I've spent the day working on our own privacy policy for Avardon and that got me thinking about all the gripes I've had with servers in the past. Personally, I do care about privacy. Not just from position of someone who processes information of others, but even as an internet user, player, customer, I want my privacy to be respected. I want companies and even roleplay servers to respect my privacy. Usually, this is only problem with some big corporations and rarely would you see anyone complain about this in regard to roleplay servers, but let me be that someone.
But first, let me be clear, I'm not writing this to insult any server or anyone in the community. I am sure there are good reasons, be it because of policies, technical difficulties, or simply different priorities why servers do what I'd prefer them not to. However, if anyone cares about my opinion, then here it is.
Problem #1 - DoubleCounter
Plenty of servers inevitably face the problem of alt accounts and ban evading, and the easiest way to solve it is to add DoubleCounter or any similar Discord bot that tracks users across Discord accounts and servers. This is bad. I'm not even going to go into details on this, because you can simply watch this video from the YouTuber No Text To Speech.
Long story short, it's used for doxxing, it's predatory in so many ways, and it doesn't even solve your problem because it's easy to walk around anyway.
Better solution? I'm not sure if I can recommend any, but I personally don't use any bots for this on any of my Discord servers and I can't say that alt accounts are some big problem that we wouldn't be able to uncover through other means anyway.
Problem #2 - Silly Rules
This is a hot take, but in my completely personal opinion, it's just completely unnecessary to require players to change their Discord name to their character name. I never understood what's it good for, but I can see what it's bad for. Sometimes you just want to be anonymous. Otherwise there are risks of harassment and more. Similar case is requiring players to leave their Discord handle in POIs. I can understand the reason but there are better solutions too. I believe it should always be the player's choice to share contact information with fellow players.
Problem #3 - Default Config
Similar to the above, did you know that some servers never disable the base game player list that shows links to Steam profiles of all players currently online? You can just press L, click on a character name, and you're on their Steam profile. Yet again, no good reason for that to be enabled. This is just terrible.
Problem #4 - Chat Logs in Discord
And last but not least, my biggest gripe and hot take - servers shouldn't save chat logs in their staff Discords. Every post, every emote, even clan messages and private channels. Everything you ever typed on nearly any server is logged forever in some Discord channel. Ever since this was a possibility through mods like RPR, basically every server out there started saving logs through webhooks into their Discord. Shamelessly recommending it to each other. And usually never making players aware.
But webhooks are not just for Discord, you can save it in text files. Why share it all with a third party (Discord), without the knowledge of the users, without any safety measures for auditing access, without any automatic removal?
If you're a server owner, I beg you to just set up some tiny HTTP server that will process web requests, save them into text files, and automatically delete them after a few days.
And if you're using Ratchet, then you can use the built-in chat logger functionality that I designed specifically because I hate this. That's also what I use as a privacy friendly solution.
I had some more thoughts but forgor them, so that's enough yapping for today.