Discord API Vanity URL subject of internal Discord dispute
Update: As of 10:00pm Tuesday (7/7), Discord has restored the internal vanity URL. Sources report that there were significant "strong words" said to the team responsible for initiating this change. Clarification as to the official/unofficial nature of the server, or its role on the official documentation, has not yet been made.
Discord's trust and safety division has struck again. One of the oldest and most intimate communities on Discord, the Discord API server, has been stripped of its identity, the "discord.gg/discord-api" invite link. Try joining that link, and you'll find that it has been disabled.
A representative from Discord's development team informed leadership of the Discord API server of the change, citing concerns over branding. This concern is understandable, since Discord API has never been recognized as "official," despite its longstanding status as a hub for bot developers to communicate with Discord's engineers. The server's own announcements channel, for instance, was where the Official Bot API was first made public (unfortunately this message could not be located, as one of the server's administrators had previously deleted all channels and messages in the server following an embarrassing loss in a community Rocket League tournament). Many Discord engineers still frequent the server's API discussion channel, and several question-and-answer sessions have been held with Discord's furry lawyers – of course, these sessions were not official.
Further still, one of the strangest contradictions revolves around the blanket statement provided by Discord: their rep states that "discord-" prefixed vanity URLs were being removed from all non-official servers; pay attention to that all. The backend powering vanity URLs has blacklisted users from using any moniker that contains this "official" slug since its original release to the public. As such, the "discord-api" invite was a special case, assigned to the server internally from a Discord engineer. This means that there could have only been one server affected by this new branding change, so why would Discord cover up their direct targeting with a blanket statement?
Further communications from the Discord engineer "night," creator of the widely used tools Better Twitch.TV and NightBot, reveal Discord's plans to begin phasing out its connections with the Discord API server. Those communications are active on GitHub, where other Discord API community leaders are actively seeking a direct statement from the Discord reps.
The Discord API server, founded in 2015, will be approaching its fifth birthday in less than a month. We look forward to the "festivities" Discord's engineers will have planned to celebrate this unofficial occasion.