
Rainway forces signing up to Discord in order to delete your account - hddherman
https://rainway.com/support/account-and-privacy/how-do-i-delete-my-account/
======
andrewmd5
Hi, CEO of Rainway here.

You actually don’t need to sign up for Discord, emailing support@rainway.com
is enough. You can also close your account from the app.

Discord is a convenient medium since our audience largely engages with us
through it daily. I’ll update the article to reflect all the valid options.

And to be clear, our business model isn’t in data nor do we share data with
others. Outside of basic engagement telemetry we don’t even know what games
you own.

~~~
wheybags
So what is your business model?

~~~
andrewmd5
Enterprise customers who integrate our technology into their applications and
services.

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Jonnax
What is this company's business model?

It makes no sense to me how they plan to make money with something they
advertise as completely free

~~~
NullPrefix
Maybe this thread is the answer?

~~~
gregoriol
Maybe Discord should make their Delete your account feature being a signup to
Rainway, that would be fair enough

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parsecs
I'd like to comment that you can use Discord without an account, but yeah that
does seem a bit weird

~~~
hddherman
When you click on the link supplied in the Rainway guide, you will be directed
to a Discord sign-up form where you have to enter an username and check the
box that says that you agree to the terms of service and privacy policy. I'm
not familiar with all the configuration options Discord can offer, but in this
case it seems you can't bypass account creation here.

~~~
parsecs
Ah they might've changed it to combat bad actors, I haven't tried to use
Discord without an account for a while now so sorry about outdated info

~~~
sc11
There are several options the 'server' admins can choose from. Some let you do
everything without account, some only let you read, and others require an
account for everything.

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the_pwner224
I'm not accusing hddherman of bad behaviour, but seems like this could be a
decent way to advertise/astroturf without raising suspicion. Bring up flaw
that, while bad, is irrelevant to most of the target market, and then splatter
links over Reddit and HN.

The first thing I did after clicking reading the linked page was to go to
their homepage and see what the hell Rainway even was. I don't need the
service but it seems potentially useful to many.

~~~
Kognito
Exactly this. This is an ad, nothing more. “Company uses discord for support
system” is uninteresting.

~~~
hddherman
What alternative do you propose for situations where Company A does some shady
stuff? Are all the posts about Google/Facebook/Amazon doing illegal things
also ads?

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aboringusername
This is why I'm so glad the GDPR exists. They list their email address in the
privacy policy so a quick email should suffice.

Obviously you can raise complaints if they do not delete your information as
the GDPR does not mandate or expect the individual to have to agree to another
parties privacy policy to exercise your rights.

You also have rights to access et al and whilst unlikely it's possible failure
to act within this law might cause issues later down the line.

~~~
Nextgrid
The problem with the GDPR is that there is no enforcement. At best, you're
relying on the other party acting in good faith and wanting to respect the
regulation.

I've had companies that breached the regulation, complained to them with no
effect, raised it with the ICO, they got back to me, upheld my complaint,
reached out to the company and still nothing despite them being based in the
UK thus enforcing fines is trivial.

There is nothing preventing this company from getting back to you saying that
"for security reasons (or other BS reason) the Discord-based process is the
only way to delete your account" and you wouldn't be able to do anything about
it because even the relevant authorities don't seem to care.

~~~
ccsalvesen
There has been a number of fines. British Airways is on top of the leaderboard
this far with €200M.

[https://www.enforcementtracker.com/](https://www.enforcementtracker.com/)

I'm not sure about how efficient the process is, but there is some
enforcement.

~~~
luckylion
> I'm not sure about how efficient the process is, but there is some
> enforcement.

At least in Germany, it's okay in some states, essentially non-existant in
others. I've reported some serious breaches, and about half of the responses
were within 5 days, the other half haven't happened yet, after > 12 months.
Reminding them just lead to getting an official case number, so they didn't
forget, they just can't/won't enforce.

------
aww_dang
Discord isn't as bad as far as signups go. I believe you can still use some
channels without verifying your email. Meanwhile, telegram and skype require
an install. I always dread dealing with a company that only responds to skype
requests.

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blibble
there's a lot of places like this

scaleway force you to add your billing information to delete your account

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Cthulhu_
It makes sense to a point because Discord is neat and having a ticket system
in there is convenient, plus it seems to be a service aimed at gamers, most of
which will have a Discord account already (if they're on PC anyway).

~~~
woutr_be
Why do they need a ticket system for account deletion? Won’t a normal delete
button be good enough? They shouldn’t force their own internal process on to
customers, they could easily have that button use the Discord API to create a
ticket.

~~~
hadlock
Account deletion isn't a very glamorous project and isn't something you can
put on your list of yearly accomplishments for a raise. This probably rolled
downhill until customer service asked the front end team to put up a static
webpage with some crude instructions. I've seen worse, but rarely.

~~~
hef19898
Well, it should be if you ask me. When a user wants to delete his account, it
usually is because he isn't happy with the company or the service. I could
imagine that by making the deletion as painless and fast as possible, a
company could go a long way to regain that user later. Some "sorry to see you
leave, but we try to make as easy for you as possible" message and maybe even
a goody the user can use elsewhere. After all, the account deletion is an
opportunity to get in direct contact with your users in a critical point of
the relationship.

~~~
hadlock
Customer retention is a pretty critical business function, but in my
experience the people approving raises etc generally have a much tighter
relationship with the sales team. New revenue is a sales function, customer
retention is a operations function. A big part of Steve Ballmer becoming CEO
(and also his decline) was his sales first strategy.

Windows 8 might have been a huge flop for Ballmer over the long-run (arguably
why he was asked to resign), but I bet the people working on Windows 8
features saw their careers advance much faster than the equally talented
people fixing driver bugs for Windows 7. And the Windows 7 driver team is
probably going to think designing a new ticketing system for deleting accounts
is beneath them and let that project roll downhill. And so on.

