the spider den

disport

Nowadays Discord has replaced forums and other platforms for everything from games to software projects. Discord's contents are not only centralised with a company that hasn't been profitable since its inception, but there are no ways for traditional web scrapers and normal people to archive Discord guilds. Discord is extremely hostile towards archivists, and has a history of filing lawsuits against people in this field (I'm not naming names but if you're reading this there's a solid chance you know what I'm talking about).

Right now we're working on tools and programs for archival of Discord data. In terms of actually archiving, we'd need to be extremely careful in how we approach the problem. One idea is to have data be crowdsourced, and allow people to anonymously submit data. Perhaps in the form of a BetterDiscord plugin, or a small program. It is extremely important if we do this that we do it in such a way that people's accounts aren't getting banned.

We are only planning on archiving PUBLIC Discord guilds. We are primarily trying to conserve posts and messages that are public information that would have otherwise been archived using something like the archive.org scraper. Think bug reports, project discussion, and general channels.