Lyberta {l Wrote}:Ok, so I finally had the reason to accept their draconian anti-humanity rules to speak to people but now they ask me for phone number.
Nope.
I would never use a service that requires phone number unless they already got my legal identity such as when doing banking.
FWIW, this was most likely imposed by the individual server admin as an anti-spam measure.
Back in late 2015, early 2016, I had a long-running gaming group. Due to constant issues with Mumble and alternatives (I got everyone on Mumble at least, give me some cred...) my co-host found Discord. I must admit that it was a dream by comparison and we always got better quality and no weird bugs that took forever to resolve, etc.
We eventually made it a 'general server' and it now has 15,000+ members. This means we are under spam attack. Admittedly Discord is very good with these, but you do get one every week or two that sneaks past. Honestly, it's more common to have a very salty and toxic member who keeps rejoining just to send people notifications, post gore, hardcore pornography, harass and threaten people, that kind of thing.
I imagine ANY large server like mine has a long delay before entering (we put it on 10 minutes until you can speak). There is a final setting though which needs you to enter a phone number to ensure you're not a bot. We turn it on mostly for the salty uses I mentioned above and in the rare bot attack (usually not targeted), the longest period we had it on for was 3.5 weeks I believe. Screenshot for illustration:
PS: server is just Discord's teminology, essentially it means community. Sadly Matrix doesn't replicate this feature yet. It's a long way away from being a replacement but I have faith it should be ready in 2022 for our requirements. Main thing people like us need is a sophisticated roles/permissions system and distinct communities within a (real) server.
You just wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this.