Posts by Allink

    IIRC I heard that it was possible for people to retrieve people's personal info such as disc. password through something in the bot.

    Even if Discord did indeed store plaintext passwords (which they 100% do not), it's just not possible to magically retrieve someone's Discord password (or the hash of their password) with anything short of a phishing attack or Discord zero day. I doubt PluralKit would have anything to do this, unless PluralKit was compromised and has some sort of Discord OAuth integration and that theoretical zero day requires some sort of OAuth access token in order to retrieve the user's password.

    Just about every point you made in this post doesn't ring true just for administration on TF, it seems to me like it also rings true for the development of the Minecraft server. Due to the way the pull request system works, there is always one reviewer required in order to merge a pull request. This is, of course, quite logical, considering if this restriction was not in place then it'd be trivial to get developer and merge permissions on TF, make a new branch, add some malicious code, open a pull request, merge it yourself and have malicious code on the development branch for whoever knows how long. This works fine when there's at least 2 active developers, but due to the nature of the developer role on TF, being without an activity requirement, and the terrible build times of TFM and just massive codebase issues, there is often only one active developer who wants to actively improve the codebase of TFM, without anyone to merge these PRs. When your PR is merged into the development, it often takes months for it to be published as a release, or put on the server. A lot of the fun in programming, at least for me, is to see your project actually running in production. Not just to have it approved and merged into the current development revision. I do understand that this is in the interest of stability, and I agree that is of high importance, but this certainly isn't the correct way to do it. It feels similar to the Debian project's stable flavour, which essentially holds back the non-security updates of packages. This, for me, is the reason that I haven't tried to make as many pull requests to TFM as I could've, it's just tiring to write changes and then get them sent into code review purgatory. Not knowing if your changes will be denied, accepted or ever merged into TFM in the first place. Code reviews aren't good when they're never done, and as such actually get in the way of development, instead of actually improving stability and code quality, as they are meant for. Neither is the branch system of TFM.

    Of course, that's now all basically irrelevant now that Paldiu has started the development of FNS, however I hope that the "it sort of works, so why change it?" attitude will never be repeated to such a degree with the warning of my lengthy paragraph above. Let's hope FNS is finished quite soon, so we can finally kick TFM into the bowels of hell, and let it burn there for all eternity.

    This entire server smells heavily of slow stagnation. The current stagnant status of TF will eventually lead to its downfall, whether you believe it or not. The server bills are paid, sure, but there aren't any features actually being added, besides the occasional bug or exploit fix. The server never changes. For some people, that's probably fine, but I enjoy change in my servers. If you eat the same food, made by the same cook, every day, for every meal, then eventually you'll get sick of that food. I'm sure the players can relate to this sentiment, as the server has been stuck on 1.17.1 for an eternity now. Please, for the love of god, just allow the server to be updated relatively fast to the latest version of Minecraft which Scissors has support for. I became a developer while the server was on 1.17.1 in May of 2022, and the server is still on 1.17.1 over a year later. And TFM is able to run natively on 1.19.4, without any issues. It has been successfully deployed on IPTFreedom, a server ran by one of our community members, without any issues. And by the way, the 1.19.3 PR still works.

    I personally think operators moaning about TF not being on 1.19.4 is annoying, but it's a valid gripe to have with the way the server is currently being handed.

    This isn't the fault of one singular developer, or even Ryan. There are much more greener pastures than attempting to fix the shitcode that is TFM. But, nonetheless, PRs not being merged in months isn't particularly good for the state of the server, either way.

    It would also be much easier if developers without admin had access to some sort of logging, so they can read exceptions & what players are running to generate those exceptions, instead of having to rely on kind administrators to forward the stacktraces to them. I understand that the confidentiality of admin chat is a big concern there, but I don't think it would be particularly difficult to quickly add support to BukkitTelnet for allowing developers to remotely access the server's console, without the ability to run commands or view admin chat. If administration actually wants me to implement this, please don't hesitate to let me know to implement it.

    I don't see myself being a developer for much longer if the server isn't updated to 1.20 (it is stable now) within the next 6 months.

    I know some people will probably be angry if I bring Kaboom up in a thread about the state of TF, but I think in this case it is certainly warranted. After all, the server is usually always on the latest version of Minecraft a few weeks after release, and the plugins are updated every month or so. I find it much easier to contribute to Kaboom, even though the owner isn't available for contact on any sort of social media, due to the nature of the server, or there not being any sort of actual "development team", besides on and off contributors. Maybe this example isn't very good.

    Also, if you're wondering why I haven't brought any of this up in development discussion or anywhere similar, it's because I think this is pretty obvious to anyone who's been spectating the development cycle of TF. But I don't know, maybe it isn't and I should've brought it up. Sorry if that's the case.

    It's time to accept that Discord has successfully isolated their core user base (gamers) by repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with these updates. They have been trying to escape the taboo of being the "gamer" platform for quite some time now. I don't know why they're still doing this, honestly... if they just embraced the "by gamers, for gamers" attitude they had before they'd be in a much better place right now. As a company, they're now in an awkward position where they have isolated their core audience and also failed to become acceptable in a mainstream context. Think of what happens when you mention Discord to your friends in real life - nobody wants to use it because they want to avoid the "discord mod" stigma. There are changes to the platform that should have been made to get rid of that stigma, but the changes that have actually happened have been in all the wrong places.

    This is what happens when a platform doesn't listen to its userbase. Granted, if I were Discord, I wouldn't exactly listen to them either since they take issue with anything that the platform does, however some of the criticism offered by Discord's userbase is entirely valid.

    This recent name system change is a great example of that. I can guarantee you that nobody who uses Discord ever asked for the username system to be changed. It already worked fine as is. I'd be willing to wager if Discord had just added global display names, there wouldn't have been as much controversy surrounding the change.

    All of these recent ill-advised changes/additions are what happens when you start blindly agreeing to everything your shareholders/investors suggest, who have probably never touched a social media platform outside of Facebook. Of course, I do want to see Discord grow and more features be added to the platform, however all of the recent additions have been absolutely terrible, or Nitro-exclusives. It's like, can you make it any less bleedingly obvious that your vision is obscured by wads of cash?

    I remember when it felt like the people at Discord knew what they were doing with their own platform. Now it feels like they're driving, out-of-control, into a tree.

    Discord will continue to gradually push terrible features/changes like this, until it becomes the next Skype or TeamSpeak.