Greetings to everyone. Yes, this is relevant to everyone, specifically citizens and foreign dignitaries.
In recent weeks, it has come to the attention of many the alarming testing and experimentation by Discord of face scanning to verify the age of some users, currently tested and deployed in the UK and Australia. This is paired with concerns over the anticipated public listing of Discord which can often change the ethos of an organization and their deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) at a time where its widespread adoption in other parts of society has proven to be premature and cause for worry. All this concerns us and has brought us to this question: how much longer can we depend on Discord as a reasonable communications platform for our community and its operations in the future?
Before going any further let me be clear: we will continue to use Discord until it is abundantly clear we no longer are able to do so, and this remains the case present day. We are still on Discord and no plans are made to leave it at this time.
The purpose of me broaching this subject is to inform everyone that although we do not plan to leave Discord, we do plan to begin ensuring resilience in the case that we lose Discord as a platform or recognize it is no longer tenable to continue using it. A directive was thus issued to Officers of the Court to begin, where able and applicable, to review what is currently executed or stored on our server that is better entrusted to our forums. This of course means that yes, we have begun auditing our internal processes across the board in order to lean on the forums more than previously. These changes are already beginning to take shape and others will come in time.
For some, like our passionate group of roleplay participants, there may be little impact especially given that our lovely participants of the map already use the forums extensively to compose their stories together and largely use the Discord for communicating instead. For others, like our diplomats, this will likely mean the need for registering an account on our forums to continue retaining embassy and consular access to Sparkalia and potentially looking to the forums for some of our updates.
The aim of this project is of course not to be more burdensome and ornery, merely protective of the wonderful community that has been carefully cultivated here. A final step in this will be of course learning what alternatives to Discord there are should we ever find the need to pull the plug and the best route to take. The hope of this project is that we will be protected and hopefully merely be a safety net.
If there are any questions regarding this project, feel free to reach out to me or reply to this on our forum.
Sincerely,
Lia
