Where you get denied hundreds of times for your bot verification, and then you see a scammer getting verified with all intents...

It's The Reality​

I usually don't rant about stuff because I got better things to do, but this time I just can't hold it in anymore.

I was working as I got an automod message. A scam. I decided to investigate it to take a little break from focus. Attention span of a coconut.

Of course, it's a CyberLeek GTA VI leak related thing because it's so interesting like omg gta vi omggg :oo

So I joined, and saw a typical scheme. A verification bot and the entire server locked out unless the user gets "verified" (read: hacked and scammed).

But one thing pissed me off in particular: the bot was verified. And had all intents approved. Including the MESSAGE_CONTENT intent, which I needed to get for years, and never got approved.

Of course, the quick verification link pointed to an AI-cloned website.

And of course, the website then impersonates Discord with a phishing login form opened in a popup to confuse the user. Entering any credentials will send them in plaintext to the scammer, and take over the account, and probably make it so the user can't even recover it.

Notice the about:blank. Super common phishing technique.

Whoever proceeds to enter their credentials will have their account stolen, and the scammer will then use it to scam others, and probably get it banned by Discord.

Who asked?​

Me. Anyway, what I'm upset about is that those scams still exist, have massive servers, with thousands of members bots, and Discord does nothing about it. And they gladly verify their bots (somehow) with all intents, while my bot (marCloudBackup) or other bots (e.g. YAGPDB, for instance) have troubles fighting over the right to get the intent.

But apparently having prefix commands is a crime, and having a bot that actually does something useful is a crime, and having a bot that actually cares about the users is a crime. And actually fights against malicious use cases and actively protects the Discord as a whole is a crime.

YAGPDB situation:

I guess doing BaaS (bot as a service) is the way now, or opensource your bot and let others run it. :/

Thank you for reading my rant.

As always, stay safe and cautious online. If you have any questions about such scams or want to discuss this topic, feel free to join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/yaftWcn

Best, Marcelektro

Here's a link to their developer help center about the update.

TL;DR: They want you to verify your bot, not if it's in over 100 servers, but when it serves over 10,000 members.

What does it mean?​

If your own Discord server has over 10k members, you need to give up your personal ID and get the bot verified. Even if you don't plan to make the bot public or share it with others.

And to make it even more fun, you then also need to apply for gateway intents, e.g. MESSAGE_CONTENT intent, which is required for most of the bots out there, and especially for marCloudBackup or other security bots that need to analyze user messages.

Why this is bad?​

Some bots avoid going through the verification process for privacy reasons, and run in a "bot as a service" model. The customer supplies a bot provider with their own token, and the service runs them their own instance of the bot, under their own Discord bot instance.

This allowed users to run their own private bots, without the need to share any personal information, and risking it getting breached (it did).

Sharing such information online should never be considered something "normal". It is obvious that if something can be used for a bad purpose, it eventually will. In this case, it was breached to the public.

But in some other cases, companies like Palantir build surveillance profiles for every citizen based on data. One could say, that 1984 was just a book. But nowadays, it feels like some people took it as a manual.

My mom always said: "never share any personal info online". She was so right.

Future plans?​

We don't know yet.

Join our Discord server to share your thoughts: https://discord.gg/yaftWcn

One day you wake up to see everything is gone. And see only one channel, named something very offensive towards you.

Turns out your own staff member got compromised and destroyed your whole community. Horrible stuff.

This is exactly what happened to us in early 2019. And that is also what sparked the creation of marCloudBackup - a full solution to complete discord server backups.

How to protect yourself?​

1. Grant permissions carefully​

Never give anyone permissions they do not specifically need. Take your time to properly configure your server roles and grand them wisely.

This also applies to bots. If you have a bot that updates the member counter channel, do not give it access to read all messages and make any changes to the server other than the one channel it modifies.

That significantly reduces the attack surface of your server.

2. Have a backup solution in place​

Everything can fail, and everyone can turn out to be against you, like in our case, our trusted staff member.

It is best to be prepared for everything, and a discord backup bot is a perfect solution for that!

We own a backup bot, and this article was in fact created to boost its SEO after a recent incident with Discord.

You can protect your server now, by inviting marCloudBackup for FREE!​

Our bot has been around since 2019 and has never suffered from any data breaches or privacy violations and has been a reliable discord backup solution that served thousands throughout its existence.

If you only care about a local backup without using any 3rd party services like ours, you can use a local tool Discord Chat Exporter by Tyrrrz, which creates local chatlogs from all channels in your server.

That way, all your messages are safe from being lost, and stored securely and privately on your own computer. Or rather, the security depends on you, how secure you make it.

When it comes to alternatives to our bot, I can recommend the Xenon bot. The bot has along history of being reputable, in fact longer than ours, and works with Discord directly, giving you a quality experience.

Why we wrote such article?​

After Discord (probably by mistake) terminated my account and the bots along with it, marCloudBackup has had a very hard time getting any new users.

This is an effort of bringing the light back to the project. Countless hours of human work (not vibecoded like some competitors) were put into the development and design of the infrastructure and the bot itself.

I really don't want this to go to waste. Especially since I never truly released the bot.

So this shall be an effort for a new beginning!

Is this content slop? Maybe. In fact yeah. It's common sense to manage permissions correctly after all. But the keywords will hopefully match some queries :p And no AI was used to write this, so at least it's human slop. :D

Whether your server is a small community of friends, or a large community with thousands of members, you should always rely on a backup bot that takes your server's safety seriously, is reliable and can be trusted with your data.

In this article, we will go through the best practices for backing up your Discord server, and how to restore it when needed.

How to back up your Discord server?​

The best way to back up your Discord server is to use a backup bot, which is a bot that can create complete backups of your server, including all channels, messages, roles, emojis, stickers, and more.

There are several backup bots available, but we recommend marCloudBackup which we own, for its reliability, security, and ease of use.

1. Invite the bot to your server: marcloud.net/backupbot
2. Create a backup: Use mb!backup command to create a backup of your server. The bot will create a backup and provide you with a unique backup code.
3. Make sure you maintain access to your discord account and the code, as you will need both to restore your server in the future if needed.
4. When something bad happens, you will be prepared to recover most of your server's data and settings, and get back to normal in no time!

Please read our documentation for more details on how to create a backup with customized options.

How to restore your Discord server?​

In the event of a disaster, or when you want to get a part of your server back, you can restore it using marCloudBackup's backup restore feature.

The bot will retrieve the backup you created, and restore all channels, messages, roles, emojis, stickers, and more, to your server.

The restoration process is usually very fast, and generally depends on the amount of roles, emojis and messages — those resources take the most time to restore due to ratelimiting by Discord.

To restore your server, you can use the mb!restore command, and provide the backup code you received when you created the backup.

Make sure you read our documentation for more details on how to restore your server with customized options.

For custom restore, have a look at the restore options documentation to learn how to restore only specific parts of your server, and keep the rest of it intact.

Conclusion​

Backing up your Discord server is crucial to ensure the safety of your community and its legacy.

marCloudBackup is a reliable and trustworthy backup bot that has been around since 2019, and has always kept the highest standards of security and privacy for its users.

Those are not false claims, and we take pride in it, thus putting it out everywhere for everyone to see, and verify for themselves.

Invite marCloudBackup to your server now and test it for yourself. It's FREE! And we only charge for additional features for those who demand even more.

marcloud.net/backupbot

But like any project in 2026, you would expect us to be using AI in some way, right? Generating source code, generating documentation, generating marketing content, generating... content.

Well, no. Never!

Here's why!

1. We built marCloud before AI was a thing​

We have built all of our projects, including marCloudBackup, before the rise of AI, and we have been maintaining and improving them ever since.

The creation of AI was definitely a game changer for the software industry. But like any other tool, we believe it should be used wisely and not just for the sake of using it, or, even worse, due to laziness.

2. We care about the quality of our projects​

The "vibecoding", while being extremely fast and "efficient" to get stuff done, is not the best way to build a product that we want to be proud of and guarantee its quality to our users.

We want to make sure that every line of code we deploy is well thought of, optimized, and safe for you, the users.

And that is something we cannot guarantee with AI generated code, which can be buggy, inefficient, and even insecure. And while we could review the generated code and fix it, I feel like that would take more time and defeat the purpose of offloading the job to an AI in the first place.

3. We want to make human facing stuff, not AI facing stuff​

We strongly believe that generating user facing content with AI makes a project feel less personal, and thus less trustworthy.

And this can be experienced when reading some news websites, blog posts, or SEO oriented content (like this subpage of marCloud).

Such content defeats the purpose of internet, makes it feel like a graveyard.

It's harder and harder to find websites that were actually designed by someone, not vibecoded in v0.dev.

It's recently quite common to even find Discord bots that seem to have been fully generated with AI.

We want to make sure that we can be relied on, both as a trustworthy project "brand", but also something to escape the modern slop content.

4. We do make use of AI tools, though.​

It would be stupid to completely not use AI. It is truly an amazing tool that for certain tasks outperforms humans and streamlines many things.

A few examples of software we use is:

• local models for automated content analysis and summarization
• GitHub Copilot, for "autocompleting the obvious" or replicating already existing code for a different purpose.
• Search engines with AI summary — sad to admit, but looking up "java lettuce set reconnect time" and immediately seeing the perfect code snippet that does what I asked for, hits hard, and it's hard not to use it.

Summary​

I just wanted to share a little insight on why I feel like vibecoding your entire service feels wrong sometimes.

If you develop something, please, don't make another sloppy crap. Even if you use AI, use it wisely, and let it help you, not do it FOR you.

I know the title is misleading, but if you got this far then it means it worked :D