Board Thread:Administrative Requests/@comment-24728342-20160321201257/@comment-27394867-20160325034619

Oppose- There are already mechanisms in place for users to report incidents when no mods is present. There is too the need for hosting the bot, which means that someone in the staff - preferably an admin since this bot will have admin rights - will need to keep a computer powered up 24/24 7/7 to keep the bot active. So far no one (that I know of) has the capability in the administrative staff to host such a bot. Plus even if there were to be an automated log, most other members of the staff have better things to do than to trudge through hours upon hours of mindless discussion without having been told that something happened, and if something happened, the people who witnessed the event may as well have taken screenshots to help hasten the process.

Plus, in the current version of the suggestion the logs will be kept publics. This raises several issues, not only privacy issues, but also witch hunting issues. To give context: witch hunting is for when people will look for anything to get others in trouble. The fact that it has already been said by a few chat users that they would gladly use the logs to seek for all the possible stuff and then send it to every staff members in the hope that one of the moderators do a ban on the targeted user does not make me confident that it will be used for good. Actually odds are it will be abused by users in the aim to get rid of people they don't like. This will only lead to more drama in a chat that has already too much of it. Once again, if something bad comes up while people are present, they are welcome to take screenshots and report the event, but people don't need the ability to go out hunting for the slightest of miss-steps to serve their agendas.

Another issue this brings up is that this will open the gate wide open for stalking of users. Why is that? Because the logs will be discoverable even via a simple Google search. So one could simply type  in Google to find all the logs in which A is implicated. That means that people who know users from outside the wikia could track them back here easily enough, and by reading these logs, easily learn a ton of information on this person. Which leads to my next point on "privacy" (for what it means in a public chat):

The publicness of the chat goes both way: Connected users see all the messages that are posted while they are connected and users who post messages know who else is connected and thus may choose what they want to discuss accordingly. They may also decide to broach some personal subject if they deem the connected users trustwhorthy and mature enough. This is the only form of "privacy" there currently is when discussing in main channel: the knowledge of who knows what you reveal. Basic information control. I know that some users do not want to talk of certain subjects when some other users are present, because they don't go well together. And that is fine. However having everything recorded and displayed to everyone will remove this ability to control information and will open a whole new can of worms.

All in all: I oppose this bot in the current form it is suggested. Looking back at it, the only way I could approve of it is if it was restricted to be viewed only by staff members, thus preventing most issues that I have raised.