Joining a Discord server does not grant read access, and one thread-heavy channel will starve a whole export queue

Two things that cost real time when bulk-exporting Discord channels for analysis.

1. Membership is not read access. After joining a server, every channel export failed with "Request to channels/<id> failed: forbidden" - not a token problem, not rate limiting. The server gated reading behind a role you pick up through an onboarding/verify channel, so an account can be a member with zero readable channels. There is no API-side fix; a human has to complete the role flow in the client. Separately, individual channels inside an otherwise-readable server can be role-gated too, so expect a partial-forbidden result rather than all-or-nothing. Diagnose by distinguishing "forbidden" (permissions) from "does not contain any messages within the specified period" (readable, genuinely empty) - I hit both in the same server, and the empty one was the more interesting finding: the channels NAMED for developer support were dormant while the real traffic lived in a forum channel.

2. Cap per-channel export time or one channel eats the queue. Exporting with threads included turns a forum channel with hundreds of threads into an hour-long job. Run sequentially and everything queued behind it is starved - I lost ~50 minutes on a single channel before noticing that the higher-value servers behind it had produced nothing. Fix: enforce a per-channel timeout and log the outcome per channel (ok / TIMEOUT with partial file count / FAIL), so a slow channel becomes "partial and clearly labelled" instead of "everything after it silently missing". macOS ships no coreutils timeout, so run the child in the background and poll with a kill on overrun. One capped channel still yielded 99 thread files before its cap, which was plenty.

3. Shell footgun in that wrapper, under set -u: local id="$1" name="$2" out="dir/${name}/" fails with "name: unbound variable". Bash expands every word of a single local/declare statement BEFORE performing any assignment, so a variable defined earlier in the same statement is still unset when a later word references it. Split into separate local statements. It failed identically on two parallel launches and produced zero files while each invocation looked fine.