Discord received funding from Tencent, this is even stated in Wikipedia. No money, particularly from China, comes without strings attached. For me that is enough to avoid their centralized data-collection platform. You also fundamentally cannot trust auto-updating proprietary software not to spy. Their platform has a store, the client also scans your filesystem for installed games and programs you run. There's no way that isn't or will not be collected. They also obviously store every message and file you send to it, and you cannot GDPR them off their servers (note for your data request, this behavior is arguably against GDPR, don't trust them). They also basically require your phone number. Etc. etc. The platform is moderated and ran by completely incompetent people, they feel obliged to educate their userbase on social issues and other political stuff. There's lots of controvercy about their moderators and support. It's just not a nice platform. That site isn't just FUD some lunatic dreamed up. I don't want my personal information floating around in unnecessary places. Discord in particular is one of the last companies I'd trust if my wall of text didn't make that clear. Discord is just repackaged Chromium with nodejs APIs, search up Electron or press CTRL+SHIFT+I. It's far from light. Either way you'd be running two web browsers, double the overhead! I have a R5 1600, RX480, 8GB, plenty powerful normally. BeamNG is rather poorly optimized in certain areas and may use quite a bit of memory so 8GB can start to run out (zram usually deals with this fine). Add the half a gig Discord uses and there's no hope. I am not planning on upgrading my ram, nothing I do requires more, especially since a lot of that 8GB is actually usable since my operating system uses around 100 megabytes itself. Also since I use Linux, I'd have to run Discord thru Wine which would add even more overhead, if it even runs. Good alternative platfrom is Matrix. Particularly for OP, this may solve your identification problem. Great protocol and actually a good chat platform.
When it comes to today's modern games, 8gb of ram is barely cutting it. You also never specified the speed of the ram. Lower speeds will mean you would require more ram for the same applications. Especially with BeamNG. The RX 480 is quite an old card. Nearly 5 years old. After running the card over those years, the performance will diminish as well. That's another reason you're likely having problems running multiple applications at once. Nonetheless, If you don't want to use discord, you really don't have to. But you can't sit here and whine and complain that the devs decided to develop this mod on a software. Besides. What data do you really want to hide from companies?
I have no beef with most of your post, but this: It's none of your business what he wants to hide from companies, or why. Privacy is not a crime, it's an integral part of a healthy, free society.
Nothing really (pls not my calculator history! Me and my bf were just playing around with the calculator I swear we were not doing anything bad.)
Take your tinfoil hat off. China has a terrible government with terrible data collection laws, but just because Tencent gave Discord some money doesn't mean that your data is being touched by the CCP. 8GB is only barely enough RAM in 2020. If you've got a low to mid-range PC, don't whine when intensive programs use a lot of resources. WTF is Matrix? Nobody beyond preachy, tinfoil hat wearing geeks use software of that obscure nature, and you can't expect everyone to jump ship to some inacessible program because you're paranoid about your data. This sentence is so monumentally out of touch that you're probably a double amputee. The point is, if you're super obsessed with privacy and download every single privacy-centric hipster app you can find, good. But don't get all pissy when people decide to use the bigger, more acessible platform instead.
"Cool mod but it uses Discord and Discord is always objectively bad because China and privacy and stuff therefore the whole mod is bad only because it needs Discord" Nice logic here, if you want your data privacy then just don't use this mod and don't discourage everyone from using it and act like the fact that it uses Discord ruins the whole thing. I think the reason why they chose Discord is because a lot of people are familiar with it already and this decision has nothing to do with any Chinese data stealing stuff. Also you can just get Discord only to log in and never use it at all, they would have nothing to steal then.
Uh, personal data and basically data you wanna hide from other companies. This question is just like asking "Why would you wanna keep your house address to yourself?". Cause people have personal information or data that nobody (especially online) needs to know about. Imagine letting the Chinese government know what your birth date is or even worse, your phone number. Do you know how horrible that could be? Seriously? What the hell, man?
Also, to bluehawk. Sorry if my last post sounded rude. You make a good point in a lot of your post, but the last part is just a bruh moment.
None of this is true. Your whole post is frankly awful. Your statement about privacy is so bad there's even a Wikipedia article about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Against_the_argument There is very legitimate reasons to avoid that platform. This is only true in the Windows world. Your software ecosystem is the worst there is. Developers nor users care about efficiency. Just Discord takes 3-5 times the memory my whole operating system does, I find it sad people think this is acceptable. I sort of can't comprehend what sort of developer thought this was a good idea, huge red flag to me. The mod seems centralized and closed source, I strongly disagree with these decisions too. And so should you, prevents people from contributing and improving it. The Element web client (developed by the Matrix team themselves) is an excellent, easy to use client, superior to Discord in many ways. The platform is completely open, e2e encrypted, decentralized general communications platform. Matrix is even used by the government of France. If there is a successor for IRC, this is it.
I would be interested to see the outcome of this since we know some of their staff are playing our mod haha --- Post updated --- Just took a quick brief look and has definitely caught my interest. Will be looking over it shortly depending on time i have spare. Tbh BeamNG.drive also uses CEF (which is also Chromium (Chromium Embedded Framework) for those who do not know) Working in Cyber Security & also being a masters student doing work around data security i can only disagree with your comment there. I chose Discord because of the amount of people who were likely to be using it. If you do have a suggestion to what platform we can use instead then I am open to suggestions. We considered steam but were at a wall due to needing a specific key from them which we could not get due to not being a game. The only other option was to build our own from scratch however we deemed this to be more of a kill on the view of the project as to anyone interested in security this would have meant them putting details into yet another system and we would have required every user to have done this because that is how we deal with the banning / management of users issue. Meaning we can reserve player names for people of importance like Youtubers, Staff and so on without the issue of impersonation.
I can understand wanting to protect things that could potentially put your life, or your family's life at risk, or even just for your personal comfort, but I'm 90% sure this person uses Amazon. Amazon, as well as google, apple, samsung,etc. all collect data. The difference is how they use them. Discord's full privacy policy is here: Privacy Policy | Discord I can't be 100% sure what discord does with our data, as they aren't necessarily 100% clear about it, but I have my high doubts that discord sells it to the Chinese government. There is some info here:Discord Company Profile - Office Locations, Competitors, Revenue, Financials, Employees, Key People, Subsidiaries | Craft.co But I can't be sure if the information is legit. Here, it is stated that Tencent Holdings is one of the investors. This does not necessarily mean that discord agreed to sell the user's information to Tencent. As I've been saying, there's no clear statement saying that discord sells data to the Chinese government. If you can share some proof with valid sources, I'll gladly eat my words. Otherwise, Let's please end this conversation here. This thread is supposed to be about the BeamMP mod. We've been getting severely off-topic.
First, thanks for responding, I did end up being rude. If I understood your current system right, you're relying completely on security by obscurity. I suspect your authentication is completely client-side, and that is the least secure way to do it. There are simple architectures that allow for anonymous users, secure username reservation and authentication, with completely free and open source client and server software that cannot be cheated. It is however required you have some sort of user system (or multiple!), one isn't hard to build. If you really struggle to find someone who is willing to do this, I've built systems like these in the past (not for production use tho, for my own hobby projects). I will however require that the mod is eventually made FOSS again. Also for what reason you want to be able to run a global blacklist? Are you going to ban people for reckless driving? Let individual server owners run their servers like they want! I'm painfully aware of this, it's one of the biggest issues I have with BeamNG.drive. Not only is it hilariously slow and painful to use, it has massive stability issues, so many people complain about "UI failed to respond in time" etc. Now, Windows has that issue constantly, imagine what a pain in the ass it is to get running reliably in Wine! BeamNG developers are funny, they've made a physics engine decades ahead the competetion, but cannot write passable user interface!! You don't know anything about me or what I use. Also, even if I did theoretically use those services, I consider them problematic, and that problem isn't solved by using more of such services. You have given permission for Discord to sell you data by using their platform, do not think they wont eventually do it, if they haven't already. If you're not paying, you're the product. Either way, there are alternative platforms (eg my love Matrix) that let you chat with your friends without all of these issues Discord has. There's no reason to defend a corporation like this.
We are perfectly capable of building a user system (I actually do that for my full time job ) the trouble was around having yet another system people would have to register on potentially. We wanted the system to be as easy as possible for people to just pick up and go and most gamers seem to have discord so that is why we chose it rather than building yet another system people would have to put information into. It is not to moderate other peoples servers but more our own or if people were trying to be malicious within our system. Other than for self preservation it just gives a system for people to have their usernames secured and roles / name tags handled in a easy manner. For the average user there isn't even any data stored anywhere. Even if someone wanted to the worst they can get from the system is a discord id and a username. Feel free to direct message me on the matter and maybe we will be able to come up with a good alternative
Please read the last paragraph. I was never invalidating your opinions. I was trying to get you to stop talking about what could THEORETICALLY happen with the data, as it is just that. A theory. There have been no sources stated as to what discord is actually doing with our data, as their privacy policy isn't 100% clear to me. Also regarding the CEF in beamNG, I have NEVER seen anybody complain, nor have issues myself, with the in-game browser, and the in-game repository. Again. Giving some sources to back up your statements would make you seem more credible, but as it is to me, you just seem to be pulling stuff out of your a$$. Of course, this is simply my take on this whole situation, but I don't see any sources at all to back up what you are saying. I could sit here and argue that "Discord does not sell our data", but I can't because I don't have any credible sources that can back up that statement.
