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- Nov 18, 2013
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Yesterday, in #staff-requests on discord, an idea was suggested to clear the #zero chat once in a while to prevent searching through the discord logs. This discussion was raised with the purpose of preventing potentially harmful information to be shared to anyone that wishes to search or scrape the entirety of the #zero history. The argument is that it is possible that a player posted potentially personal information in the chat, which does not disappear, undeletable by the player itself, and remains publicly available through the means of discord's history.
This sparked a small discussion with a few staff members, and also in #staff_requests, on what the pros and cons are to deleting this history. The summary is as follows:
Pros to keeping (full) history:
- It simply could be interesting to look back.
- It helps staff search through chat logs easier (in the context of a ban-appeal, or similar endeavours), as the search functionality is more readily accessible.
Cons to keeping (full) history:
- Anything you say on the MC server is publicly accessible and referenceable forever (as long as the discord server exists).
While opinions differ in terms of where values lie (e.g., the worth of staff convenience vs the benefit of removing the chat history), it has become apparent that not everyone is fully comfortable with a non-modifiable public record of what you said on the server. The discussion was not geared towards infringing messages, but rather to privacy and potential leakages of personal information.
In general, we do not recommend sharing any personal information on the internet, as it can be misused.
On many forums, Discord servers, chat groups, and Minecraft servers, and in general, the internet, what you publish is permanent. For most players, this should be obvious, but even still, a lot of information can be gathered from full chat logs. And as rightfully stated, if by accident you type something personal on the server, it will remain there indefinitely.
We therefore drafted a few approaches that we could take to combat this. Preferably, staff is still able to use the easy lookup provided by discord, as it significantly decreases the time that we require to handle ban appeals, and in some cases, green applications.
(1 - Questionable, significantly different): We disable 'view chat history' for non-staff members on the #zero channel, which means that you cannot see any history prior to your current discord session in the zero channel. What this entails is that as soon as you close your discord client or app, the history of the #zero channel is no longer accessible to you. (So you can only really see messages as they come, rather than look back in time). In a way, this provides on discord a similar experience as on the server, where on logging in you also cannot see the chat history.
(2 - Not preferable): We simply delete messages on discord after X amount of time. While this ensures deletion from the public discord channel, the drawback is that it also deletes access for staff, and is severely rate-limited by discord: bulk-deleting messages older than 2 weeks is disabled, so messages need to be deleted one-by-one (programmatically, but still, they have a limit to how fast this happens).
(3 - Preferable): We archive the #zero channel periodically, to where staff can access the channel still, but it is no longer publicly accessible. This means that every X amount of time, the #zero channel is moved out of view for the public, after which the history is no longer visible. The benefit here is that we do not need to remove the messages, and staff can still continue to make use of the discord search facilities.
A problem that we see with all these approaches (except theoretically 2, but that will be a too-large investment in our opinion) is that they are a blanket wipe: we need to remove the full history. This means that users who, for some reason, wish to keep their history around, will not be able to. Therefore we open up this thread for discussion to see everyone's viewpoints on it.
In the end, we think privacy is important, and as Chillers nicely said in the #staff-requests channel: it's your data, and you should be able to decide what happens with it.
Hence this thread. We preferably will work towards implementing (3), depending on the discussion and poll here. We do not want the convenience of one to impede the privacy of the other, so if we have a controversial outcome on the poll, we may need to come up with more elaborate strategies (e.g., per-player basis deletion), which may not be feasible short-term.
For full disclosure:
Since this discussion, we have already prevented any non-verified discord members from seeing the full chat history (they can see the history in their current session, but nothing before that).
Staff is not willing to give up on our private logs (which contains, alongside your messages, your logins, past/current ip-addresses, and some other information that we can use to track your in-game player), since we need these tools to ensure run legitimacy, provide moderation and combat alternate accounts (as forbidden by our rules). This way of storage is not particular to our server: most of this information (such as your ip-address logins) are generated by the Minecraft server client.
You are allowed to request account deletions / forum account deletions, but we need to keep the information that we require to moderate the server as described above (i.e. you cannot delete your account in order to be unbanned), and technologically it is infeasible to erase your actions / chat messages from our server logs.
This sparked a small discussion with a few staff members, and also in #staff_requests, on what the pros and cons are to deleting this history. The summary is as follows:
Pros to keeping (full) history:
- It simply could be interesting to look back.
- It helps staff search through chat logs easier (in the context of a ban-appeal, or similar endeavours), as the search functionality is more readily accessible.
Cons to keeping (full) history:
- Anything you say on the MC server is publicly accessible and referenceable forever (as long as the discord server exists).
While opinions differ in terms of where values lie (e.g., the worth of staff convenience vs the benefit of removing the chat history), it has become apparent that not everyone is fully comfortable with a non-modifiable public record of what you said on the server. The discussion was not geared towards infringing messages, but rather to privacy and potential leakages of personal information.
In general, we do not recommend sharing any personal information on the internet, as it can be misused.
On many forums, Discord servers, chat groups, and Minecraft servers, and in general, the internet, what you publish is permanent. For most players, this should be obvious, but even still, a lot of information can be gathered from full chat logs. And as rightfully stated, if by accident you type something personal on the server, it will remain there indefinitely.
We therefore drafted a few approaches that we could take to combat this. Preferably, staff is still able to use the easy lookup provided by discord, as it significantly decreases the time that we require to handle ban appeals, and in some cases, green applications.
(1 - Questionable, significantly different): We disable 'view chat history' for non-staff members on the #zero channel, which means that you cannot see any history prior to your current discord session in the zero channel. What this entails is that as soon as you close your discord client or app, the history of the #zero channel is no longer accessible to you. (So you can only really see messages as they come, rather than look back in time). In a way, this provides on discord a similar experience as on the server, where on logging in you also cannot see the chat history.
(2 - Not preferable): We simply delete messages on discord after X amount of time. While this ensures deletion from the public discord channel, the drawback is that it also deletes access for staff, and is severely rate-limited by discord: bulk-deleting messages older than 2 weeks is disabled, so messages need to be deleted one-by-one (programmatically, but still, they have a limit to how fast this happens).
(3 - Preferable): We archive the #zero channel periodically, to where staff can access the channel still, but it is no longer publicly accessible. This means that every X amount of time, the #zero channel is moved out of view for the public, after which the history is no longer visible. The benefit here is that we do not need to remove the messages, and staff can still continue to make use of the discord search facilities.
A problem that we see with all these approaches (except theoretically 2, but that will be a too-large investment in our opinion) is that they are a blanket wipe: we need to remove the full history. This means that users who, for some reason, wish to keep their history around, will not be able to. Therefore we open up this thread for discussion to see everyone's viewpoints on it.
In the end, we think privacy is important, and as Chillers nicely said in the #staff-requests channel: it's your data, and you should be able to decide what happens with it.
Hence this thread. We preferably will work towards implementing (3), depending on the discussion and poll here. We do not want the convenience of one to impede the privacy of the other, so if we have a controversial outcome on the poll, we may need to come up with more elaborate strategies (e.g., per-player basis deletion), which may not be feasible short-term.
For full disclosure:
Since this discussion, we have already prevented any non-verified discord members from seeing the full chat history (they can see the history in their current session, but nothing before that).
Staff is not willing to give up on our private logs (which contains, alongside your messages, your logins, past/current ip-addresses, and some other information that we can use to track your in-game player), since we need these tools to ensure run legitimacy, provide moderation and combat alternate accounts (as forbidden by our rules). This way of storage is not particular to our server: most of this information (such as your ip-address logins) are generated by the Minecraft server client.
You are allowed to request account deletions / forum account deletions, but we need to keep the information that we require to moderate the server as described above (i.e. you cannot delete your account in order to be unbanned), and technologically it is infeasible to erase your actions / chat messages from our server logs.
