We are now running an experiment with a Discord proxy with a rate-limiter to combat abusive Repls, and we’re seeing Repl connectivity to Discord at nearly 100%. Please try running your bots and let us know how your experience is.
For those curious about the details:
Repls share external IP addresses with each other. If one bad Repl gets banned by Discord, it takes out all the other Repls using that same address. To make Replit safe for people to use Discord, we need to set some boundaries.
As an experiment, we’ve added entries to /etc/hosts and a self-signed HTTPS certificate that lets us pretend to be Discord (only in Repls). The proxy limits Repl requests to Discord to one at a time, enforces Discord’s rate-limiting headers, and severely rate limits any Repl that gets a 4xx response code from Discord (this is what gets the shared IP addresses banned).
We would like your feedback on how to make this experiment permanent. No matter which option we go with, we need to block direct connections to Discord.
Which of these possible options would you prefer:
- Like how it is now. We keep having a self-signed certificate. When you connect to Discord, it transparently goes through our proxy. We could potentially add a setting that lets you opt in or out of this feature, if there is demand.
- You opt in to the proxy by using a different URL to connect (for example, you use discordproxy.replit.com instead of discord.com)