History - ghostselfbot/ghost GitHub Wiki

This page covers the full history of Ghost — from its early roots as a small experiment to its rise, fall, and eventual full rewrite. It also briefly covers the Nighty incident and what lies ahead for the future of the project.

Ghost's story begins in 2021 with a small, single-file selfbot called Bennyware, made by Benny as his first real dive into Discord development using discord.py. It was Benny’s introduction to creating selfbots — Discord bots that run on user accounts instead of bot accounts — and it taught him the basics of building an invite/auth system and writing fun, unique commands.

While Bennyware was never massive, it sparked a deeper interest in bot development and laid the foundation for what would eventually become Ghost.

Ghost was created after Bennyware started gaining popularity. Benny wasn't a fan of the name Bennyware, and he wanted to build something that could sit alongside the big names in the scene — tools like Nighty, Rise, and React. Ghost was that next step.

It started off as a small, invite-only community made up of close friends. Each week, Benny would drop 10–20 invite keys to keep things growing. Eventually, demand shot up. People were constantly asking how they could get Ghost, and some even suggested selling access. Benny started selling keys for £2 each — and when the community exploded even more, he raised it to £5.

By October 2021, just before things took a turn, Ghost had over 350 users, with more than 200 commands. It had officially become one of the more well-known selfbots in the scene.

In late 2021, someone started spamming Nighty's API with messages like "use ghost" and "nighty sucks", which didn’t go down well. Nighty's staff assumed Benny was behind it and used the situation to target Ghost directly.

Due to a serious flaw in Ghost's security — it handled HWID checks client-side, which made spoofing easy — someone was able to bypass access checks, and Ghost was cracked wide open. Nighty’s team eventually leaked the source code, and Benny’s real name was exposed.

To this day, Benny doesn’t know who spammed Nighty’s API — but it definitely wasn’t him. Regardless, the damage was done. Benny dropped Ghost’s source in its own server and stepped away from the community entirely.

During the time away, Benny never fully stopped tinkering. What started as a small side project eventually became a full rewrite of Ghost, properly kicked off around 2023.

This time, Benny built things the right way — using discord.py-self, cleanly separated cogs, and utility files to make the project scalable and organized. He started with a few simple commands and slowly began porting some features from the original Ghost. But in reality, most of the rewrite was brand new.

In 2023, Discord blocked user accounts from sending rich embeds, which forced selfbots to find workarounds. Some, like Nighty, started using custom image-based embeds as a replacement. Around that time, Benny had been learning Python Pillow, so he gave it a shot — and in late 2023, he ended up creating a custom image embed utility that worked well and looked great. He even shared it with Rise selfbot’s community, and it quickly became Ghost's first major standout feature in the rewrite.

While balancing college life, Benny kept slowly adding to the project. Then, sometime in 2024, he decided to take on something new — a GUI. With more and more selfbots moving away from CLI interfaces, it felt like the right time.

He started with Tkinter, but it wasn’t quite what he wanted. With help from ChatGPT (😅) and a lot of trial and error, he learned ttkbootstrap and eventually built a clean, modern UI that didn’t even look like it was built in Tkinter. He’s since said he’s “absolutely in love with the UI” — and it shows.

Right now, Ghost is actively maintained, open source, and packed with features. But Benny isn’t stopping there.

One of the main goals going forward is to expand the GUI’s functionality beyond just setup/config. The long-term vision is to be able to control Discord fully through Ghost’s GUI, with all kinds of tools and unique features.

One current feature in development is similar to Spy.pet, but limited to mutual guilds only — so it stays within reasonable scope and doesn’t attempt to scan all of Discord.

You can check out the full roadmap here:
🔗 Ghost GitHub Project Roadmap

Benny also plans to polish up the GUI and refactor parts of the codebase that are getting messy again. He’s working on building out a proper workflow for himself using custom Tkinter components — it’s not quite there yet, but it’s coming together.

✉️ A Note from Benny

Hey, if you’ve made it this far — thanks for checking out Ghost.

This project started out as a little side thing, and it grew way bigger than I expected. I made a lot of mistakes with the original Ghost, especially around security, and the whole Nighty situation was rough. But it also pushed me to learn, take a step back, and come back stronger.

The rewrite means a lot to me, it’s something I built with actual thought and structure behind it. It’s been tough to find time with uni and life, but I’m still here, still working on it when I can, and still excited about what Ghost is becoming.

Thanks again for stopping by, and I hope you find something useful (or cool) in this project.

– Benny