I’ve had that with a website requiring address and a bunch of other PII to ‘redeem’ my purchase. They only mentioned they required all this ‘to combat fraud’ after I paid for it.

They say there is specific criteria like joining too many servers too fast or spamming, but I tried to make a work account and it prompted me for a phone number before I ever tried to join a server. Support reset it once, same thing happened again.

I’m not going to use my personal one for work, so guess they don’t need my work data that bad.

It’s infuriating, for sure.

I don’t want to defend this pattern, but I will at least say it’s a little more understandable when you consider how Discord has grown and changed as a service.

In the beginning, Discord never required phone number at all, ever. And life was good.

But then there came a lot of problems with spam and bot accounts. Discord added the ability for ‘server’ admins to require phone number verification for people in their servers to help prevent this, so that’s one thing that could trigger it.

They also have other security factors that determine whether a number is required and trigger it account-wide, like if you use VPN, or if you DM multiple people you aren’t friends with, and presumably other factors which Discord keep to themselves.

Some people manage to use Discord without it ever asking for a number, but other people get immediately forced to.

If you don’t run into this wall then you’d never notice, but if you do hit it then it feels like a nasty bait and switch, when you didn’t seem to need a phone number at sign-up, and then suddenly you do.