Posts by videogamesm12

  • The Story of my Ranks

    Great read! Even though I've been here for most of the events that Steven described here, I still ended up learning some things I didn't know or completely forgot about, including the fact Steven achieved his ban manager rank through application.


    While I often make jokes about Steven being god, I do have a lot of respect for him and I wish we had more people like him, willing to offer a helping hand wherever he can and taking initiative to fix issues he sees.

  • Prioritize getting a panel

    ↩ @'Ryan' Alco used the term "sensitive functions" to describe more than just Discord administration. The TotalFreedom bot has Senior Admin-level access to the server, with the only line of defense being a simple role check which could be easily defeated by simply giving yourself the Senior Admin role. If the person who compromised the Discord bot knew of this, they could have granted themselves the Senior Admin role to add themselves in-game, extending the breach to the server as well, with far more catastrophic potential.

  • Prioritize getting a panel

    Before I begin, here's a sort of "timeline" of events leading up to this suggestion for context.

    • In November 2020, @"Telesphoreo"#36 created a suggestion to implement a panel. After a heated showdown between Ryan and Packs, the suggestion was denied likely because there were more important matters on hand.

    • In March 2021, I created a suggestion to revisit Packs' suggestion. In my suggestion, I justified implementing it by noting that relying on a Discord bot to control everything is not only a bad idea, but also a potential security hazard. The suggestion was approved in April 2021, but it was considered a low priority.

    • In May 2021, after the Discord bot went down temporarily I asked that we prioritize getting a panel in internal development channels. It resulted in an argument in which I questioned the reliability of Discord as a service in both stability and security for the long term. Other developers assured me that Discord was a reliable service, but I stood firm. Later in the argument, I questioned why we had to wait until the worst case scenario to happen to do something. The argument went nowhere, and getting a panel remained a low priority.

    • In August 2021, the reliability of Discord as a service as a whole was put to the ultimate test when the Discord server was wiped through a security issue regarding the TotalFreedom bot and we needed to restore from a backup, which turned out to not exist. As I predicted, it failed miserably. Not only that, but for a period of time after the wipe, we had no way to stop and start the server in the event it went down or something broke that required a restart to fix, since the Discord bot was banned from the server and no alternative was provided for a while.

    The writing is on the wall. A panel would not only be a much cleaner solution than the unstable implementation (which has proven time and time again to be unreliable) we have now, but also provide multiple large benefits in terms of security, maintainability, and stability. People have been asking and patiently waiting for a panel since November of last year. Guess what? It's August 2021 now and nothing has changed. People (including myself) are growing increasingly impatient. We've been running into issue after issue regarding the Discord bot, many of which could be avoided using a simple panel.


    This suggestion is not a reiteration of the previous suggestion, but a suggestion to make getting a panel a higher priority. It's time we put this issue to rest once and for all by implementing a panel.

  • Disabling of Crackshot

    A brief explanation for why this happens

    Trinkets in Crackshot are supposed to create an explosion that destroys the item frame holding it when they are set off. However, because explosives are disabled, you can just endlessly spam players by pressing the pressure plate over and over again because the item frame is never destroyed.

    Why the feature shouldn't be disabled

    In the interest of providing a better user experience, I feel like we should refrain from disabling features unless:

    1. The feature poses a significant threat to server or client stability

    2. The feature isn't logged by CoreProtect

    As the issue does not fit the criteria, I believe this feature should not be disabled. Anyone who abuse this feature to deliberately annoy other players can be sanctioned under rule 3c of the conduct policy.

  • Disabling of Crackshot

    I've re-enabled the plugin for three reasons:

    • The claim to be able to hide your own username is unconfirmed and should be taken with a grain of salt
    • Administrators can effectively stop someone from spamming by using /rd ITEM_FRAME and can also track the use of item frames with CoreProtect
    • This is not an exploit, but still a violation of the Conduct Policy as a Section 3 offense as it's considered an extreme annoyance and thus can be something someone can be sanctioned for.