Online list and privacy [split from: TMW promotion]

[Frost]

I am glad a discussion has started here about whether the online list should be freely available.

It's not that simple. You have been collecting this information for a long time, without informing people, and now you release all this historical data publicly. This is a far cry from the realtime list which people use to see if friends are online.

I don't know how old anyone of you is, but I grew up with the knowledge that *everything* which is is recordable, will be recorded and datamined. You need to keep the sources closed. Do not try to make rules about how data should be used, once they are there! Make sure they won't be there in the first place!

I'm older than you are. I do not accept that the fact that something can be recorded justifies recording it, storing it, and releasing it later without the knowledge or consent of those affected. Open Source is irrelevant here.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll mention here that you also have been sent (for backup purposes) full data about all transactions in ManaMarket. (I also have this information, but I have not and will not release it except privately for creating the stats pages, or to TMW project leaders for purposes directly related to the project.)

Don't blame me, but the online list being there. If you don't feel well with recording the logs, remove the online list.

The current online list has no bearing on the historical data you have released. My concern is with the sudden release of previously unknown historical data over the objections of some of those affected. My concern is that this is justified with "nobody stopped me then, and now it's too late."

I do not wish to be associated with an organization that operates in such a fashion.

[mistergrey]

argul,

I never said that nobody else could get such information. I pointed out the potential for harassment - a lot of people who would not have the tools, knowledge, or time, to log the online list properly would suddenly have it easily placed into their hands. While this can be limited by only releasing much older logs, this still allows anybody with the persistence a way to map out a player's approximate routine times online. Not to mention, I'm sure many players would love a "gm online time schedule", to coordinate rule breaking endeavors .

I don't know where this became a "remove the online list entirely" or "release detailed logs that make it easy to track players" ultimatum, but I don't think either is necessary. It's one thing for a game to offer basic information, like who is online at the moment, and various group average stats. It is quite another for that game to encourage and facilitate players to more effectively stalk each other.

I don't really understand what changed since you said that you would not post the logs for the sake of others' privacy, but I think it was a valid concern. Keeping logs for personal curiosity, or to make stats is one thing, but this is putting some personal information out there - especially considering the amount of big player conflicts and just how vindictive some people can be about the players they dislike lol.

[Big Crunch]

I'm of the opinion that I'd these collected stats are useful to deva, by all means use them. I'm also of the opinion that they should not be publicly available. All of the arguments why have been stated.

Regarding the "we only have to give them up to a judge" argument, we can't afford a stamp let alone potential legal fees. I have a feeling thatany info would be given freely and swiftly. That is not to slight the ideals espoused by our project, it is merely a reflection of reality. Often when idealism meets reality, idealism is quickly shuffled aside

[Nard]

I don't see how it would be useful to everyone to see everyone's online habits. I think it would encourage harassment to be honest, and trolls. Should the statistics be viewed by the public? definitely not in my opinion. As i said in my other post everybody deserves privacy and should have that right to it. Is there a way everybody can see their own stats without seeing everybody elses? I think this would be much better than everyone's statistics being public. considering it would be their option to show it to everyone by their hand, not anybody elses.

Again, as Argul said, online list is available now. Every player who says he/ she has never used it to see if he/she could find friends, or would not find people he/she doesn't like (In terranite cave for example), in game or offline is either a newbie or a liar. There is NO private information in that list, there is no private information in the collection. Thus no way to prove anything about you as a person except if you gave your identity to unfriendly people (it can happen and happened to some players).
The purpose of global data is again to retrieve information about TMW population not private persons and there is no way to correlate both except with a lot of extra information. The only valid objection I can see was given by mrgrey: with this data everyone has an already done job which facilitates a lot information gathering about other players. But unlike him "player who stayed the longest time in game this week" is precisely the information I would not like to be published unless there is a contest about it.
Btw it is almost sure that 4144 would beat almost everybody at this game
Now and again, retrieving significant information different than the one you can get with a paper and a pencil is quite a tricky thing; it is very unlikely that a player spend hours digging this sample in the only goal to troll someone, He/she is not sure to find something. This is the point with statistics: you must know something about what you are looking for to be able to get information about it.

Let's take my example: Let's suppose you retrieve all information about my connections. You can easily see that I spend most of my game time during CEST "awake" hours. you can correlate as much information as you want you will not be able to say much more except that my char stays sometimes 24 hours online. Yes, it does, and what? I left the computer on and manaplus launched? sure (watch 4144!). Now suppose you make the same measures about Luxima. You will see that Luxima is mainly active during the same time, and that there is some correlation between the two chars period of supposed activity. But Luxima is a far less active player and thus information is much more noisy
Now make again calculation about V0id for example, or Argul, Or Jenalya or Gina... you will find similar results;now make cross correlations. You may conclude that I am V0id or that V0id is me as you like it. (a player arrived to this conclusion with no calculation). With no extra information (a lot) you have NO wayto make any other conclusion than:
"I have no reason to refuse the hypothesis that character Nard and character V0id are the same player with 95% reliablilty"
and you will be wrong because the test has a wrong basis. I am not sure that you could have a better fit with Luxima though she is a character of mine.

I am sorry but I cannot see what kind of harassment can result from it. There are better, faster and more efficient ways to do it: systematic killing in terra cave, bringing mobs on a player in gy repeatedly, stealing targets with systematic potion use, insulting players when no one is around (even in public when no GM is online), lying about them when they are offline, chat trolling... I experienced all of these

The privacy argument was an answer to Frost's post and not about online list archives publishing .

Now your question:

Is there a way everybody can see their own stats without seeing everybody elses?

is an interesting suggestion to development team(s). This feature is available on different games, mostly given by the client itself.

[argul]

You have been collecting this information for a long time, without informing people, and now you release all this historical data publicly. This is a far cry from the realtime list which people use to see if friends are online.

Which is not true. Specially those who now oppose me in this thread were very well aware I did a logging as I told them.
Any outsider could also know from the gm nomination threads, which sometimes have had statistics on that particular nominated player.

I do not accept that the fact that something can be recorded justifies recording it, storing it, and releasing it later without the knowledge or consent of those affected. Open Source is irrelevant here.

We had a private talk a few days ago, in which I asked you for reasons on not releasing these data. At the end of the talk you seemed to agree on releasing is not as critical as portrayed now here.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll mention here that you also have been sent (for backup purposes) full data about all transactions in ManaMarket. (I also have this information, but I have not and will not release it except privately for creating the stats pages, or to TMW project leaders for purposes directly related to the project.)

Right, multiple locations are a good place for backups. But mind the difference between publicly available logs and confidental stuff. I did not touch nor did I look at these backup files as they are the other category.

The current online list has no bearing on the historical data you have released. My concern is with the sudden release of previously unknown historical data over the objections of some of those affected. My concern is that this is justified with "nobody stopped me then, and now it's too late."

Right. As said you knew I was doing recordings, so why didn't we discuss the relevance of recording at that time?

I don't know where this became a "remove the online list entirely" or "release detailed logs that make it easy to track players" ultimatum, but I don't think either is necessary.

Please look at the script, which does the recordings: https://github.com/stefanbeller/tmwlog/ ... /logger.sh
That's 9 lines of code, basically just a loop around the wget command(which downloads the file) and then a sleep for 5 minutes.

How much time would you estimate does an average person (non programmer) need to write this down or similar?
Here is the script in an easier form:

Code: Select all

while true; do 
  wget  http://server.themanaworld.org/online.txt -O$(date --rfc-3339 seconds).txt  
  sleep 5m
done

So it does not need a programmer to make such recordings. All you need is a computer which runs 24/7 and some skill to read the manual of how to use the tools delivered with your distribution.

That's why it boils down to the exact question as you stated: Either all or nothing on the free web.

Is there a way everybody can see their own stats without seeing everybody elses?

That would be the best solution in my opinion. You can see general statistcs (there are 23 players online at the moment), but not the names. The names are only visible in the game to befriended players. So you actually must opt-in (allow) others to see you online.

"Data minimization and avoidance of collecting data".
That's the principle to follow, if we want to avoid such discussions in future.

[Nard]

I'm sure many players would love a "gm online time schedule", to coordinate rule breaking endeavors

There is no need about it there are online list and GM log, you get the schedule in real time. Be sure that botters use it (and maybe bots too).

[Big Crunch]

Argul, doing something for personal knowledge, which is what I thought you were doing, and publishing them for public consumption are two different things. If you hadpublished purely the results, as in "the most players are online during X time period, or Y map is least used, let's put a quest there, no one would be questioning you as those things can be deemed useful. As is, I can see no use for this data other than mischief.

[Big Crunch]

I'm sure many players would love a "gm online time schedule", to coordinate rule breaking endeavors

There is no need about it there are online list and GM log, you get the schedule in real time. Be sure that botters use it (and maybe bots too).

yes but this data can be easily used to get a much clearer idea of a schedule

[argul]

Argul, doing something for personal knowledge, which is what I thought you were doing, and publishing them for public consumption are two different things.

What's the difference? You are assuming I have higher morals or that I am not stalking you?

Seriously. What is the difference?
If you have a look at the bright side, there might be also people who have more time than me and can do better information retrieving from the data available and help out on The Mana World.

The whole stuff called 'science' is based on publishing your data, so a smarter guy is able to come up and help on improving things on the given data.

Now that the discussion seems to be just a repetition of arguments in different styles again and again, what would you expect me to do? Deleting the data (and tommorrow someone else will step up to collect the data)?
If we want the discussion to be over we'd need to aim for the online list being available freely. And only make that list available to logged in users (game or forums) and put rules on it, such as vetoes on logging/datamining. (btw: vetoes don't really work well, so removing the source would be better in my opinion)

[Nard]

Argul, doing something for personal knowledge, which is what I thought you were doing, and publishing them for public consumption are two different things. If you hadpublished purely the results, as in "the most players are online during X time period, or Y map is least used, let's put a quest there, no one would be questioning you as those things can be deemed useful. As is, I can see no use for this data other than mischief.

Results with no data and without the way they were acquired are meaning less. The calculation method may have importance too.
Once again: It would be easy to encode character names before publishing the results. Publishing sample summaries would be possible too but it begins to be tricky because classification require non uniform duration intervals as the histogram is obviously very dissymmetric. Connection duration is not the only parameter to follow, as a short connection may result from a lack of interest and also from experienced players character switching witch is very likely to occur. Deeper investigation in this gold mine could be very useful to TMW community

If players cannot understand the interest of such data, I ask again Argul to give them to TMW admins who will decide what to do with them, and the issue would be solved anyway.

[Big Crunch]

Argul, doing something for personal knowledge, which is what I thought you were doing, and publishing them for public consumption are two different things.

What's the difference? You are assuming I have higher morals or that I am not stalking you?

Seriously. What is the difference?
If you have a look at the bright side, there might be also people who have more time than me and can do better information retrieving from the data available and help out on The Mana World.

The whole stuff called 'science' is based on publishing your data, so a smarter guy is able to come up and help on improving things on the given data.

Now that the discussion seems to be just a repetition of arguments in different styles again and again, what would you expect me to do? Deleting the data (and tommorrow someone else will step up to collect the data)?
If we want the discussion to be over we'd need to aim for the online list being available freely. And only make that list available to logged in users (game or forums) and put rules on it, such as vetoes on logging/datamining. (btw: vetoes don't really work well, so removing the source would be better in my opinion)

i was assuming that you considered us friends and would respect my opinions as i have respected yours. I assumed that you had some kind of moral fiber rather than 'it was there, i did it, Duck off'. I assumed you thought of others as friends as well and respected their opinions. I guess i'm the moron for assuming.

[Big Crunch]

as far as what to do with the data, first i would recommend it not be published to the public in this raw form. Place it somewhere that it can be accessed by devs or someone who is interested in turning into a useful form. As i've and others have said, in its current form it is useless, except for mischief.

[Nard]

I'm sure many players would love a "gm online time schedule", to coordinate rule breaking endeavors

There is no need about it there are online list and GM log, you get the schedule in real time. Be sure that botters use it (and maybe bots too).

yes but this data can be easily used to get a much clearer idea of a schedule

there is no need of a long period to have a precise Idea about GM habits. I took botters and bots as an example, but I can ensure you that players who use to insult, spammers... didn't wait for Argul's data to be published to break the rules too.

Now mrgrey's connection stats were given by someone among the admin team during his GM poll as an argument for his "election"

Finally Data mining may give you interesting results even if you don't see actually what they can be.
among them: answers to the questions: Is the number of active characters decreasing? since when? is the number of new players stable or not? what ratio in new players continue the game? how are the lags related to the number of in game chars? Which was the influence of some past strategic decisions on the way of playing? and so on

[mistergrey]

Nard, I mean no offense, but I feel like you got the wrong idea here. None of us have any problem with people logging whatever they wish - it is the making it public part, without concern for player's privacy concerns. They were indeed used beneficially in my GM poll, and in other places, and I fully support them being used again - but I would not feel the same if I'd opposed my times being shown, and they were made available to everyone. You can learn a lot from things like that and data mining, but in such a case it would be ideal if those stats were figured out by the person logging, rather than making all the raw data available to everyone.

Yes, I know that botters, rulebreakers, as well as all kinds of players, check the GM log constantly. This is a form of stalkery I have submitted to. Forgive me, but I do not feel a need to give players even more knowledge of my times online.

argul - yes, people can get the same data that you did. And much easier than before, I might add, since you were kind enough to post your example of the script you used. I do not really care about the online list, but I see no reason that needs to be removed to avoid this problem. It is a simpler problem, along the lines of - players, friends, etc, asked for this not to be published; one moment you respected this, and the next you were pretty much saying "oh well, they're up now, too bad". You are making light of very valid concerns, and using the excuse "somebody else could do it", which you have made easier by making the script available, AFAICT.

It is my feeling that a game like this should never offer information of that detail about it's players, as a matter of respect for their privacy. If you disagree, there is not much I can do about that, but I do hope you will consider a little more compassion towards the players who are upset by this, as they have a right to be upset.

[Chicka-Maria]

Everyone should have a right to privacy and if others privacy is being given out publicly then something's very wrong.

That's correct.
Privacy is very valuable, but when does it start to get impacted? Of course you can have a gut feeling when somebody is online and when s/he is is not.
The data just back you up there. But apparently you seem to have a different feeling if the online list is just there, or if it is recorded and the logs are kept, which I cannot understand.

Because the online list allows you to see who is online in the present at that exact moment, the statistic data will allow the person to just see what time the player comes on MOST of the time. With the online list you can easily click on a name and whisper friends or tell when your friends are online WHEN your online. Like i said before its much more useful then having a statistic data about online playing habits. Thats why i feel differently from the 2, Hope you understand that now.

Argul, doing something for personal knowledge, which is what I thought you were doing, and publishing them for public consumption are two different things. If you hadpublished purely the results, as in "the most players are online during X time period, or Y map is least used, let's put a quest there, no one would be questioning you as those things can be deemed useful. As is, I can see no use for this data other than mischief.

totally my points.

Regards,