- 255
- IGN
- videogamesm12
Background
When Rebooted was first established back in August 2023, one of the first things decided upon were measures intended to mitigate the possibility of raids against the server actually being impactful. In fact, it was even included as part of the original proposal intended to convince Ryan to hand over TF:The part about removing the ability to upload images in particular wasn't very popular with the community, and on October 18, 2023 a suggestion was created that intended to allow anyone to post images on the server. There was a noticeable amount of hesitance from the executive team about such a concept. However, the suggestion was still approved sometime later with the implementation being pretty simple: you asked for the embed role and you got it.Proposal said:But what about Akefu? What about all these people?
- The first step we’ve already taken is removing the ability to upload images on discord and to embed links from every single person except staff themselves.
- We will try to have spam detection and raid detection bots to prevent such things from happening.
A month later, the idea was developed into a system that required you to link your forum account with your Discord account to be able to get the role. This was actually fairly unpopular due to privacy concerns in regards to the amount of information that the linking plugin had access to. However, it was mostly accepted as a necessary evil to be able to protect the community and people kind of just lived with it.
A few months later, an unrelated incident occurred which prompted a more in-depth look into who had access to the Discord server which led to the establishment of a user verification system, and with a much better way of protecting the community in place, I've decided to create this suggestion.
It's inconveniently redundant
Both the verification system and the forum linking system were implemented to address the same problem: bad actors joining the community under alts to spam, attack, or otherwise harm the server. With both solutions in place, the forum account requirement is redundant, and while redundancy is nice when it comes to security, this redundant solution is actually more inconvenient to individuals who just don't want to link their forum account to their Discord account than actual threats to the community.It does not protect the community
On multiple occasions, this measure of requiring a forum account to post media links has failed in its job of protecting the community. I'd like to list some examples.- Mosley (former Senior Admin who has since been unappealably banned for his conduct in attacking the server amongst other things) has been using a stockpile of alternate accounts to spy on the community at large. This is so that he can post new content about various people he considers to be "lolcows" into a Discord server he runs or in order to find information about them to document on a wiki he maintains. Blocking embeds for people without forum accounts simply does not protect against that.
- There was a group of individuals who were involved in a conspiracy to dox shdwo by a picture he posted. The details aren't going to be specified here for obvious reasons, but shdwo has since dismissed the incident as a matter of a fucked up embed permission while he has completely missed the fact that someone malicious was in the Discord server at the time and was able to sufficiently dox him. Blocking the embed permission would have not prevented that.
- Despite the implementation of the requirement, small-scale raids have been successfully performed in which raid-related musical lyrics are posted instead of images.
The user verification system is historically more effective
In early 2022 amidst the raids against the original TotalFreedom, a user verification system like the one mentioned above was implemented. This prevented malicious users from joining under alternate accounts to spam gore, raid-related copypastas, and porn. As a direct result of this system, the amount of attacks related to the Discord server decreased by a large amount and it became more difficult for the attackers to target the the platform.Although it was not successful in stopping the raids altogether (because they never will stop), it was still enough to force them to switch tactics and choose a different vector to attack, and it just so happened to be the Minecraft server which is a completely different platform altogether. This is a testament to the success of that system.