Can't download age-restricted channels

[Gersado]

Version

2.46.1

Flavor

CLI (Command-Line Interface), GUI (Graphical User Interface)

Platform

Linux and Windows

Export format

HTML, TXT, JSON, CSV

Steps to reproduce

Simply download any channel marked as age-restricted on either the CLI or GUI versions. Whether its downloading an age-restricted channel by itself or when downloading an entire server and the age-restricted channel is next to be downloaded.

Details

• Expected behavior:
  Downloads the age-restricted channel at a consistent speed, progress bar slowly fills up over time, and eventually finishes downloading the files.

• Actual behavior:
  When trying to download an age-restricted channel, the progress bar hangs for a very long time with very little or no progress being made, with very little to no files being downloaded.

This affects both the CLI and GUI versions on both Linux and Windows. Mac, while not tested, is presumed to be affected as well.

All the non-age-restricted channels download normally without any issue.

Checklist

• I have looked through existing issues to make sure that this bug has not been reported before
• I have provided a descriptive title for this issue
• I have made sure that this bug is reproducible on the latest version of the application
• I have provided all the information needed to reproduce this bug as efficiently as possible
• I have sponsored this project
• I have not read any of the above and just checked all the boxes to submit the issue

[logroi]

Do you live in the United Kingdom or Australia? Are you age-verified as "Unverified" or "Teen"?

[Gersado]

Do you live in the United Kingdom or Australia? Are you age-verified as "Unverified" or "Teen"?

No, I don't live in either countries.
I've check with my local government to check if there was any age-verification laws, there isn't any (for now at least).

The only pop-up I see when selecting the age-restricted channel is if I want to continue viewing said channel. Otherwise I can view the channel just fine without any prompts for verification.

[Gersado]

Recently, I've tested other downloaders to see if they have any issues accessing age-restricted channels.

Gallery-dl seems to work fine without any problems, so it seems like DiscordChatExporter is the one having issues at the moment.

[Tyrrrz]

I doubt slow export speeds is because of the age restriction, I'd guess the channel content itself is causing it

[CanePlayz]

I let Codex conduct some tests on my behalf and here are the results:

I ran a controlled test with two synthetic channels in the same guild:

• one normal text channel
• one age-restricted text channel
• both seeded with identical 1000-message synthetic content
• no invite-shaped links
• same exporter/token/environment

Results:

With default rate-limit behavior, the age-restricted channel consistently exported slower:

• affected: ~17.7-18.2s
• control: ~12.0-12.1s

With --respect-rate-limits false, the difference mostly disappeared:

• both channels were roughly ~12.8-15.1s

All runs completed successfully with exit code 0 and no timeout, so this does not reproduce the original “hang” directly. However, it suggests that age-restricted channels may trigger different advisory rate-limit behavior, and DCE’s rate-limit handling may be responsible for the slowdown.