Comment by ejj28
5 years ago
Phone verification can certainly be annoying, but anyone who'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.
Personally I think that giving server admins the ability to require phone verification is a good thing. It's not mandatory and it's only used if the server admin enables it. I don't think it's fair to blame Discord when it's a choice made by the server admin, plus a forum could have the same requirement.
My problem isn't with the phone verification. I totally understand why they do that. I don't even have a problem with not accepting VOIP. I get why they do that too.
My problem is that they don't have an alternative, and there is no way for channel admins that turn on that feature to know how many people can't get in because of their choice.
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.
The alternative is to have an admin/mod assign you a role. If you read the the text under "Verification Level" https://discord.com/safety/360043653152-Four-steps-to-a-supe... you will see that members with role don't need to have phone verification.
That being said, anecdotally I have heard Discord locking/terminating accounts without verified phone numbers (usually if suspicious activity has been detected).
Definitely, I agree that phone numbers are a flawed verification method. Something better needs to be created, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't have the same or different flaws.
There’s an ID verification service, at least in the US, where you go to webpage A who wants you to confirm identity, A then redirects you to the service. The service asks a bunch of questions like ‘which of these cars have been related to you’ or ‘which of these addresses belonged to you when you lived in town x?’
That generates a score where the service determines if you are who you say you are and returns the result to the calling web page.
But I assume it uses background check/credit check information which may be limited to the US and is a paid service as compared to phone validation.
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Pay $5 via crypto, venmo, whatever to add a similar cost barrier. Make it separate from nitro.
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Admins can just lower the verification level for the server, can't they?
https://discord.com/safety/360043653152-Four-steps-to-a-supe...
Isn’t that an all-or-nothing choice? What if I want to manually allow a single user who can’t pass the phone verification routine?
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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.
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.
Spy bots get away because they don't spam or do anything weird. No one is sitting there auditing users who haven't spoken much. Spam bots will end up with their account banned and phone number blacklisted.
Yeah, they definitely need to do better, but forums can have the same phone verification requirements, it's not really a negative of Discord compared to forums in my opinion
>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.
Cool, except whoever or whatever is deciding what is and isn't VOIP is not doing a good job at making that determination. A few years back I ported my old cell phone number to a VOIP provider. I now have a new phone number on a different carrier. $OldPhoneNumber is apparently not a VOIP number and $NewPhoneNumber is. So I had to use the $OldPhoneNumber on a VOIP provider to verify my account because $NewPhoneNumber with a carrier wasn't acceptable.
But hey, it's their closed platform and they can use whatever means of keeping people off of it that they want. I don't really care for it anymore.
> It's not mandatory
That's not true at all. At any point your account can be flagged by their internal system and on your next login you will be forced to add a phone number "for security purposes". It happens to people all the time, but in particular, though not limited, to TOR and VPN users. So, yea, sure Discord's not at fault in the situation where a server admin turns on the phone number requirement, but they are definitely to blame when they force users, some who prefer to remain anonymous, to either give up personal information or lose their account forever (support will not help you).
Not sure if this can still happen if you've got 2FA turned on, but seeing as I see it mentioned more often from tech literate people (e.g. on here) who are more inclined to setup 2FA I doubt it makes a difference.
> It happens to people all the time, but in particular, though not limited, to TOR and VPN users.
The best part is that this only matters to people who care about their account. Most malicious actors won't care and will just create a new one.
Phone verification would be fine if discord had support for multiple accounts/identities. It's a fundamentally important feature of any online social service to be able to retain privacy and have different identities for different purposes. Discord makes this very difficult.
If they allow the user a chance to send an appeal or out-of-band alternative method to verify then this becomes less of an issue. It's when people presume certain baselines — like a phone number — that it becomes a showstopper to community.
I have seen Discord servers that use 3rd party verification systems, but very rarely. An alternative to phone numbers would be ideal, but there will always be flaws similar to the flaws of phone verification in my opinion.
I totally get all the frustration over phone number verification but it simply is the easiest and most effective method. It's really hard and expensive to get more phone numbers while every other method is easy to get unlimited accounts. Almost every country has phone numbers tied to ID as well so you can report the worst of users to local police.
Discord pushes SMS verification because it a)gives them your identity which is valuable and b)avoids them having to spend money on proper bot/troll mitigation.
VoIP number bans don't accomplish much because there are lots of services that sell real-sim-backed numbers and nowadays there's even eSIMs.
> Phone verification can certainly be annoying
Not just that. Why do you need to share such private information for every service out there? It's pure madness. It is, and will be used for tracking you online everywhere.