Posts by wild1145

Who needs nicest when you're already the best.

And I will keep making the statement because I know how upset Lyicx gets

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↩  Shdwo You can't simply assume that messages are stored too, as there are many various reasons as to why images / videos are stored.

You certainly can... Given images / video's should not be stored according to Discord, I wouldn't trust they don't actually cache anything.

And for the 100th time... They should have backups of the service for their own disaster recovery scenarios... Or they should give us as a server admin / owner proper tools to export the content of the discord server in a way that can be restored if they did have a disaster and lose everything... Giving us neither option is what I'm pissed off about.

Given they are a managed service, they 100% have copies of the data for these sorts of scenarios, because they'd go bankrupt if their hosting environment was compromised / crashed / whatever and they couldn't restore the data into a new operational environment. It's basic SysAdmin stuff...

↩  Shdwo given you decided to blatantly ignore mine over and over I was running out of time and patients.

↩  Shdwo As I have told you, you are mistaken... You seem to be just ignoring my messages. Discord does not actually delete content when you give a delete command... Images / Video's are especially obvious with this. Unless it's been fixed this week I've been able to upload stuff to Discord, hot link to it and delete the original message in discord without a problem.

You also clearly seem to lack the understanding of what a back-up is... The point of a backup is to prevent data loss... Exactly what happened here... If they somehow deleted that data from their backups, they wouldn't be valid backups.

Again as I said, this is not a "Discord Can't restore our data" this is a "Discord Doesn't want to restore our data. There is a huge difference and it makes a huge difference to how much trust I put into their ability to run a resilient managed service offering (AKA, now that's near 0 trust).

↩  Shdwo It's absolute bollocks unfortunately... It's a known issue... Their CDN caches data even beyond image deletion and for quite some time... They might say they delete it, they do not.

Again, there will absolutely be backups of the data, because that's how you mitigate disaster recovery, else if they lost part of their servers, the entire of Discord would be wiped, destroying their company...

See previous comments...

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↩  Shdwo Discord doesn't store messages / server info as that would be against their own platform's rules and would breach their user's privacy. I personally don't want every message I've sent in a server, stored elsewhere.. They can't restore what they don't have.

It already is all stored... Their CDN keeps copies of everything for months - years... They absolutely do have backups of their platform because otherwise they'd be fucked in a DR Scenario, which we know they have had before... It's not a case of "Can't" it's a case of "won't"

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↩  Shdwo I know you hold a grudge, but if you value your privacy then you'd respect the route that they've taken.

I do respect my privacy, it's why I don't use Discord for anything personal or business related, because their privacy is honestly laughable...

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↩  Shdwo No, what bit you in the ass in the case of the discord server, wasn't the fact that you were relying on a third-party service. It was the fact that someone with ill-intent had access to the token, that's your faults, not the services.

The issue with the service is they actively refuse to put any effort into providing a way to either back the data up ourselves, or restore it for us, you would expect one if not both options available with it being a SaaS offering with no clearly defined responsibilities model.

But again, I wouldn't use a 3rd party SaaS offering for a backup solution given how poorly Discord has treated us, and I wouldn't trust other companies not to do exactly the same. If you can't trust your primary backup / restore route (Discord) then you damn well want to have control and trust over the fallback (Whatever we end up adopting).

The templates aren't a super useful way of doing Dr recovery, it's something I've looked at and may end up being part of our final disaster solution, but on its own is pretty useless because they have to be kept up to date as we tweak channels and have to be stored somewhere. Not to mention they don't contain content.

Update - Discord have finally got back to us this morning, and unfortunately as predicted Discord are refusing to restore our server from any sort of a backup. With that in mind the team are going to start looking at how we can re-build the Discord server to start to bring it back into normality. This will be a slow process as there's a lot of stuff we want to change now our hand has been forced into a clean slate setup.

We have also made some changes to help prevent this sort of thing from happening again, and will have more changes to make. The TF Bot's are now all owned by me and will continue to be owned exclusively by me, with access to the tokens better controlled going forward. We will also be improving the process for how we handle joiners / leavers with server access, to ensure such tokens are rolled which should help prevent unauthorised access. Finally we are also reducing the scope of the permissions that all of the bots will have, bots will going forward no longer be permitted the global administrator roles without me manually reviewing the use-case, and there being good reason other permissions are not sufficient.

As our trust in Discord as a SaaS offering has been broken, and they refuse to restore anything for us, we will also be looking to introduce our own backup solution which will allow us to backup the full servers content and channel templates on a regular basis so that should the worst happen in the future, we will have back-ups of all content and channels to allow us to restore as much as we can with ease.

Update - Our current understanding is that the bot was initially used at 09:19 AM BST where it deleted all of the channels in the TF Discord, except the 2 that Discord wouldn't allow (Discord mod channel and important information as they are mandatory for having a community server).

Steven then banned the TotalFreedom bot at 09:22AM this morning.

At the current time we are working on the assumption that any content shared in any channel on the discord since it's creation last October through to 09:22 today may be compromised, and while there is no evidence to suggest there were copies of these channels taken, we are now working on the assumption that it could well have happened prior to the deletion.

Update - Thanks to some investigation work by Elmon, we're reasonably confident at this point of the chain of events. Due to legacy reasons when Seth originally deleted the discord and everything else, Fionn re-created the discord bot under his account, which Elmon then used to run the bridge and help administer the server.

From what we can currently tell Fionn still owns that Discord bot, the same one that deleted every channel in our Discord community.

It it our current belief that Fionn intentionally used the token from the bot to programmatically purge every channel on the TotalFreedom Discord server, likely after what transpired on this thread yesterday - https://forum.totalfreedom.me/d/2332-fionns-statement

We are still actively working with Discord to attempt to restore the server, and should that unfortunately not be possible we will look to start re-building the Discord from the ground up, and will look to put preventative measures in place to safeguard the server going forward.

Because the Discord is currently in a bad state and we've made the decision not to attempt to manually restore / re-create channels until we have heard back from Discord support around if it's possible for them to restore the discord from a previous backup they may have.

What we know so far - At 09:19 this morning, the main TotalFreedomBot went through and deleted nearly every channel on the Discord. We're unsure currently how this happened, but from what we can see it doesn't look to have involved the Freedom-01 gamemode where the bot is primarily used.

The bot along with any other bots Elmon maintains have been temporarily removed from the discord, and the bots permissions generally have been restricted to prevent this from happening again (Though this does impact their functionality).

We're not actively re-creating the discord until we have confirmation that the discord can / can not be restored, so will sit tight and see what Discord says.

↩  Miwojedk One of the best globally, even when it causes all sorts of trouble. See when they refused to help the US DOD unlock the iPhone of someone who had been a suicide bomber and shit like that...

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It says that Apple will not scan all photos, but rather only those that have been uploaded to iCloud Photos, suggesting that any phones with that feature turned off will be exempt.

5 Mins of googling found that.

So if you're not storing stuff in iCloud you're fine anyway.

Also it's pretty common and can actually be done client side anyway. Very interesting technology behind it all.

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↩  burger After a brief peak around the discord, I have found numerous examples of people committing the same actions that warranted shdwo's ban, all in a "joking" manner. Going off Ryans logic of, "It's breaking the rules if it's a joke or not...", all of these statements should warrant some sort of punishment.

https://discordapp.com/channel…169163/861026066947375124

https://discordapp.com/channel…169163/819540946290475008

https://discordapp.com/channel…169163/870847131727061062

In all of these examples, (excluding tropicalSharks statement), it is painfully clear that what has been said, has been said in a joking manner. The only contrast in these otherwise similar situations, is the execution of shdwo's attempt at joking around. Because both shrimp and anzukyu both made it apperent that what they said was in an amusing manner, the community did not react the way they did when shdwo essentially made the same joke. The user tropicalShark didn't even make it clear he was messing about and it wasn't until he said the hard R (which was made public by red) that he received any severe punishments. (I believe he received a temporary mute prior to this event).

My main takeaway in this is that, taking into account what Ryan has stated, if shdwo is to be banned for this, then I think it would only be fair if we did the same to shrimp and anzukyu (including the many others that remain unlisted).

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While a valid point, it's not valid as an argument for why it's acceptable. If breaking the rules is reported and it's reported in a timely manner (Like this was) appropriate action can be taken. The links won't open without logging in, but raise it with a Discord mod if you think they are recent enough that it is relevant still (Ie not months ago)

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↩  fssp It makes no sense for a subsequent message to be construed as an “attempt to cover one’s own arse” if the message had been sent prior to any punishment having been exacted on the player, meaning that they clarified their jokes being just that—in jest—before you had decided to ban them from your community. By merit of the period when they had sent that message, it is not much of an excuse; they are simply making clear to an audience that knows as well as they do that what they had said was in jest.

The TLDR of my response is - I disagree, I've stated I think it's "ass covering" and I stand by that. Else I wouldn't have issued the ban.

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↩  fssp Finally, you did not ban them for making dumb jokes on the topic of racism and other -isms, however you banned them for "discriminating against, harassing, or insulting a person based on their race, sexual preference, gender, or age" which is something that they are plainly not guilty of as there is no corresponding party that has been discriminated against in this case… from what I have seen, everybody that was present during their conversation understood that this player was joking about.

The rule in my view (And given I think I re-worded if not wrote that one) exactly this case. Let me help you out.

Racism

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prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.

Transphobia

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dislike of or prejudice against transsexual or transgender people.

If you want to argue that it doesn't meet the bar for a section 2 offence that I issued the ban under that's fine, I'd encourage you to read the Discord community guidelines, which must be followed to comply with the discord terms of service, which to breach is a section 1 offence, which makes the ban indef with no grounds to appeal... I'll give you a hint, this is the first part of it:

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1. Do not organize, participate in, or encourage harassment of others. Disagreements happen and are normal, but continuous, repetitive, or severe negative comments may cross the line into harassment and are not okay.

I think me issuing this as a section 2 ban is pretty reasonable, and as far as I am still concerned, this behaviour was out of line and unacceptable. I am sick of people making shitty excuses to be horrible people.

Provide evidence that the ban didn't happen or grounds that a lesson has been learnt, because I'm seeing neither, and I'm gonna let you in on a secret, you can't learn your lesson as far as I'm concerned less than 12 hours after you were banned, that's just called getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar...

↩  DragonSlayer2189 Generally speaking yes, that is the case of appeals. The general exception to that rule is where it is a section 1 offence, which I'm unsure if this actually would fall into, I'd have to go check the Discord T&C's properly.

But equally yes, I think it's an absolute piss take that the ban is being appealed at this time less than 12 hours after it was issued.

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↩  Shdwo You're replying to a post that literally explains that part of your point.

And as I said, it was nothing more than "a part" of my point.

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↩  Shdwo However, the rule states I have to be discriminating against, harassing or insulting an individual due to their race / religion etc. In any other scenario where "I hate blacks" was said out of the blue, this would 100% fall under this rule. This isn't the case for my ban though, there was context, and I made it clear I wasn't serious about it / there was no meaning behind it.

I'm not a racist, and I would never go out of my way to discriminate against someone with a different race / religion / sexual preference to me.

Context only gets you so far here... And frankly, every time I read the chat back, it just continues to make me more and more confident that this is a justified ban...

As part of the work we've been doing to review all of our projects, I wanted to give you a bit of an update on the old Proboards forums as progress is being made.

First (Just because the title of the thread and all) we aren't deleting the Proboards forums or stopping work, progress has been slow as there's been a few more complexities than we had originally anticipated.

@"StevenNL2000"#2 has been cracking through moving threads as and when he's had time to do it and getting the new boards configured with working and proper permissions to ensure we can properly provide an archive of the Proboards forums which will endure into the future.

Some Stats

Threads Moved: 3,705
Posts Moved: 47,952

This isn't a huge number, and we still have a long way to go, but I do look forward to when we will be able to re-open the proboards forums to the public and ensure that we have an accurate archive which can endure.

Thank you all for your continued patience when it comes to this, I know it's annoying and it's got a lot of memories for a lot of us (Myself included), I think what we're doing is the right thing to safeguard the legacy forums going forward.

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↩  Shdwo It was less than a minute, and you can see that from the timestamps on the discord messages. Chat was active at that time, so obviously it's gonna be lower down than I would've liked it to be due to the popular inflow of discord messages.

The fact I have to scroll off my screen to see it was part of my point. But doesn't detract from the point of "It's breaking the rules if it's a joke or not..."

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↩  Shdwo You what? That's a horrible comparison to make and relates nothing to the evidence at hand.

It's a pretty good comparison I think... It seems to be exactly the behaviour exhibited here.

↩  fssp I think the context you're lacking is how far after that original message the "I was only joking card" was pulled in what I feel is a shite attempt at covering his own arse.

So let me also then make it clear, "I am joking" is not a good enough excuse to claim the rules do not apply to you. It never has been and never will be. If you threatened to rob a bank or murder someone and then when you hear someone going "You know you can't do that, it's illegal" you go "Oh but I'm just joking" it doesn't generally tend to fly.

But in case that's not enough, let's go a bit further up in the chat... Excuse the fact you can't see him joking, it doesn't all fit on even my 4K Screen for a screen grab so you'll have to work out the overlap...

I think it's pretty fucking obvious he's being racist and transphobic... He may then 1-2 mins later have gone "Oh it's a joke" but that doesn't make it right, or frankly cut it for me.