ToS violation, yes or no?

[Ziocash]

I'm sorry if I maybe duplicate this thread.
I made a quick search before writing this to discuss about compliancy.

I checked Discord ToS and:

When using our services, you must comply with these terms and all applicable laws, rules, and regulations, and you must only use the services for authorized and acceptable purposes. You must also adhere to our Community Guidelines and other policies, which contain more detailed rules about your content and behavior when using Discord. Fundamentally, do not do, try to do, or encourage or help others to do any of the following:

• Don’t use the services to do harm to yourself or others. Among other things, this includes trying to gain access to another user’s account or any non-public portions of the services, infringing anyone else’s intellectual property rights or any other proprietary rights, harassing, bullying, spamming, auto-messaging, or auto-dialing people through our services.
• Don’t use the services to do harm to Discord. Among other things, this includes trying to gain access to or attacking our systems, scraping us, transmitting viruses or other malicious code to our services, abusing or defrauding us or our payment systems, copying our product or using our intellectual property without permission, and misusing our reporting or customer service mechanisms.
• Don’t use the services to do anything else that’s illegal. This includes using the services to commit any crime or infringe anyone’s intellectual property rights.

We encourage you to report content or conduct that you believe violates these restrictions.

So technically downloading chats from Discord using Token is accepted, it is not tolerated to use the token to spam things.

If you have further info, let me know, maybe i didn't check something or I missed anything else.

[Technetium1]

This is not technically ToS compliant, though an effort is made to have requests made reasonably slow enough to pass as a client.

Use is at your own risk. Accounts have been shutdown - safety is not certain.

[96-LB]

From the Respect Discord section:

• Do not use self-bots or user-bots. Each account must be associated with a human, not a bot. Self-bots put strain on Discord’s infrastructure and our ability to run our services. For more information, you can read our Developer Policies here.

Using a token from a user account is a violation of the terms of service. Using a token from a bot account, on the other hand, is compliant and perfectly okay. It's strongly encouraged that you use a bot token with DiscordChatExporter to avoid breaking ToS.

[Snowphey]

Thank you very much for this fast and detailed answer!

[nonami1612]

Is there a chance that this will take down my server and/or my account? Sorry if this is a ridiculous question, I can't help but worry.

[Ziocash]

Is there a chance that this will take down my server and/or my account? Sorry if this is a ridiculous question, I can't help but worry.

Yes, using a bot token is more secure

[96-LB]

@nonami1612 I believe that if your account is terminated then any servers you own are taken down with it. You might be able to appeal a ban, but you're strongly recommended to comply with the terms of service and use a bot account, which has a 0% chance of getting you banned. I've heard very few reports of anybody losing their account because they used DiscordChatExporter with a user token, but it can happen.

[nonami1612]

@96-LB Okay, thank you. I've just been banned before for no reason (it was repealed thankfully), so I can't help but worry.

[Ziocash]

I opened this discussion on purpose, just to explain to Discord that not all "self-bots" are intended for damaging their infrastructure.
I also hope one day that the answer can be "no" instead of "yes".

[KeqiangSun]

In the latest Discord Developer Policy, there is a term that reads:

You may not mine or scrape any data, content, or information available on or through Discord services.

I noticed in other strict terms, they said "Do not", rather than "You may not", like:

Do not use API Data for any purpose outside of what is necessary to provide your stated functionality.

There might be some difference between them.
Anyone knows to interpolate that correctly? Are we officially allowed to export history from Discord?
Thank you!

[stevenOCR]

I just got dinged this week for Platform Manipulation disabling my account's ability to send chats for two days. I've been suing DiscordChatExporter a few times this week each of which go back about two months of light to medium chats frequency. So yes you can definitely lose your account's good standing for overusing this tool.

[YourHabibiAmir]

Does this put my data at risk? Like the actual texts have sensitive data

[EclipsedStar0]

Was exporting a server's chat logs with the respect api rate limits and got an email saying 'You broke Discord's Community Guidelines'. You can DEFINITELY get violations for 'Platform Manipulation'. Especially if you export multiple things at once, you can rack up multiple community violations in one go.