Highest server moderation. Must have a verified mobile phone number

Whilst discussing the highest level of server moderation with the support team in ticket 17363154... I was advised that the verified mobile phone is only used to enforce ongoing bans if the user was banned by discord themselves due to a TOS violation.

This does seem to reduce this level of verification's usefullness to server owners. Our servers combined admin team thought that the mobile phone numbers would be used to prevent banned users from creating alt accounts and continuing to harass the server community.

Support tell me that the phone number is not involved in the server ban enforcement in the slightest. Sure forcing them to have a number may reduce raiders... But as we are a private invite only server thats not a big issue for us. Our concern is keeping trouble makers out once they are banned.

As touched on in my prior support cases and feedback... IP banning is flawed due to a lot of reasons but chief amongst them due to dynamic address assignment and VPN's rendering them near useless in some situations and the potential for collateral damage.

It would be a little more surgical to instead include mobile numbers in this banning process as its harder to get a new number, and the chance of collateral damage is lowered.

If this is implemented, it would need to be done in such a way that the user does not game the system. i.e. do something like change the mobile on an alt account to rejoin the server. If a user account changes the mobile number, some kind of memory of that number needs to be retained to prevent abuse.

On the flip side of this there needs to be some way for server admins to fix potential collateral damage. Like say a banned user cancels their mobile service, eventually a new person inherits the banned mobile number. We would need some way for discord to recognise that the number is now associated with a new trusted user and not the old troll.


Currently it is too easy for users to bypass IP bans and create alt accounts to troll the server. Including both IP, hardware ID's, and verified mobiles could help with this. As long as server owners have the capability to override the automatic process to help with any collateral damage.