[ve55]

thanks for the informative response. I will look into how difficult it is to connect to a server using a user account from an IRC client, as that would make the experience much nicer for users like me.

I'm curious about the logging API permissions - it seems kind of weird that I could potentially join someone's Discord server and then download logs of their conversations for the past year instantly after joining, but I suppose this is already possible by viewing history in the client?

EDIT: looking at the API on https://discordpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api.html, it seems you need permission for the channel logs, but that can't prevent someone from writing code to collect them manually, regardless of permissions?

[ehsankia]

Discord has a pretty indepth permission system that allows per-channel/per-user setup.

If a server allows a user to view the message history (which basically mean, when you enter the channel, you can see previous messages and scroll up), then yes, that user can write a bot to save all the messages. I don't really see what the issue is here.

That to me really is one of the main reasons I prefer Discord to IRC. It's the fact that you can join a channel from any device and see past conversation. But of course, if for security reasons you don't want that, you can very easily disable message history and have it act like IRC does.

[Gaelan]

The channel log permission only applies to logs before you joined. You can always scroll up to the point you joined the server.