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Comment by mrklol | Hacker News Reader

I simply wanted to write a user bot which reads messages from a channel (to write them to another messenger). After reading tos it seems to be a reason to get a ban, but did this ever happen for simply reading? I bet this stuff only triggers on actions.

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they actually provide a pretty complete bot api that's perfect for what you want to do. since it's a bot api, the "user" will appear as a bot in discord clients, and a few restrictions will apply (e.g. bots cannot interact with each other). but for simply reading a channel, it's pretty trivial to do.

I did use it in the past using the Rust library Serenity [0] (unofficial library ofc) to make a geoguesser-like bot [1] for a private server with friends. Pretty simple to use actually! Do note they have some pretty harsh ratelimits when it comes to API calls though, so pay attention to caching when fetching data (not likely to be an issue for your usecase at it'll mostly be server-sent events.

[0]: https://docs.rs/serenity/latest/serenity/

[1]: https://github.com/Tuetuopay/bot-ticelli (don't judge, this was thrown together between amongus games during lockdown)

I know about the bot api, but I want to use that as a user account.

I don't get why you would want that but what do i know :DI

Indeed since clients have a websocket connection to stream incoming messages, it should be nigh indistinguishable for them from a regular clients.

Also, the API abuse they are worried about is spam and scams, so just pulling out messages is likely to be the last of their problems.

I mean that’s kinda the same as the linked project Dissent - they also use a user account. That’s why I thought about it that way.

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