EDIT: Will’s apparently seen the article. Cool! Still says he doesn’t use Discord CDN. Not that cool. He has apologized for the transphobic remarks, so I will remove the “Will’s transphobic. Nice.” line for sake of clarity, but I will keep the fact in as it’s somewhat useful for me.
A few months ago I found out about this little neat image host called BiSoga via my friends. I thought it was cool that some kids were going out of their way to start their own coding adventure with an image host. Cool! But then I discovered something extremely laughable — the service isn’t an “image host”. Using a Discord bot and Glitch.com, it hosts your images onto the Discord CDN.
If you’re not familiar with Glitch, it’s a free site meant to host web applications. This, plus the fact that they have three different links to give them money on the main page, and that most of their external services are free or very cheap, this has brought me to think they are most likely cheaping out.
A few months ago, Discord’s CDN had an outage. To test my theory, I uploaded an image to BiSoga. This is what it printed out.
I had proof that BiSoga was using the Discord CDN. Despite this, the admins, Will and Advaith, still deny any claims they use Discord as a hosting platform, and went so far to call that image “faked”.
This is where the rabbit hole begins. Strap in, folks.
So, of course, I brought this to the attention of the BiSoga Twitter account via Direct Messages.
Then they brought this out:
That’s of course not how it would work, because media.discordapp.net is for file hosting, not bot gateways. After talking with them for a while — even on the phone, they finally sent me some “proof”, which you can view here. This gave me a few clues to solve the puzzle, though — especially that they use Google Firebase (most likely for database hosting), which has a free tier, funnily enough.
We move on to late September. I remember the concept of BiSoga and begin to dick around with the screenshots that I had. Using the Discord API, channel names, topics, and the last sent message’s ID are leaked, allowing a client mod to see said channels. I quickly discovered #harry-berries, and after uploading an image, the ID would change for the most recent message.
This didn’t confirm my theories — it could simply be a log channel of some sort, or maybe just some privacy creepy snooping channel — but it started to heavily imply they used Discord CDN.
Fun fact — during this period of time, my friend called BiSoga support. They called her an ‘it’.
I forget about it for a few weeks, but then I see this in my Twitter feed:
quickly followed by a:
I couldn’t believe my damn eyes. BiSoga, a *not legally registered or acknowledged* company, is trying to make a tablet. Once my friend questions it, of course, Will decides to insult them on the “corporate” account. Very cool.
This sparked my interest, because then I decided — Will seems a little, y’know, immature for this kind of stuff. He’s never actually publicly spoke about how old he is either. I can’t find it *anywhere*! Let’s see here:
- insults people on a corporate account
- posts memes on a corporate account
- has not stated his age
- sounds young, maybe waiting or undergoing puberty
This started to raise a lot of questions. So in I went.
I found some interesting stuff.
First of all, I went to the hub of Will’s work — his website, located at https://willm.xyz. Despite being half broken, it seems really snazzy, and looks impressive. Since he states he is a “Front End Developer” and “Web Designer”, you’d expect it is his website, right?
Yeah. Turns out this isn’t even his website, it’s a half broken fork of the “Freelancer” Boostrap theme from startbootstrap.com. The download link is available here, and the source code is available here.
I eventually found Will’s Medium profile, located at @mccwil4937. I found some gems of articles, such as this very underdeveloped and misleading article about Discord, this story about how my friends bought BiSoga.com and pissed off Will, and then “The Articles”.
“The Articles”? Did I just find some drama?
I did, turns out. Multiple other people have called Will out for being too immature for the job of hosting an image host (which is potentially illegal, by the way, they claimed they are not responsible for GDPR privacy laws which makes them illegal in all of the European Union and opens them to serious fines).
Then I found this line.
c) Accusing Chew of rape
This was obviously a joke. I had said “she raped me” as a joke since I dislike her. Yes, I DO realize that this is totally unacceptable and I should have never accused Chew. I’m lucky this didn’t get too serious, as wrongly-accusing Chew is illegal. Chew, I’m sorry for harassing you, offending you and anything else that you didn’t appreciate from me.
I’m glad Will apologized about this situation, but.
You just falsely claimed someone had raped you.
…
I’m honestly speechless.
Will, if you read this, feel free to make a rebuttal. I am open to constructive criticism. But I legitimately don’t understand how you’re still standing.
You presumably break COPPA, run a possibly fraudulent image host that violates Discord Terms of Service, seems to have a track record for being transphobic, and accused someone of raping you.
I don’t understand how you can stoop that low, but sure. Go ahead. I’d like to see your response.
And, please, just stop lying about the BiSoga backend. I have proof that you use Discord CDN. There is no reason to continue the fib.
Thanks for reading this article which is longer than I expected. If you’re looking for an open source image host that actually hosts files by itself, you should check out elixi.re.
