Working on a player list.

[Cihparg]

Scry is currently tweaked to showing when a user was last online (and if they're online), who they last played, and what server they were on.
Loose queries now show a list of matching characters where history used to be, so you know why it matched that account.

Users can opt-in to get their entire character list visible, along with their (account's) full playtime.
Opt-in still handled through forum PM's.

[BegoneThoth]

It's now showing more info about me then yesterday despite me opting out.

Intentional? Is it possible at all to have you, you know, do what those of us ask? And not pool or cache our info?

I was offline, but today I get up and hey there's a timestamp for me now. So you were still doing it even after you had your opt-out going and just arbitrarily decided to display more of that info today.

Please stop. Opt out means opt out. Stop caching and hiding and later revealing my playtime. I don't want to have to keep looking at your third party site and just randomly see you deciding to share new information.

Just stop. Take me off the list. Stop scraping.

[Nitro]

..

That's actually a very good way of going about it.
Haven't received a PM yet though; are you certain you sent it?

Chill out mate, he said he didn't get your PM.

[BegoneThoth]

I sent it and it was received, my name on the scry tool showed less info yesterday then today, and still less then everyone who didn't opt out. But there's still new info today, meaning the scry tool is still collecting information the opt-out should have stopped.

That's the concern. That the info I opted out of having shown is still being gathered, which I wish to have stopped by opting out. Ideally, I'd have the scry tool only mirror the portal as far as information gathering is concerned.

I'm just a privacy minded individual. Like most Americans, I just had my info stolen from Equifax, a company I never did business with. So it's pretty annoying to, even though this is minor, see a third party keeping tabs on me without my permission, and continuing to gather information despite an opt-out.

[Wytchee]

What it seems to me is that people are worried others will see how much they have played Arelith. If you feel ashamed you played that many hours there's really only one person to blame.

If you don't care about that, then the playerlist is just harmless, and quite useful as stated in other posts.

Tone deaf as heck.

[Queen Titania]

Let's stay polite and civil here, probably not the best idea to attack those concerned over privacy (or back at them for doing so).

[Shadowy Reality]

I get everyone's concerns, I really do. But everyone seems to think that having Cih change the way his tool works solves the actual problem, it doesn't.

I, or anyone else could as easily access the same information and log a lot more than Cih's currently does. It is public data as is.

You shouldn't be wrestling with the developer of this tool for him to limit what you don't like, you should be wrestling with Arelith admins regarding the data about you that they make public and easily available.

[Lorkas]

You shouldn't be wrestling with the developer of this tool for him to limit what you don't like, you should be wrestling with Arelith admins regarding the data about you that they make public and easily available.

Yep. Cihparg isn't the only person who has developed tools like this, just the only one to give it a nice appearance and make it available online for others. What changing Cih's tool will do is just keep the access to the full data limited to Cihparg and anyone else who has developed their own setups.

[BegoneThoth]

It's one thing to make a list of who is playing, it's a whole nother to log 300+ IRL days of online activity.

Which this tool is doing.

And I don't like it for myself, and want out of the tool and to only share the info available on the portal. I don't want it just hidden either, I don't want it scraped at all, as the dev is willing to just undo changes made and start revealing additional information again, info that was gathered while 'opted out.'

You shouldn't be wrestling with the developer of this tool for him to limit what you don't like, you should be wrestling with Arelith admins regarding the data about you that they make public and easily available.

Yep. Cihparg isn't the only person who has developed tools like this, just the only one to give it a nice appearance and make it available online for others. What changing Cih's tool will do is just keep the access to the full data limited to Cihparg and anyone else who has developed their own setups.

I really don't like the 'privacy loss is inevitable' approach to data sharing. It's not a good argument.

[Shadowy Reality]

And I don't like it for myself, and want out of the tool and to only share the info available on the portal. I don't want it just hidden either, I don't want it scraped at all,

I don't share your view but I understand your problem. If you don't want it scrapped at all both API and server status page would need to go. I don't find it fair that Cih's project gets changed because some people don't like what he does with the data, and that is exactly what is happening. Cih is a nice person enough to listen to community's feedback and change things, but he doesn't have to.

[BegoneThoth]

I'm saying, Cih could simply run a check, where if a player is 'optout=1,' then it just doesn't cache any info beyond playername, character name, online y/n.

Also with rule 1 I'd say you could make an argument that they do have to listen to feedback about this thing.

Opt out requests are pretty standard and nice. If I was demanding they make it opt-in that would be one thing, but I saw someone doing something, asked them to stop. It's polite.

[Twily]

Just because some people seem to miss this..

This tool does NOT gather personally identifiable information in any way at all.
Additionally, having your information not gathered by this tool does NOT mean it isn't available.

That aside, given the tools availability, it's understandable that some people would be concerned about meta-gaming occurring with it.
The potential for online stalkers is a possibility as well, if the stalker knows your arelith log in(or the stalker came from Arelith, but if this ones the case talk to DMs/Devs).

Beyond potentially being used for meta-gaming, this tool can't really do anything at all.
It doesn't know your real world name, it doesn't gather your IP(by my understanding), it doesn't know your address/town you live in, it doesn't know ANYTHING, beyond your log in name, and the characters and times associated with that log in name.

This tool doesn't even know your Public CD Key, which would mean even the website owner and creator can't link two separate accounts together. (if he did have access to the public key, he wouldn't need the PM from the forum account as authentication for opt-in/out)

Don't want people knowing what characters you have on your account? Use a different log in for each character, because even without that tool people will still know.


That said, Meta-gaming is a valid concern. Even Arelith's portal can be used for meta-gaming, Cihparg's just has more information and can be used for meta-gaming in more ways as a result.


If privacy is people's actual concern, the effort is really better spent elsewhere.
There's hundreds(or even thousands) of companies out there gathering your real world identifiable information and many are profiting from it.
There's websites out there that let someone look up the exact address you live at, your landline phone number, family member names, previous house locations, etc, with just your first and last name.
Some companies even have such well developed facial recognition that all of this can be pulled up with only a photograph. (the Arelith thread where people post IRL photos of themselves comes to mind at this point...)
These are legitimate privacy concerns.
I know I'm far more concerned about some creep showing up at my front door due to all of this, than getting a message in game saying "Hey baby *eyebrow wiggle*, I know you also play-" *-notells*

PS, Sorry if I sound a bit annoyed, but I feel it's unfair for players to be rudely attacking another player over something so small. Various posts have gone beyond voicing concerns and making requests and turned into outright demanding things.

[BegoneThoth]

I'm not attacking anyone, I just don't want my info scraped and activity logged.

Honestly I find the fact that the server has, on some people, 200+ days if online activity logged concerning. And I don't want to he a part of it.

I do not feel that adding an option out feature that prevents scraping and caching is too much to ask, and should be considered whenever a tool like this, one that can archive months of playtime down to the second, is made.

[Lorkas]

You shouldn't be wrestling with the developer of this tool for him to limit what you don't like, you should be wrestling with Arelith admins regarding the data about you that they make public and easily available.

Yep. Cihparg isn't the only person who has developed tools like this, just the only one to give it a nice appearance and make it available online for others. What changing Cih's tool will do is just keep the access to the full data limited to Cihparg and anyone else who has developed their own setups.

I really don't like the 'privacy loss is inevitable' approach to data sharing. It's not a good argument.

That's not the argument I'm making. I'm making the "you're talking to the wrong person" argument with regard to all this stuff you've directed at Cihparg.

If you don't want the information to be accessible to people who make tools like this, well,

You shouldn't be wrestling with the developer of this tool for him to limit what you don't like, you should be wrestling with Arelith admins regarding the data about you that they make public and easily available.

...as was actually quoted.

[BegoneThoth]

Yeah, but the arelith devs aren't publishing 100's of days worth of activity logs for individual players.

Either way OP says they are doing an opt out system and ill wait for that to roll out.

[Cihparg]

Some minor fixes to the "old style" that's available with the adjust button.
* More specifically, the extra padding on player nodes made the colors look blander than they really were.

[Nitro]

Yeah, but the arelith devs aren't publishing 100's of days worth of activity logs for individual players.

I mean, since the API is public they kinda are. Anyone anywhere could whip up a script to get all that info and give it to anyone they want to.

[BegoneThoth]

Some minor fixes to the "old style" that's available with the adjust button.
* More specifically, the extra padding on player nodes made the colors look blander than they really were.

Looks better.

https://vps.cih.fi/donut/2hfn4-e2-4/are ... oth&format

Any way you could narrow it down to just show the last active date vs the last second?

[Cihparg]

I suppose I can change it to showing hh:mm if the player was last online within one day span, otherwise just show dd/mm/yy.

* If the player hasn't been online for a day (24 hours to be specific), the "Seen" date is compressed down to only DD/MM/YYYY.
Otherwise they'll show DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM

[BegoneThoth]

Sounds great to me.

Thanks for hearing my concerns.

[Lorkas]

Would the more privacy-minded people in this thread object to the scry function showing all characters active under a particular playername in the last, say, 2 weeks or a month? That is more information than is displayed now, but seeing other currently active characters from the same player has been quite useful for me in the past when trying to connect with people in game.

I feel lost on the thing now. At this very instant I have two people that I marked as "friend" because some character of theirs left a note for mine, and because they're playing a different character now, I have no clue which friend they are.

[Marsi]

Is it necessary for Arelith to publish this API? As now many people have tried to explain there's still nothing preventing someone from setting up a simple web-scraper and doing this as they please, but at least Arelith is doing nothing to aide that.

Getting rid of the API seems to be the obvious solution here. I think it's a great tool, but I feel very strongly about my real-life privacy so I can't help but sympathize with those who feel the privacy of their online identity threatened.

I am curious though -- why is this only happening now? Cih's project has been running for a long while by this point. He's been very transparent about documenting his progress, maintaining a presence both here and on the Discord server. And yet there's been almost no noise about privacy concerns. I've seen a couple remarks made about the privacy issue here and there but they were isolated, gained no traction and seemed more hypothetical unease rather than a very literal "this is invading my privacy and needs to stop". Tbh I'd be pretty disappointed if I'd put all this work into a dev project (not to mention paying for hosting!!), going out of my way to maintain a space for people to provide feedback, trying to get people involved in testing, letting everyone know how the thing was going, and then only after two years people were suddenly all "wtf shut it down" and decided it was evil and "creepy".

Reading this thread and the #codenerds chat I think there's a lot of really unfair misplaced anger. It's the API that's making this possible. Cih, as devs do, just found an API and did a thingy with it.

But yeah, privacy > convenience. This API doesn't seem necessary at all.

[Improv]

I guess I feel like just because anyone can do something doesn't mean anyone should. There's lotsa stuff I can do as an adult, like eat candy all day, but maybe I should restrain myself.

As for why it's coming up now, I guess there was an opportunity for conversation about it. I was never crazy about how well it tracked every character attached to a username but I didn't want to spearhead a conversation about it under this or my old forum name.

It's also not attached to the Arelith site and there's not an easy way to find out it exists. There's probably been a fair amount of turnover and new players have to learn of it from word of mouth-- so it's like, "I've been playing here six months and I never knew people could track me this way?"

And like most things around here of course there's a bit of hyperbole and overstated cases-- who'd have thought role players could be drama queens?

[rookie]

I guess my question is what is the benefit of listing the individual players/characters online in the Arelith run Server Status page?

I could write something in a day for my personal use just reading the data off of that and have the same functionality as the scry tool. Probably with a week I could have something that could give likely alt accounts for a searched user based off metrics like no alts can be on at the same time and possibly further narrowed down by stuff like logins within 5 minutes of logout, etc. It wouldn't be a fast search and would have some false positives, but would be serviceable as the queries have no need to run in real time. I imagine most Sophomore CS students or equivalent could do the same.

I'm not going to write something like this as I have zero interest in stalking someone, but just changing cih's list alone is more like the illusion of security IMO.

Personally I see the whole thing as a low worry, the one time I've been stalked on here and the several times on Eve Online have all been with a primary focus on social engineering.

[Liareth]

(I'm not an Arelith admin any more so this is just my opinion and not the team's)

Isn't it a bit of an extreme and disproportionate reaction to call for the removal of the Arelith portal page over this? Some things can be misused but that doesn't mean the team should just remove them.

Besides, even if the Arelith portal were removed:

- By default, NWN shows all characters and their full builds before you even enter the server. Somebody could build a 'stalking scraper' this way. The server has this disabled right now but it may or may not make it in time for EE.
- You can see the full player list when you enter a server. Somebody could build a 'stalking scraper' this way.

That's not to mention how other servers handle it:

- Many servers have a portal of some kind.
- Some servers even integrate their portal into the side bar of the forums.
- Sinfar, the second biggest/biggest server (depending on who you speak to and their feelings about fake clients), has a player list in game and out of game. The in game one even broadcasts the area you're in by default. It has a character search tool through the portal which shows even more information than Cih's tool.

If we look at how other games handle it:

- Almost every game has some sort of /who functionality which shows whether you're online, your level, and in some games, such as WoW, your area.
- Some games expose an API to query this information, but not all.
- DDO has a web portal where you can look any connected character up from outside of the game and see their area and everything about their character.
- LoL lets you view any game of any account from the web via an API, and maybe even allows you to view replays?

A stalker will stalk you with or without Cih's tool or the Arelith portal. Personally I don't really mind the tool. It doesn't matter to me if people know when I was last online or what character I've played recently or the amount of hours I've played. This is all publicly observable information with or without any tools or API. Nice of him to offer an opt-out for sure!