As a community member, I am concerned and curious about why the Project “FiveM” Discord guild is currently “Disabled”. I’m sort of confused what the problem is (and yes I’ve read the post in #announcements).
I would appreciate some further elaboration on the problem, as it seems that the administration is being a bit dramatic in that statement, in my opinion. The FiveM community never voted for this, and as a result, this unplanned action is widely regarded as a punishment to the members, and restricting them for no apparent reason.
I can recall a couple other times where the guild has been suddenly restricted, such as this one on 09/05/2019:
This is just another instance of complaining that a problem exists, without any evidence of such issue, and then punishing/restricting members (even patrons as of 10/17/2019) because some Element(s) got frustrated. Not to mention that the whole “We’ll keep you all updated ” never happens.
I’m not sure how there are any problems with the guild or with Discord in general, even with the size of the community in mind. There are many other guilds that have 200k+ or even 300k+ members and still manage to make things work without any “alternative to Discord”.
An official response from the administration would be nice, but I would also like to see what the rest of the community thinks of this (since clearly the Elements don’t, or they would have said something).
Any ‘official’/pseudo-official guilds of such tend to
a) not offer support through such, and
b) be run by a dedicated, often full-time employed, community management team.
We don’t want to stop doing a (as people would just vomit their crap elsewhere), and don’t have b at all.
As to this final straw - the reason is very clearly stated: Discord thinks it has the power to control every other app on the users’ PC as they desire, not as the user desires, even if not enabling any explicit ‘integration’ between those apps it a) vomits a ‘DiscordHook64.dll’ all over the users’ system processes, b) has some really weird shady ‘discord vigilante’ or whatever process (don’t have an install at hand to check the current name of this module) capable of running in the background and c) talks to particular other apps using an undocumented local socket to enforce some made-up policy to allow an ‘integration’ which was never opted into.
There are many, many other reasons for us to not use Discord in any official or endorsed capacity, which would take infinite amounts of time to list, but for the time being, we’re not going to do so.
Mind you, the guild wasn’t created by any conscious decision of the Collective - it just existed before we took over and nobody had the balls to abandon it so far. It also never should’ve been seen as any official/formal channel, we already have the forums for any data that ought to be official and/or non-ephemeral.
… some additional info on discord vigilante we just got: it’s basically a programmable (downloads and runs Lua scripts from the Discord API) minimal RAT which can read arbitrary process memory and send it someplace.
It’d make sense if Discord’s privacy policy mentioned this, like the privacy policy of most anticheat companies… but hey guess what it doesn’t.
(_con.exe is just the file with the ‘subsystem bit’ changed so that it runs in the console - nothing else was edited; 36408 is the process ID for FiveM that happened to be running)
scripts/meh.lua script for testing:
local b, l = GetModuleInfo('FiveM_GTAProcess.exe')
print(b, l)
print(Read(b + 0x18D93D0, 48))
Now, why would Discord include such a module?
Also, mind you it’s called ‘vigilante’:
A person who considers it their own responsibility to uphold the law in their neighborhood and often does so summarily and without legal jurisdiction.
Source: Wiktionary
Evidently, Discord considers it their responsibility to uphold a made-up law in ‘their neighborhood’ (users’ PCs) and doing such arbitrarily, without any right to do so in the first place (‘without legal jurisdiction’), or any ability to appeal such (see ‘summarily’), and they admit it by calling this module appropriately: the ‘vigilante’ module.
As a developer on FiveM I can for sure say, I feel the pain they are going threw, Honestly with everyone always having issues (User error) and going to support constantly asking what the issue is with FiveM Ect… Despite what people believe the FiveM Community is not ran by hundreds of Moderators to my knowledge the I only know of about 6 moderators moderating a forum/discord of over 40,000+ people,
I for one have released scripts on this forum and to this day get contacted and DM’d because of issues and problems, Which isn’t a big deal but when its Constant for me and my releases have over 20K views and being used by hundreds of servers, I can only imagine how constant it is for the discord, keep in mind FiveM isn’t a big entity or a big company, gaming studios usually hire people to manage their community ect… and those are usually groups of about 10-15 ppl, managing a community forum/discord, I understand peoples frustration with FiveM just shutting down their discord but other users have already found alternative places to ask their questions and get responses, so I don’t understand the big deal. I think the issue here is Discord allowing access to things that will result in the end user being at risk.
My question is, why is FiveM concerned with these “issues”? None of this is specific to the FiveM guild, right? So why should the members of the discord, who don’t care about these “issues” be punished or restricted? I’m just confused here.
If there is a problem with Discord, then I’m sure the developers would love to hear some feedback. https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Why do you consider it a fundamental right to talk with/about FiveM in an official place on one particular service? Do you complain when you can’t reach Microsoft’s Windows development support over Discord, or can’t reach your favorite open source project over Matrix, too?
Unless services start federating again you’ll always be ‘forced’ to use one service, and in our case that’s not Discord anymore (and bridging is impossible due to limitations on Discord’s side).
Try https://t.me/s/cfxre. It’ll open up properly in a bit but here’s an early announcement.
Correct. And I agree, this could be a problem. Perhaps someone should take that up with Discord, rather than “disabling” the entire guild for no reason, when this potential problem has nothing to do with FiveM or that guild specifically.
Discord is unlikely to do anything about it. It’s likely they wouldn’t even care. It’s like them removing the game store, in the sense of people complained about it, but they did it anyway.
So simple question is, what now? No steam, No discord. How we supposed to hold community by the current META of usage in the gaming/VOIP community. Just curious why you mind them changing settings. That’s not like they’re digging inside your computer, right? or am I wrong?
Right. But the part that still remains unacknowledged is that this is not specific to the FiveM guild. So why should FiveM take any action, or even care at all.
No but it affects users of Discord, which the Collective feel this shouldn’t be allowed (and I agree as well). Also do you feel comfortable with a program changing other program settings without you saying it’s okay?
As to this ban evading individual who’s been spamming clown emoji everywhere too,
a) I’ve never used Discord ‘screen sharing’ functionality, and
b) it was in a one-to-one call, no music was being broadcast, sung along to or even talked along to at all - I just like listening to background music at low volume while explaining things to others; but apparently explaining for 30 seconds (note: not using PTT, using properly-adjusted voice activation: in a one-to-one call you easily hit 30 seconds of talking) is considered ‘broadcasting music’ and even though I never signed in to my Spotify account on Discord, they still feel the need to ‘control’ an application they don’t have any right to control.
If they need support, then the forum is the best place to go… Discord tends to be chaotic and messages get lost in the large amount of spam-help-related messages.
What else would you expect when there’s still only 2-3 individuals ‘actively’ running this project and, and all of them get increasingly busy with ‘life’ and increasingly frustrated with the community’s… behavior over time?
Again, we try our best, but sometimes ‘our best’ is not good enough.
Telegram is open right now and due to the currently <100 members, your message is very likely to be seen and replied to by an element. If you want to speak to one, make a bit of an effort to do so…
” never happens.