From the start, the Glitch community has used the platform to build apps and bots that interact with Discord, the hugely popular chat and conversation platform. As we’ve been working with their team lately, we wanted to make sure everyone on Glitch are being good citizens of the Discord developer community — both in terms of making sure well-intentioned apps that don’t cause undue burden on their platform, and especially in terms of combatting any attempts to use Glitch to build abusive apps or bots. We’ll talk about the work we’ve been doing, and how it impacts our overall plans for Glitch.
TL;DR: We recently banned self-bots on Discord as it violates their community guidelines. Going forward, we will also be banning npm packages that we identify as bot network abuse vectors, which may impact some bots currently running on Glitch. The good news: you can use the official Discord.js package to ensure you’re building an app that’s a good member of both the Glitch and Discord communities.
Many Glitch users have asked about updating our container infrastructure to include newer versions of key dependencies like Node, and unfortunately we’ve had to delay these important updates a few times so we can handle abuse on the platform as it happens. Today, nearly all of that abuse is related to Discord bot networks. So we’re making changes to address the bad bot problem, which will let us make Glitch better for everyone.
We are not banning Discord bot development entirely on Glitch. But to enable continued Discord development, we need to become even more opinionated about what we allow developers to run on the platform. This means being more careful about curating the packages, API calls, and infrastructure that’s available to Discord-based projects so our team can focus on the important, fun work that enables everyone on Glitch to share and discover the good web.
Put simply, the code packages that are overwhelmingly used to make disruptive or negative bots are being banned. As with any such banning of technology, it’s quite possible that some of you will be impacted negatively despite having good intentions. If that’s the case, first of all: we’re sorry! And second: we want to hear from you — we’re not trying to ban any thoughtful Discord developers. If this ban impacts you, let us know what you’re trying to build, and what you’re building with; We’ll work with you to figure out a solution.
I and the team appreciate your patience while we do this work, and thanks to our friends at Discord for helping us come up with good options for people to make cool Discord apps that work well with both our platforms. If you have any questions or concerns, sound off on the thread here, or you can email [email protected].