@Jennkryst said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
How far back does the Ares opt-in go? Like if a week later someone else points something out and it clicks in your head, is that somewhere?
This depends on how the game has been configured. Ares game have a configurable retention period for things like channels and pages, after which they’re deleted. As long as you’re within the retention period you can report it.
@IoleRae said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
Ares’s ability to opt-in/consent on the spot to capture a particular problem is EXACTLY right. It is the correct level of trade between privacy and protection. I can say ‘please capture this in a way I cannot alter’ and send it up, without having to worry about my RL medical woe discussion going across a staff channel for lulz.
I am, unfortunately, going to ‘well, actually’ this. Because I love the Ares report feature, but by its very nature, it has to log all pages and channel messages and hold them on the server for it to work. If you can log into Ares and see something like a page, or a channel message, it’s currently stored on the server. While that data may not be immediately viewable to an admin, someone with direct access to the server (so, in most cases, the game runner or server admin) can access the database and view everything that’s within the retention period if they so desire.
And that’s not unique to the report feature - by the nature of Ares itself it needs to store that data so you can have offline pages, page history, channel history and so on.
Though, as I harp on about nearly every time the subject comes up, in any system where you’re sending data to a server, someone with access to the server is theoretically capable of capturing every input you send to it and logging it to disk for an unlimited period of time (including passwords, so don’t reuse your important ones!). So, essentially, don’t send anything to a game (whether it’s running on Penn, Evennia, Ares, w/e) that you wouldn’t want the server admin to theoretically see.
There is no securing against a bad actor in the case where the bad actor has control of one side of the conversation.