Deleting large accounts

[DatCodeMania]

TLDR: Many days. 400k ~= 9 days. It's a Discord limit which I can't safely do anything about.

Hey all. Someone emailed me asking this, so I am putting the answer somewhere findable. Ask in the comments if something here does not cover your case.

Why

Messages older than about two weeks share a single account-wide rate limit, so parallelism stops helping: once discord-delete detects that limit it drops to a single worker and settles at roughly one delete per two seconds. Recent messages go much faster and discord-delete runs them with multiple workers in parallel.

To estimate your own run:

Messages / 43200 = Days
400k / 43200 = 9.3

43200 is how many deletes fit in a day at one per two seconds: 86400 / 2

That is the ballpark rather than a promise. Recent messages come in under it, network drop-outs and pauses push it back up.

For reference, my own account was just over 400,000 messages, the largest tested so far, and it took a bit over a week.

Raising --workers or lowering --delay will not beat this. The limit is account-wide, so extra workers in parallel only collect redundant 429s and the engine collapses back to one worker anyway. --delay is a floor on the spacing between deletes, not the rate you get. Lowering it does nothing, because AIMD is already sitting at whatever Discord currently tolerates and that is wider than the floor. Raising it does work, since whichever of the two is slower wins.

If you want to go slower than the defaults

--delay 3.3 --workers 1 puts you at roughly 0.3 deletes per second instead of 0.5, which is about 15 days for 400,000 messages instead of 9.

This is not a documented safety threshold. It is just slower.

What happens if it stops partway

Nothing is lost. Every confirmed-gone message ID is written to a resume log and flushed as it happens, so any unexpected exit can restart cleanly. A re-run filters out everything already done before it queues anything.

The log is keyed to your account rather than to the package file, so it still works if you swap from an old package to a newer one.

So there is no reason to avoid stopping it. If you would rather not leave it running for nine days straight, quit whenever you like and start it again next week.

Running it unattended

• Dry run first, which is the default, and check the preview matches what you expected
• Run it headless with --no-tui, ideally on a server or a spare machine
• Set up --ntfy so you get progress every 30 minutes on your phone, with Pause, Resume, and Stop buttons, instead of watching a terminal for a week
• Leave the pacing defaults alone

DISCORD_TOKEN=... discord-delete --package package.zip --no-tui --execute --ntfy my-topic

Ban risk

Automating a user account is against Discord's Terms of Service and can get it banned. discord-delete cooperates with the rate limits because that is the well-behaved way to hit an API, not because it protects your account.