Second Life Group Chat to Discord Integration?

[Perrie Juran]

9 hours ago, Aishagain said:

My point with regard to "privacy" remains.

 

8 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

The root of the disagreement is different views on what is private information.

No where in the quoted policy is "Privacy" mentioned. That comes under the heading of "Remote Monitoring." Privacy is covered in the next section of that policy statement.

 

7 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Wait, what? Guess I missed it - "Builder's Brewery" is using Discord integration?  Aren't "Builder's Brewery" supposed to be a "shining example" of Second Life "good guys"?!?  If so, how disappointing that they DON'T mention the Discord integration.

To be clear it is not "Builders Brewery" that is using Discord integration.

There are some members of the group who are using it.

And I will give them this. I don't know what is involved in making the integration work but the posts always state "Via Discord."

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Perrie Juran said:

And I will give them this. I don't know what is involved in making the integration work but the posts always state "Via Discord."

When you put it that way, we don't know if the individuals using Discord integration are using it for "just themselves, privately" (and not some Discord "group" chat.). If so, I don't see the difference between that and "offline IM's" or replying to Outlook emails from your phone app instead of your PC app.

[Aishagain]

41 minutes ago, Perrie Juran said:

To be clear it is not "Builders Brewery" that is using Discord integration.

Well well, that I did not realise.  In my innocence I had rather assumed that it was an "official server" not an adhoc one used with (I must assume) tacit approval of the BB mods.  Since the chats are publically visible, that seemed to me to be a reasonable assumption.

I rarely make contributions to BB chat but I will assuredly not be doing so henceforward.

Edited November 1, 2023 by Aishagain

[Wulfie Reanimator]

15 hours ago, Perrie Juran said:

No where in the quoted policy is "Privacy" mentioned. That comes under the heading of "Remote Monitoring." Privacy is covered in the next section of that policy statement.

I'm talking about the discussion in this thread, not the TOS. The people who have issues with SL<->Discord connection are mainly concerned with privacy.

15 hours ago, Perrie Juran said:

To be clear it is not "Builders Brewery" that is using Discord integration.

There are some members of the group who are using it.

And I will give them this. I don't know what is involved in making the integration work but the posts always state "Via Discord."

It is BB using it.

The SL group has a link to the Discord server. The founder of BB is the server owner. Multiple BB moderators are in the server. Teachers/mentors use the server for BB classes.

It works by using 1-2 bots. One in the Discord server, one in the SL group. They both read messages in Discord/SL, relay them to the other bot, and the other bot repeats each message in its own chat.

When anyone posts a message in those "synced" channels, a bot in SL will repeat the message starting with "Bot: Wulfie Reanimator [via Discord]: Good morning!" (We have to use our SL names in the BB server as a rule, otherwise "Wulfie Reanimator" would be whatever my normal Discord name was.)

Edited November 2, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Perrie Juran]

14 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

It is BB using it.

Thank you for clarifying this. As I had said I did not know how this worked.

[Love Zhaoying]

14 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

It is BB using it.

Thanks for clarifying, and all the specifics. So I should reclassify BB as "chaotic good" (from just "good")?

[Beq Janus]

This is an interesting conversation.

When I first encountered a relay in a group chat I was surprised and a little disconcerted at not realising there were people outside of the room listening in, but I was also rather impressed at how well it worked and at a purely technical level, enabling an extension of SL presence to Discord makes a lot of sense.

Technical kudos and support convenience aside, this is almost certainly a TOS violation, as mentioned by many already, the fact that your chat is being echoed into a public forum that you may well have no access to, that you have not signed up to and that you may not even be able to trace is a breach of trust and is clearly not allowed. Someone (the OP perhaps) mentioned that a local chat relay, broadcasts when you first say something, this does not happen in the groups that I know are relayed, nor would it change the facts of the issue. Being told is not the same as being asked and getting your permission.

Personally, I have no problem whatsoever with many groups to which I belong (such as BB, whom I have nothing but the highest regard for) using a chat extender to mirror my chat between Discord/Slack/whatever and SL (and to be clear, if the option to opt-in to that was available for those groups I would enable it); however, I almost certainly do have an issue with some other groups that I am part of doing the same as I consider my membership of those groups less public (and by the same measure would choose to opt-out or leave those groups were I made aware/given the choice). The fact that I have no control or visibility of this is troubling.

Of course, anyone can do this at any time, if someone wants to copy/paste chunks of what I am saying into another forum then they will TOS or no TOS and as such I should be careful of what I say and do, we all have a responsibility in this regard, but as @Henri Beauchamp pointed out, there is a difference between having a rumour of a conversation overheard in a pub, where the audience was limited, and a full recording of that same conversation taken without permission and echoed to the masses. When we chat in a group we have an "expectation of privacy" and assess the risk of that privacy being broken based upon those present etc. Once we accept that actually any group may be extended to an unknown/unseen audience we have given up any illusion of privacy.

The big issue here is not so much the siphoning of chat to another service, but the fact that we are not being given any warning or opt-out. There are clearly big gains in terms of customer support from using a rich communication platform such as Discord, it would be useful (as is demonstrated by the mostly well-intentioned and increasingly widespread use of relays) to have proper tools to deal with bots and relays inside a group chat.

 

 

Edited November 8, 2023 by Beq Janus
fixing a few ugly grammos

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Beq Janus said:

The big issue here is not so much the siphoning of chat to another service, but the fact that we are not being given any warning or opt-out. There are clearly big gains in terms of customer support from using a rich communication platform such as Discord, it would be useful (as is demonstrated by the mostly well-intentioned and increasingly widespread use of relays) to have proper tools to deal with bots and relays inside a group chat.

Having looked into relays recently while setting up a discord server for /r/SecondLife on reddit.

I can only agree, especially the point about it being a ToS violation. This is actually worse than the old IRC relays people got upset over back in the day as there is no 'physical' presence required or present an option to opt in.

We're past the point of in world chat losing relevance, for a lot of meaningful purposes, it already has. Even LL run a discord server to keep staff and user groups in contact.

I would like to see a formal way to link group chats and discord that presents users with a way to opt out.

Ad-hoc relays are rapidly becoming the norm for product support and social groups.