Ask HN: Banned from Discord (9-year user) over an abandoned server – Advice?

9 points by namrog84 1 year ago | 3 comments

Hi HN,

I've been a Discord user (namrog84) since Jan 2016 and it's crucial for my personal friendships and professional game dev work. Three months ago, I was permanently banned (Oct 2026?) without any warnings. Apparently because an old server I created for the game Dark and Darker was left abandoned and unmoderated.

Now, not only have I lost contact with friends and collaborators, but I'm also cut off from essential support channels for development tools and communities. Despite multiple appeal attempts (all seemingly automated rejections), I don't think I've had a real conversation with Trust & Safety. I acknowledge as a server creator I share responsibility for moderation, but without any prior warnings a permanent ban seems disproportionate.

Discord was my primary social outlet after I left my role at Microsoft, so losing that network has been personally tough and professionally limiting.

Is there any proven path forward or guidance from the HN Community? Are there lessons from others who've faced similar bans and found success either in reinstating their accounts or otherwise? any advice or insights would be greatly appreciated.

Full additional details (timelines, appeals, screenshots, and such here): https://gist.github.com/namrog84/684f5e8ea854d7d04c149854b84bdce7

For context, I'm a former Microsoft employee turned full-time indie game dev: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-gorman-b3544412/

Thanks for reading and any tips or advice is welcome.

Adam (namrog84)

elmerfud 1 year ago |

Most of these user agreements have binding arbitration clauses in them. Your best bet is to look at their agreements find the relevant section that specifies dispute resolution and then follow that. Not many people will go through the trouble of doing these binding arbitrations and submitting the necessary things to request it but in the few cases that I've read or people have most of the times the companies just a reinstate the account. Because they don't really want to go through the hassle of binding arbitration and it also triggers a human to actually look at it and realize how foolish their automations are.

Unfortunately this is the state of many of these online services. They simply do not care because you are in fact not their customer you are a product of theirs. So removing a problematic product even if they are falsely removing it doesn't really matter because they have several hundred million more products.

namrog84 1 year ago | |

Thank you, I hadn't considered arbitration as an option.

And it does appear they have an alternative to the traditional appeals process regarding arbitration. And this is an important enough of an issue to me to pursue it.

anthk 1 year ago |

That's what you get with closed silos with propietary protocols. Not an issue with Jabber/XMPP, where you could just move on and ping your old peers via other protocols (email, phone)...