I was banned from discord... for creating an account / 2023-05-01

For a lot of things discord seems to be the place to interact with people. I didn't want to create an account there for a long time because I didn't want to interact with yet another service. But for certain subjects it is the place to be.

One such subject is the hack the box CTFs, the post-deadline discussion where all the write-ups are shared is mostly on discord. So in May 2022 I finally created an account, wanting to view the discussion. Directly discord wanted a phone number to finish logging in. I decided I didn't like that so I left it at that.

In the beginning of April I saw that part of the discussion about the proxmark (NFC security tool) is in discord. So I decided to give in and finish the login procedure.

So on 6 april 2023 I added a phone number, received the SMS and entered the received code. Right after that I was logged out with the message 'Your account has been disabled'.

I also received an e-mail about this block, with very general reasons why the account was disabled. Nothing specific, just 'we block accounts due to spam and/or abuse'. So I requested more information on why the account was blocked, received a ticket number in autoreply and that was it.

Three weeks later still no answer, even after a friendly reminder. I have no idea what is wrong, discord does not communicate and I am left thinking this is a very unreliable service if they can block for no verifyable reason without explanation.

I could try to create a new account, but from what I can find discord stores IP addresses and phonenumbers of blocked accounts and blocks those on the next account creation, so that's no use.

Update 2023-05-06

Finally an "answer" from discord. Which says they can't find the account associated with my e-mail address and I should only communicate about accounts from the e-mail address associated with the account. With a standard text about anonymizing accounts that are banned after 14-30 days. Which suggests that the anonymizing includes forgetting the e-mail address because it says:

if your account was disabled for a violation of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines, we'd have no record of that account existing.

So this "we can't find the account" is caused by their own slowness in responding, the response is 30 days after the block. To the day.

But they probably keep other data such as phone numbers or IP addresses (see above) so I don't think it is worth the effort to restart the whole circus. This is probably not completely GDPR compliant.