With the new web portal features, it would be cool to include private messages (e.g. pages). However, that would necessitate storing PMs in the database - similar to mail messages. I think given the historical, epic levels of distrust between staff and players, that would be a serious dealbreaker.
I mean, it really shouldn’t be. Staff can already snoop on pages in Penn/Tiny if they really wanted to. No communication on a MU* is ever truly secure from the people who control the server. It’s really just a perception issue. Like how some people are really against RP logs… only magnified a hundred fold.
I wish I could see some way around this. Thoughts?
It’s funny. There are a lot of arenas where I don’t particularly think about how much an admin can see of my private messages (forums come to mind). I’m sure the ability to go through that stuff is THERE, but it’s just not a concern. But on a MUSH, yeah, I get the concern about a knee-jerk response to something like this.
The functionality appeals (I’d unreservedly love the ability to save mails, for instance), and it’s not as if players don’t have the ability to communicate via IM/Skype/Discord/a zillion other ways if they want a truly private conversation (privacy is as you say, only as sacred as a MU god wants it to be on their game).
I don’t know. I’m not personally the type of player who’d be bothered by this, and because of that I’m interested to read replies from those who would be.
I’m also not the sort of player to generally mind that. Personally I don’t think it’s that big an issue as long as it is clearly marked (though of course, disingenuous staff could remove the relevant warning).
That said, I think you’re right that it might turn some people off the codebase. Is it possible to make mail and PMs on the web portal an optional thing? So a game could disable them and then they would be telnet-only.
Well, mail has always been stored in the database (even on Penn/Tiny). Wizards can read anybody’s mail in Penn just by using the mail() function. So I don’t see any issue there.
Pages, on the other hand, have never been stored anywhere. Their transitory nature gives the illusion of stronger privacy, even though in reality all it would take is setting someone SUSPECT and suddenly all their conversations are logged anyway.
So I dunno… I’m torn. It seems that having pages stored would also potentially combat some of the ‘he said/she said’ of harassment logs, since the evidence would be right there.
Tat made me sign up to post this, but you’re already aware of the pitfalls in the argument against including PMs as you include it in your opening post. So I’m mostly just chiming in to say that perception is demonstrably and easily disproved in this case and the functionality far outweighs the potential complaints.
Also, an aside, I really like what you’ve been doing to the code. Keep up the awesome work.
The internet isn’t private; anyone who doesn’t understand this has some serious issues to get over.
Storing pages is fine; what is a page but a quick mail?
That said, I would not expose an admin interface into viewing pages or mail.
Yeah, the site-admin can dig into the database and pull out stuff, but really, if a site-admin was motivated they could spy without Ares helping at all.
The key is to not make ‘spying’ an thing Ares supports.
The whole he-said/she-said to me is the totally wrong way to look at it: I wouldn’t want an admin level ‘review pages/mails’ ability. That someone else might write a utility to extract such details from the database, that’s on them.
Lots of forum software exists without spying abilities; PM’s in several (but not all) can’t be read by admins unless flagged. In all of these, some motivated developer/site-admin could read any message posed, but that the software doesn’t make it a feature readily accessible, it simply in most cases doesn’t happen.
The entire internet relies on people giving up their email addresses too, and yet there’s a multi-page thread on MSB where almost every response was vehemently opposed to the idea of using email for registration. The entire internet is web-based and yet a large percentage of MU responders are anti-website, anti-wiki. A non-trivial number of people have a visceral gut-check against scene logs. Unreasonable or not, I think that’s the reality we face.
I wouldn’t either. But just as a player could voluntarily forward an offensive mail they’d received, I see no issue with allowing players to forward offensive pages they received. It’s not fundamentally different from sending a log, but you know it’s authentic.