Troubles with the guild

[Deimheucadh]

Slava Smirnov started the guild "Russian Mafia" and now there are many people in the guild, except Slava Smirnov, that is not online for about a month. Since there i have questions:

1. Why noone else but guild owner can manipulate with membership?
2. How guild owner can be changed?
3. How can guild member quit the guild?

[4144]

Slava Smirnov started the guild "Russian Mafia" and now there are many people in the guild, except Slava Smirnov, that is not online for about a month. Since there i have questions:

1. Why noone else but guild owner can manipulate with membership?
2. How guild owner can be changed?
3. How can guild member quit the guild?

1. Current guilds is only guilds emulation, by unknown reason real guilds disabled on this server. For guild emulation used special bot.
By default only guild creator have rights in guild.
2. Try ask Big Crunch or bot owner about permissions for some one else in guild.
3. Command /leave in Guild tab.
If using outdated client, then !leave in guild whisper.

[Derpella]

BTW, can the community have a clear, reasonable explanation why native guild support is turned off?
If it's because of need of one guild for the privacy in their guild chat, can't you just keep the guildbot and have normal guild system, too? Because things like this are blocking the development, IMHO. We miss very cool and useful options because of this.
And I will hardly believe in "we are too busy" explanation, because no one works hard on something, implements it and leaves it unfinished and just hanging there.

[Freeyorp101]

BTW, can the community have a clear, reasonable explanation why native guild support is turned off?
If it's because of need of one guild for the privacy in their guild chat, can't you just keep the guildbot and have normal guild system, too? Because things like this are blocking the development, IMHO. We miss very cool and useful options because of this.
And I will hardly believe in "we are too busy" explanation, because no one works hard on something, implements it and leaves it unfinished and just hanging there.

[Sure.]

(No idea why 4144 thought the reasons were unknown, given that this happened in his thread.)


---Freeyorp

[Derpella]

With 100 player slots per guild, and anyone being able to create a guild, memory usage on the server would shoot up much too high.

I can't believe you made all this code to abandon it because you can't add few lines about only giving the rights for creating a guild to owners of a real, massive guilds... AFAIK, there are only four guilds in the game: HMC, Phoenix, Russian Mafia and CRC. Besides, I remember Platyna said last time during the event that the server is OK with big memory overloads...

About the members, I am sure guild leaders are able to manage members so no inactive people will take slots.

let's introduce a fee for each guild member.(...) That ensure that only active members will be kept in guilds.

Look! A money sink! A money sink which will make players happy! <3<3<3

Ih, and the topic you linked me to was, on it's end, concentrated on the privacy issues:

In addition, I do not see any reason that any form of chat - including party/guild chat and whispers - should be considered private.
In fact, it is necessary to record them in order to provide substantial evidence against players who are verbally abusive.

(let's note, you can be called a very bad names in the middle of the town, in front of everyone, and no evidence of that is kept, but if you talk with your friends in your party, you should be watched because you can say mean things to each other?)
So let's be honest, WHERE is the problem located?

[Freeyorp101]

It could be resolved as soon as either guilds are made to store or scale nicely, or a guild creation procedure is made that prohibits an explosion of throwaway guilds.

There are a number of ways this could be done.
Here are a few that have been brought up in the past, listed in ascending order of effort required:

• Having the cost of forming a guild increase exponentially with the number of guilds.
• Having a small base limit again that grows with guild experience via the guild extension skill. iRO has a limit of 16 that expands up to 56.
• A new rewritten guild system.

I'm partial to the former independent of any other solutions that might also be pursued.


---Freeyorp

[Freeyorp101]

Regarding your edits, I fundamentally oppose that kind of server sided logging. Such violations of privacy go against everything I believe in.

If I am ever overruled on this and any such plaintext logging mechanisms are ever implemented, I will personally create a client sided OTR patch, assuming someone else doesn't get there first.

In any case, this is getting off topic. If you want to pursue this further, let me know and I'll split the thread for you.


---Freeyorp

[Derpella]

I have seen in many games a system, that if you want to make a guild, you must write an application written by someone sane and mentally able and have a list of at least... 20? members. Just making it expensive won't really help, because there are some rich players, who would be happy to use it, even just to show off their richness...


@up It's a really good thing to hear

[Freeyorp101]

Besides, I remember Platyna said last time during the event that the server is OK with big memory overloads...

Hm, you're sure? I didn't think it was that long ago that the char-server kept crashing due to hitting the memory ulimit...

About the members, I am sure guild leaders are able to manage members so no inactive people will take slots.

I wish it worked so nicely. But it stores everything up to the current maximum number of members, regardless of how many actual members there are. This is one of the reasons that I opposed replacing the system that made it grow as a guild progressed with a system that set a static cap of 100. Funnily enough, despite that it actually stores 120 in memory for whatever reason.

I wrote:let's introduce a fee for each guild member.(...) That ensure that only active members will be kept in guilds.

Look! A money sink! A money sink which will make players happy! <3<3<3

Either way, that still doesn't change the way the underlying system works.


---Freeyorp

[o11c]

Ih, and the topic you linked me to was, on it's end, concentrated on the privacy issues:

In addition, I do not see any reason that any form of chat - including party/guild chat and whispers - should be considered private.
In fact, it is necessary to record them in order to provide substantial evidence against players who are verbally abusive.

(let's note, you can be called a very bad names in the middle of the town, in front of everyone, and no evidence of that is kept, but if you talk with your friends in your party, you should be watched because you can say mean things to each other?)
So let's be honest, WHERE is the problem located?

I'll admit the case for recording party/guild chat is weaker than the case for recording public chat.

The point of recording public chat would be to allow those records to be used in abuse reports, which is currently not possible.

The point of recording whispers - although among friends people may wish true privacy - is also related to abuse. I really hate it when the official policy for dealing with abuse is "just /ignore it".

My other point, is that is not reasonable for players to assume that the server isn't recording all chat without telling anyway. It might not even be done maliciously - for example, recording all network packets for technical reasons.

If I am ever overruled on this and any such plaintext logging mechanisms are ever implemented, I will personally create a client sided OTR patch, assuming someone else doesn't get there first.

Regardless of what form of recording is implemented on the server, I think something like this should be done - as long as the implementation gives due consideration to the possibility of continued whisper abuse (i.e. it should require mutual opt-in).

[Derpella]

Well, there would be good if there would be an option to store current log (in encrypted, safe from mealing way)by the person feeling abused so the "screenies are not proofs" problem would disappear.
It will need work though, and because of it it's unlikely.

[Crush]

We have discussed this several times, and came to the conclusion that we don't want tools to spy on players.

See also this discussion on the Manasource bugtracker
http://bugs.manasource.org/view.php?id=392

and what I wrote there:

In m opinion, logging whispers and private chat channels is a violation of the users privacy. It is of course correct that any administrators who want to monitor users communication can easily implement this themselves, but that doesn't mean that we should provide them with the tools for it.

Public chat is different, in my opinion. It is, as the name says, public.

Regarding the non-provable abuse problem which arouses by that: I would suggest user-controlled "quick freeze" system for that which is already implied by the list of planned @commands on http://doc.manasource.org/chat_commands: [^] We make the server log the last few minutes of chat non-persistently in memory. The player can use a chat command to make the server save the last few minutes of his ingoing and outgoing chat history. A GM can then review this saved chat. That way users have the possibility to prove that they were abused using private chat, but game masters don't have a spying tool because they can't monitor communication without the consent of one party.

Regarding the idea with chatlogs which are saved client-sided and cryptographically signed by the server: I really doubt that this will work reliable in practice. 1. not everything in the clients chat console comes from the server, 2. not everything is displayed the way it is on the server, 3. due to network latency and packet loss lines might be dropped or in the wrong order. The potential for bugs which will only manifest in a failed validation and will in most cases be dismissed as a player trying to frame someone is limitless. I also heard the idea to sign every chat line individually to improve robustness: this makes it possible to selectively remove lines from a chat log and thus conceal important context from an abuse report.

The discussion applies to Manaserv, but the situation on tmwAthena isn't one bit different.

[Derpella]

Regarding the idea with chatlogs which are saved client-sided and cryptographically signed by the server: I really doubt that this will work reliable in practice. 1. not everything in the clients chat console comes from the server, 2. not everything is displayed the way it is on the server, 3. due to network latency and packet loss lines might be dropped or in the wrong order. The potential for bugs which will only manifest in a failed validation and will in most cases be dismissed as a player trying to frame someone is limitless. I also heard the idea to sign every chat line individually to improve robustness: this makes it possible to selectively remove lines from a chat log and thus conceal important context from an abuse report.

Damn, I just woke up with idea of reinventing the wheel...


Crush, Freeyorp, isnt' party spy a working GM command, btw?

[Platyna]

Besides, I remember Platyna said last time during the event that the server is OK with big memory overloads...

Hm, you're sure? I didn't think it was that long ago that the char-server kept crashing due to hitting the memory ulimit...
---Freeyorp

If server crashes due to memory ulimit you have to notify me and I will raise the limits.

Regards.

[Freeyorp101]

If server crashes due to memory ulimit you have to notify me and I will raise the limits.

I did, and you did.

Still, I'd rather avoid drastically bumping up memory requirements further if we can at all help it.


---Freeyorp