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Tell HN: Discord is permanently locking out users with multiple accounts

77 points by lynndotpy ↗ HN
I used Discord's new account switcher feature and, shortly after, I was locked out of both accounts for phone number verification.

Specifically, each account requires a separate phone number, and I am not banned for a ToS violation.

After trying several different methods (including buying a second cell phone plan) I have been unable to access my accounts. Over a few weeks with support, I've spent money and several hours on my end, to no avail.

From our conversation, I understand this triggered a false positive on their "suspicious activity detection system". They couldn't tell me what triggered it, and I have not broken the ToS (no unofficial client), and they cannot remove the hold, and paying for Discord Nitro does not let you keep access.

This is especially painful because it's cut me off from friends and certain developer communities. From what I see from posts on other social media, this is not an uncommon occurrence.

Has anyone else had these issues? If so, has anyone had luck getting this resolved?

77 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread
nathanaldensr
Discord's phone verification is ridiculous, buggy, and insane. Sorry, Discord, but nearly everyone with a phone has a single phone number. Also, once you verify with one phone number there is something like a seven- or ten-day waiting period (forgive me; I don't remember the actual number) before you can use it to verify another account.

Time for Discord to be disrupted!

gtoast
Been trying to verify my phone number on my personal account for literally years. Every few months I give it a shot and it’s always the same. The fact that I used my phone number on my work account prevents me from verifying my personal account.

If Discord thinks I’m going to purchase a second phone line to verify my Discord account they’re insane.

Asraelite
There are sites which provide a temporary phone number for account verification for a small fee. I don't know any off the top of my head but they're easy to google. They often also accept crypto if you want to really retain anonymity. Effectively this means you pay $0.50 or whatever per extra account you want to have.

I really wish sites offered this option directly to customers so you wouldn't have to use these shady services. The primary purpose of phone verification is just to make the cost of creating a spambot greater than it's worth for the spammer, so they should have no probably simply accepting money instead of a phone number. The only service I know of that adopts this approach is Threema.

ranger_danger
Exactly zero of those sites provide non-voip SMS numbers, which are what's required by Discord and the like. They can detect when a number is really VoIP-based and they block all of them.
Asraelite
Are you sure? I'm not talking about the ones that offer a permanent number that can be reused, just those for one-off verification.

I've verified with them successfully on Discord multiple times.

ev1
There are plenty that provide non-voip numbers, but Discord will randomly challenge you later on if you do things like VPN heavily or block fingerprinting and if you can't access the number your account is toast.
antifa
> There are sites which provide a temporary phone number for account verification

Wouldn't those all become blocked, flagged, or "already used" pretty quickly?

zardo
They do, if you try to verify with one it's likely your account will be locked.
lynndotpy
The messed up thing is that I did buy a second phone number, on Mint Mobile. The verification code never came either, even after the number had been active for more than a week.

I also tried several numbers from Twilio.

ev1
All of Twilio is banned. Mint blocks some shortcode SMS.
aendruk
My coworkers looked at me like I’m crazy when I refused to use my personal phone number to verify work accounts.
quickthrower2
Unfortunately Discord is the disruptor. To me anyway. Slack and Reddit are the things it is disrupting. It is way more slick and fast than both.
skyyler
You say this, either not realising or not caring that slack and reddit were the disruptors before discord.

Discord needs to be disrupted.

branon
Isn't there some fosscord that exists? Put IM and voice in the same darktheme JS page and you've got a viable clone
lynndotpy
Unfortunately, even if Fosscord was a perfect clone, I can't just spin up an instance and expect all my friends and communities to migrate :(
hammyhavoc
Element (a Matrix client) can be used with a Discord bridge on your own server. I've even bridged Facebook Messenger et al to it. Only install one messaging/VoIP app per device. Battery life much better as a result.
tenryuu
I haven't used the native token switcher at all, but I've never had an issue running multiple instances of discord on the same machine to login into multiple accounts simultaneously (3 canary instances)
rubyist5eva
trash software and a trash company that can’t make money that won’t be around much longer
aendruk
Amazon trampled me in a similar way when they permanently disabled my account “due to inactivity”. Customer support said to just create a new account with another phone number.

As if I have another phone number.

antifa
There's no guarantee your replacement phone number isn't already used in someone else's inactive amazon account.
EddieDante
This is what you get for using Discord, and for having friends who choose to use bad software. It's a self-inflicted First World Problem.
nyx
"Sorry, we can't be friends anymore, you use bad software." Look, I guess I kind of get what you're saying, but unless you're Stallman this kind of lifestyle just isn't viable. Real people just want to use the thing that's easy to set up, good enough for their uses, and most importantly already popular. Network effects are a real showstopper for those of us who'd like to move to FOSS alternatives, and when the options are to either use the popular thing and communicate with our friends, or insist on the FOSS thing and isolate ourselves, it takes more zealotry than most of us can muster to commit to the latter.
EddieDante
I didn't have friends before Discord existed, so I never had a reason to use it. Network effects don't mean shit when you lean into capitalist atomization.
tenryuu
With an attitude like that I'm not surprised
ls15
> Real people just want to use the thing that's easy to set up, good enough for their uses, and most importantly already popular.

In reality this is not one app, but Skype AND Facebook Messenger AND Discord AND Zoom AND Teams AND Whatsapp AND ...

I am really glad that the EU is now requiring messenger bridging by regulation, so people don't have to install an ever-increasing number of spyware apps, just to be able to talk to their families, friends and colleagues.

shreyshnaccount
I really hope this message bridging regulation is more widely adopted and atleast I can move to a Foss alt
ls15
Companies with a market valuation above €75bn will be heavily fined if they try to skip this.
flipdot
I really like how people striving for freedom in software are always ready—and eager—to take away the freedoms of companies they don’t like. “I want to be able to do whatever I wish for with software I use, but I don’t want people who make software to be able to do anything with their own products”, huh?
xigoi
The freedom to choose what software you use is more important than the freedom to make your software a walled garden.
monkeywork
Freedom to choose what software you use is completely different than having the freedom to force developers to give you features that you want.

You do have the freedom of software choice already.

ls15
> You do have the freedom of software choice already.

Not on iOS (until next January when regulation kicks in)

xigoi
My school makes me use Microsoft Teams. In order to communicate with my classmates, I have to use Facebook Messenger. The new law will hopefully resolve that. Are you expecting me to drop out of school instead just so I don't have to use proprietary software?
Schroedingersat
Not when you can't go to university or get employed without using ms teams.

Or buy second hand without facebook or their properties.

Or contact businesses without facebook.

ls15
Like slaves were ready to take away the freedom to own slaves from slave-owners.

In today's world it is not a real choice to avoid BigCorp platforms if you want to work and communicate with the rest of society, so society should have a right to at least set some boundaries, otherwise we are allowing BigCorps to set the boundaries for society instead.

What I like most about these new rules is that they are specifically limited to big companies, so smaller companies are not hit by too-hard-to-comply-with-for-smaller-companies regulation, but customers are protected from BigCorp overreach.

EddieDante
Human rights are for human beings. Corporations are not people. They're just made of people, like Soylent Green.
shreyshnaccount
"i want to do whatever I want" as a customer. most of the people who hold this opinion are a. only talking about things which have a very high network effect. no one says they want legislation to force adobe to make photoshop open source, or even work well with gimp or anything. this is only for communication software. b. mega corpos with billions of users take a more prominent position, and as uncle ben said, with great power comes great responsibility. we just want the responsibility. imo it should be like this: you are allowed to excercise your right (write software as you want to) all you want unless it interferes with someone else's right (to use whatever software they want to use). while facebook doesn't force me to use WhatsApp, the network effect associated with it does.
herbst
IMO a little Stallman is a good thing. Are you installing any random app when someone asks you for contact details?

How will you find out that the person actually has Telegram if you don't refuse Facebook and WhatsApp first?

Is it actually relevant that you use the same social platform as all your friends do? Or is it actually possible to just not and still be friends?

2Gkashmiri
i have been holding out on installing whatsapp for as long it was an active service. i use a "business" number to get work contacts to send me stuff but never my personal phones.

i am anxiously waiting for the EU dma to be enforced so that finally i can use my matrix to connect to whatsapp/snap/fb/insta users who want to connect to me, right now they cant and its a bummer but i've stubbornly stuck to this.

viraptor
I think you'll be disappointed in your specific situating. The regulation doesn't seem to force the communicators to be both open protocol and open federation. Unless I misunderstand it, Apple, Google and FB having a private federation between each other would satisfy it too.
blitzar
This is what you get for having friends.
gnu8
What you are running into is that every supposed feature of Discord and Slack is actually a fatal bug. There is no replacement for IRC.
Mandatum
This point of view is so tired. It's the same mindset of those who long for the days of BBS.
hammyhavoc
I think people long for the cultural and social zeitgeist more than they do the platform and technology itself.
opan
IRC works extremely well and has the best clients of any chat protocol. I also use XMPP and Matrix, but they always feel rough by comparison and have issues. Crashing, message delays, no good way to look through logs locally and quickly, etc. IRC is of course simpler, but it really sticks out how polished irssi and weechat are.
ranger_danger
I just wish there was a way to bridge Matrix into IRC, instead of the other way around. I want to use my IRC client to join arbitrary Matrix channels.
Arathorn
https://github.com/progval/matrix2051 might be what you’re after
ranger_danger
Neat but it appears too broken to use. It crashes every time I connect to the IRC port it listens on.
progval
Hi, author here. It's definitely broken in many ways, but crashes should not happen. Could you open a ticket on the bug tracker with the error message(s) you get and the domain of your homeserver?
zaik
I haven't used it, but if you like irssi you might also like profanity which claims to be inspired by it: https://profanity-im.github.io/
opan
I have tried Profanity and it's only similar at the surface level. The actual features and interactions are very lacking. I'm convinced at this point that some of the best parts of irssi and weechat get ignored by devs of clients for other protocols, so the only way to get a great xmpp or matrix client is to somehow bolt that protocol on to the IRC client (like we have seen with weechat-matrix). Something as basic as switching channels in profanity is a lot harder. I use a "go" script for both irssi and weechat that lets me hit C-g and then type part of a channel/window name and press enter to quickly jump to it. I don't know of a way to do this in profanity. I have also found the omemo behavior in profanity to be rather unfriendly.
account42
I haven't ever had an IRC server require a phone number but sure, choose Discord if that's what you like.
hammyhavoc
Matrix has pretty much replaced IRC for my needs, can even bridge IRC into it.
hammyhavoc
Just sounds like yet another reason to use Matrix.org to be honest.
lynndotpy
I'd prefer that, but nobody I know uses it :(

I got invited to a probabilistic machine learning study group my uni is running, but couldn't access because of this issue. It'd be a big ask to get them to set up a matrix bridge

hammyhavoc
Bridge it yourself via Discord or whatever platform they're using. I have a bunch of accounts on each platform that I'm bridging through a Matrix server. Can run it in a Docker, or via an Ansible playbook complete with all the bridges. Can run on something as simple as a Pi.
ls15
How do you do that if Discord is locking your account?
hammyhavoc
It isn't going to work if the account is already locked. Need another number? Use a free SIP service.
herbst
And repeat once you get banned again, because your new number directly put you on a blacklist. What a time to be alive!
ranger_danger
Doesn't work, they will only verify real, non-voip SMS numbers.
hammyhavoc
You say this, but this hasn't been the case in my experience with decent quality providers.
herbst
Discord says my phone number is not valid. I am glad they know better than me.

It's a horrible platform with zero actual customer support. It's just important to realize that Discord is and always will be a throwaway account you can't trust to keep

Digital28
This isn't just a Discord problem, it's a consumer rights problem.

I've gone through this same thing with multiple companies, most recently after an identity theft, and the only recourse for consumers at this point is to indefinitely wage a campaign of turning a grievous issue into such a massive PR and/or legal department war that they have no choice but to attempt resolution.

ldng
Well, never give your phone unless it is a very critical account/service and thus avoid a shit ton of stupid bugs anywhere.
donkarma
https://smspva.com Use a phone number that your current IP is in. Alternatively make a new account on a residential IP and idle for about a week and don't message anyone you're not friends with
dr_kiszonka
Thanks for sharing the link!

I have some difficulty figuring out how that service works. I would like to create a second Google account, which requires a phone number to receive security codes. If you have a minute, could you please explain how to go about it and how much it would cost me, say, per year?

ev1
They are for one time verification for spam accounts, not legitimate or long term use.

If you are Western based I would really not send money to them at risk of your payment accounts getting hit with "sanctioned" problems.

dr_kiszonka
Ah, that's a pity. Thanks for explaining it to me!
egberts1
Like Netflix’s overzealous identification of individual users (spread out over multiple households), Discord too will face declining users.

Not sure what the business model is anymore but this sure isn’t about revenue.

I’ve dropped Discord since phone number requirement was added.

burnerburnito
While I personally don't use twitter, a sad reality is often people get better tech support from making a fuss about a shitty situation on twitter while pinging companies' accounts publically and challenging them to fix it.

I'm not sure if it will help you, but it's worth a try, or at least trying to get someone else to make just such a fuss to get proper attention.

shaggie76
I had a similar but less harsh experience -- just my alt got locked -- and it sounds like I was lucky. I'm sorry to hear that you're having a worse time of it.

I brought this up with our Discord contacts to suggest that there was a problem with their system (we integrated a bunch of stuff into our game so I had people I could talk to). It took about a about a month of polite follow-ups to finally get my alt account unlocked and get told that they were looking at what caused the problem.

I tried, as politely as possible, to explain that if you need a separate phone number for each account then their newly minted alt-account switcher was nearly useless and that they might want to rethink things.

It did motivate me to investigate what alternatives there were, and I was dismayed at the lack of options. I'd be happy to hear any suggestions I might have overlooked.

freemint
Did you at any point use a third-party client?
lynndotpy
Not at any time, ever. I didn't even know about them until after I got locked out.
ironmagma
Which is ironic, since the only reason I have multiple accounts is because Discord’s UX is such crap. I didn’t even intend to create them.