another programmer, and given a task: to erase the current bot and write a new, normal bot. Despite the fact that I didn't use words like "delete" in my emails, there still should be a context in the text of the email, which should inform about the need to restore the account. Context!

 

The whole thing sounds like trolling and bullying. I don't understand, doesn't the discord bot know the word "restore"? Apparently he really doesn't know such a word... Can't he be taught to define the word "restore"? They are two completely opposite words, how can they be confused? How is it possible in 2022, at the time of the development of neural networks, not to understand the difference between deletion and restore?

 

I ended up getting several emails with instructions on how to delete an account...

Below in this email are lines like this:

"REMINDER: If none of the above solved your issue/question, you will need to reply back to this email if you would like to forward this ticket to our support team!"

 

I replied in the same email. I wrote that I didn't need instructions on how to delete the account, I needed to restore the locked account. But there was no response to me.

Months went by and I kept waiting for an answer. Now it's been a year and a half.

 

 

Several of the last emails came on October 21.

In 1 was another instruction to delete the account.

In 2 I was told that: "We appreciate you reaching out! We're unable to review email submissions via support @discordapp .com / support@discord.com."

support@discord.com is the address through which I communicated with them using my email service.

In the 3rd email I received this: "Your request () has been updated. To add additional comments, please reply to this email."

 

So, one day I received 3 emails, one telling me that they could no longer consider emails sent via this email, and the next telling me that for additional comments, I needed to reply to this email (to support@discord.com)...

 

I went to their website and through the Discord appeal form I pointed out that I had received conflicting information and asked where do I need to write?

Four days later, I received two emails: one had what I already mentioned, "We appreciate you reaching out! We're unable to review email submissions via support@discordapp.com / support@discord.com"

And in the second letter they confirmed that they had received my request.

 

I haven't received any more letters since October 25th.

 

By the way, if you encounter blocking of your account, you will also be asked for your account ID, it is 4 unique numbers something like #9696. But if your account is blocked, you won't know this number unless you remember it because your account now looks like this: Deleted User#0000

 

What numbers did you have? You won't know unless you remember or someone reminds you. There's no way to find out those numbers through tech support or the discord website if you've forgotten them. Considering how much information you have to keep in your head in the 21st century (birthdates, blood type, passwords, data, pin codes, names, secret words to check, etc.), it's very easy to forget those numbers. This is also a very silly part of this whole system.

 

 

From which I conclude:

1. Employees of technical support do not care about appeals. They do not want to do their job. They do not care about anyone (well, or only me).

2. Employees can not read the text of the appeal and understand its essence. When I got answers from real people, I had the impression that I was communicating with a bot or script. I kept getting answers from new operators. None of them helped me. They answered with ready-made templates.

The letter doesn't say anything about deleting the account, but several times it mentions "restore". And in response they send me instructions on how to delete the account. I don't know what this has to do... This is total absurdity.

3. The tech support staff doesn't know how to handle a non-standard situation. They can not think at the level of making independent decisions and can only read ready-made scripts with the answers. If the situation is non-standard and they do not have a ready answer (this situation is not described in the scripts), then they cannot do anything, because they cannot think independently. They probably go into a stupor, their mind fails, they reboot, and they send something that has nothing to do with the situation. All they can do is read ready-made answers and press CTRL+C + CTRL+V. When you make arguments and ask questions, they stop answering you, the employees just run away and ignore you when they don't know which answer to copy and paste. That's what Diskord tech support is all about. I think given the intellectual capacity of Diskord tech support, we're the ones who should be checking that they're over 13 years old.

 

 

I don't think some 13 year old kid is going to do all this correspondence and waste his time to restore his account, because it's easier for him to make a new one.

 

I know about 10 different major services that I have dealt with and I can say with confidence that they always try to help with the problem of their users, using an individual approach. And you won't get a few "how to delete your account" instructions if you need to restore it.

And only one single discord shows a disrespectful, indifferent, spitting attitude towards users. They are not trying to help you. They have absolutely stupid rules and do nothing about it.

 

What's the problem with looking at a photo first and if you can tell from the photo that the person is over 13, then discard the need to demand a passport photo from them? What's the problem with having a discord channel where you can upload your photo directly? What's the problem with restoring an account that's over 5 years old with a linked phone number? It's been a year and a half since the blocking and a month and a half since the last letter from tech support. And all I saw were ready-made scripts in the responses.

 

Perhaps I was rude in this message, I apologize. But I hope for your understanding. This situation makes me very sad... I have been nervous for half a year now and I cannot do anything to solve this problem. The reason for the blocking is so insignificant...

And I am somehow trying to draw attention to this problem to solve it, or maybe hear some advice.

 

Maybe there are mistakes in the text, inappropriate words, or incorrect context. This is possible because I used Deepl to translate this text. I am fluent in my native language, but not equally fluent in English. Also, some words may be different in strength, meaning, or, for example, sound rougher than they were in the original.

https://www.reddit.com/user/span4ev_/comments/zc6bjv/discord_worst_tech_support_ever_how_discord/