Anti-ossification measure: send random additional fields with no meaning in every response

[erkinalp]

To prevent people writing client libraries that crash when they encounter responses with additional properties, Discord REST and gateway responses should include random additional properties, with meaningless values. This is the same anti-ossification strategy used by TLS 1.3.

[braindigitalis]

Wait... is it April 1st already? 😂

This sounds like a great way to waste bandwidth and CPU on Discords side. if someone makes a library that crashes on extra fields, they will find out the minute discord makes a change and adds a field. sounds very much like a "them problem" that it isn't in the remit of Discord to guard against to me.

[bignutty]

The fixes for this problem are called competent library design and the openapi schema that discord has been working on for like a year now. Adding random nonsense data achieves nothing but waste more bandwidth and break all libraries that do have this issue.

[SinisterRectus]

Why stop at adding random properties? The properties should also randomly change types, or be completely removed without any version bumps. That will keep us on our toes!

[braindigitalis]

nah this feature is not required as this is how discord changes already work. best read the change log because there's no such thing as a minor version!

[erkinalp]

Yeah, @braindigitalis is right. Discord suffers from #6207.