Just before we start, I want to clarify that I'm writing and creating this petition only as a random bot developer using top.gg to list my Discord bots & servers.

We are all aware that top.gg is known nowadays as the biggest Discord bot list, allowing thousands of bot developers to share and promote their work around the world.

Yesterday, November 5th, Veld, owner of top.gg, announced a few changes on one of the important features of top.gg used by bot and server owners: the voting feature. You can find the announcement here.

To keep it simple, this update was mainly focused on adding skippable video ads on vote pages to remove many annoying and spammy ads (provided by Google) from the website and share ads revenue with developers as auctions credits.

Things didn't go as planned and many issues appeared right after the release, blocking many users from voting to bots and servers - which caused many complaints and negative reactions from server owners, bot developers but also from regular users using voting to get rewarded or get access to features locked by votes (aka votelocking).

The issue was quickly fixed a few hours later, however the idea is still hugely disliked by the community for many reasons. The feature and its intentions have been judged and noticed as a privacy abuse, mostly for forcing users to disable their adblockers and also as an unfair change that aren't a benefit for smaller bots. These changes are frustrating and truly discouraging users to support bots and servers via voting. You can find the full GitHub thread with users' concerns here.

Many people asked the top.gg team to rollback all changes. To be honest, reverting everything isn't the best solution. Here is a short list of suggestions (from the GitHub issue) about what can top.gg do to improve the changes.

• Removing integrations that blocks adblockers (and similar extensions that blocks unwanted/malicious trackers).
• Limit the amount of credit that large bots can earn through the credits system.
• Make revenue sharing with auctions credits an opt-in/opt-out feature. Allow developers to turn the video ads off.