Comment on Discord Servers asking for Phone Numbers and 'Verification Levels'
LWD@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Interesting. I assumed Discord itself aggressively demands your phone number regardless of the “server” you join… At least, that’s been my experience.
Of course, even if the company is wrong (and just dumb), they’re still choosing to use Discord as an official channel.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s the impression that is being given, but its not true.
I’ve been successful in a very few cases of getting a Discord server admin to dial back the verification level from ‘highest’ to ‘high’ on their server, so that I was not prompted for a phone number. They agreed that the highest setting was overkill.
Most times though server admins refuse to do so. Gotta wonder at this point if they actually see the phone numbers or not at this point.
Sanctus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
When I ran a Naruto RP server we ran without verification for a while. Then trolls came in and they just kept coming back. They would target the feminine-identifying members of the server every time. Situations like this are probably why. To my knowledge I could not access the phone numbers.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 8 months ago
In one XMPP group I was in that got spammed, they just disabled the ability to speak without manual approval. Was your “guild” too big for that? Can Discord do something like this? Because giving phone number to something as shady as Discord is just inappropriate.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Is the email verification/validation, being registered on Discord for more than five minutes, and being present in the server for longer than ten minutes, not sufficient?
Sanctus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
No, they would just sign up with a new alias, wait, then join the server, wait, and then do it again. Most servers should not do this. But for situations like ours, a small RP server being harassed, it was useful for the year it was up. The users would not have been okay with that if the entire server wasn’t a close community of about 20 people. Its just another example of a thing that can protect extremely small teams conveniently being abused by bigger entities to get something they want (your data).
HKayn@dormi.zone 8 months ago
Getting a valid email address, being registered on Discord for more than five minutes and being present in the server for longer than ten minutes takes, you guessed it, 15 minutes.
If you ban someone from your Discord server for harassing other members, they can be back at it after 15 minutes. How do you deal with that?
sanpo@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I doubt they do. They just want to be “secure” and are unwilling to admit setting the level at “highest” is bullshit.
It’s not like you can easily get a new number and circumvent this “security” measure if you want… /s
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s the crux of it, they’re using a lie by omission to not have to justify to their users that its they themselves that are asking for the phone number, and not Discord corpo.
Nima@lemmy.world 8 months ago
on quite a number of servers that are 18+, higher verification usually sounds a little bit more safe. But then on most of the servers I run or moderate, we tend to have our own in-house verification methods instead of the built levels for discord.
the idea of the verification levels is attractive, however. anything to keep the kids out. though I’m not sure I’d go as far as requiring a phone number, I might consider it for future.
it depends on how the server is going to be used. why a gaming server should be highest level, I don’t know. I would think “high” is enough.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Only difference between high and highest is the asking of the phone number, all other security checks are the same. So if the other existing forms of validation are not already enough, then the bad guys have already won.
Nima@lemmy.world 8 months ago
what “bad guys”? Whatever the server owner feels is appropriate for levels of validation is up to them. ya know?