Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Using a user account to do this is still considered risky since any automated API usage by a non-bot user is against TOS, and they have heuristics (maybe now ML-based heuristics) for banning accounts for 'things that "don't look like what our official client does"'[0].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25215415



This is why I use a dedicated account to scrape servers, since I unfortunately need my main to interact with(/run) communities unavailable elsewhere.

FWIW, I haven't exactly been careful with it (oftentimes scraping 2 servers at once, and downloading all attachments) and have never had an account get banned.

The only time I got 'banned' in any capacity was when I hammered the internal JSON API to get information about server's invite links, and even then it was only an automated IP ban from Cloudflare for a couple days. Although, it was an unauthenticated API.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: