<story><title>Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community</title><url>https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ejj28</author><text>Phone verification can certainly be annoying, but anyone who&amp;#x27;s been part of large Discord communities will know that spambots that DM users with all kinds of scams are a huge issue. Phone verification stops someone from raiding a server with it enabled with hundreds of bot accounts. As for VOIP numbers not being allowed, that also makes sense; VOIP numbers are extremely cheap and allowing them to be used would defeat the whole purpose of phone verification.&lt;p&gt;Personally I think that giving server admins the ability to require phone verification is a good thing. It&amp;#x27;s not mandatory and it&amp;#x27;s only used if the server admin enables it. I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s fair to blame Discord when it&amp;#x27;s a choice made by the server admin, plus a forum could have the same requirement.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>Oh please do.  This seems like the perfect time to bring this up:&lt;p&gt;I had a piece of software that used Discord for support.  They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord.  I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don&amp;#x27;t support VOIP numbers.  I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity.&lt;p&gt;They told me, &amp;quot;Just use a friend&amp;#x27;s phone to verify.  As long as they don&amp;#x27;t try to verify on Discord in six months it should be fine, we won&amp;#x27;t check again&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Their official answer to identity verification was to impersonate someone else!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>My problem isn&amp;#x27;t with the phone verification.  I totally understand why they do that.  I don&amp;#x27;t even have a problem with not accepting VOIP.  I get why they do that too.&lt;p&gt;My problem is that they don&amp;#x27;t have an alternative, and there is no way for channel admins that turn on that feature to know how many people can&amp;#x27;t get in because of their choice.&lt;p&gt;They should either have an alternative way to verify oneself, or a way for the channel admin to allow you in without the verification, or both.</text></comment>
<story><title>Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community</title><url>https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ejj28</author><text>Phone verification can certainly be annoying, but anyone who&amp;#x27;s been part of large Discord communities will know that spambots that DM users with all kinds of scams are a huge issue. Phone verification stops someone from raiding a server with it enabled with hundreds of bot accounts. As for VOIP numbers not being allowed, that also makes sense; VOIP numbers are extremely cheap and allowing them to be used would defeat the whole purpose of phone verification.&lt;p&gt;Personally I think that giving server admins the ability to require phone verification is a good thing. It&amp;#x27;s not mandatory and it&amp;#x27;s only used if the server admin enables it. I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s fair to blame Discord when it&amp;#x27;s a choice made by the server admin, plus a forum could have the same requirement.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>Oh please do.  This seems like the perfect time to bring this up:&lt;p&gt;I had a piece of software that used Discord for support.  They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord.  I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don&amp;#x27;t support VOIP numbers.  I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity.&lt;p&gt;They told me, &amp;quot;Just use a friend&amp;#x27;s phone to verify.  As long as they don&amp;#x27;t try to verify on Discord in six months it should be fine, we won&amp;#x27;t check again&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Their official answer to identity verification was to impersonate someone else!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>giancarlostoro</author><text>There’s a bot that will ban most of those spam bots called Beemo. You realize a lot of bots are verified right? I’ve seen scripts to verify accounts on GitHub and spoken to the kinds of people who would automate accounts via scripts just to have a bunch of alts. They get numerous alts into servers just to spy. Its a  kind of art I guess. I wouldn’t recommend doing any of these things.&lt;p&gt;Personally I just wish Discord wouldnt rate limit bans if they’re not going to make a true effort to catch these bot farms. Gee I wonder how likely it is that three thousand accounts will decide to join the same exact server at the exact same minute? Having modded a decent (tens of thousands) sized Guild I gotta say people pop in every few minutes or seconds. Unless something big and relevant to your server happens that draws more traffic, but even then never thousands in seconds.</text></comment>