harmony VS AnswerOverflow

There are already reimplementations of the client side of some of their protocols (which are just JSON HTTP requests), including account registration without running any JavaScript (parsing the JS is needed though). These are of course against the ToS and can get you banned though.

https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/

It used to be possible to connect with a free software third party client (https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony), but then Discord changed the CAPTCHA system (from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha), and there's currently no way to solve hCaptchas with free software, as far as I know.

I don't think I'll delete Minecraft, but I guess I'll probably (barring something similar to harmony) stop playing if it really is impossible to play without a Microsoft account. It seems like it must be possible to avoid the account requirement somehow though.

This is Harmony: https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony

> TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots in a channel are doing.

These sorts of bots are quite rare on Discord, you usually have to make an account to be able to see anything. There have been attempts at standardizing this (like https://www.answeroverflow.com/) but they haven't taken off. Public logs are much more common on IRC than on Discord.

Related: AnswerOverflow makes Discord messages searchable on Google/ other search engines. It’s open source.

https://www.answeroverflow.com/

I agree that the discord centralization for Q&A is becoming problematic, it makes it less discoverable and searchable (Had this problem a lot with Svelte).

That said, I have had success so far using https://www.answeroverflow.com/ to search discord for questions. It sucks we have to use such tools, but given the current situation, it's also better to adapt.

We've started mirroring our Discord to the web using https://www.answeroverflow.com/

You could roll your own equivalent but AnswerFlow has some nice features and handles issues around consent nicely.

If you're starting a Discord then I'd strongly recommend stating upfront that you might mirror content to another location even if you're not doing it now - it makes it a lot easier than doing so further down the line.

A better solution would be to not use Discord but friction, push-back from my colleagues on alternatives and a fear of fragmenting the community made this the best option for us.