Project "FiveM" Discord Guild "Disabled"

FiveM Discussion
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In the past some regular members maintained a spreadsheet with common issues that were not related to outright crashes (you know that famous three letter words). However, we stopped doing that after a day or two as it was obvious that most issues people did have were already known to have a fix. We did share this list with the elements, but I doubt they got good info out of it.

That’s when we started making all those commands if I remember correctly. Unfortunately most of the issues didn’t have any easily explainable and 100% “here you go” fix. This was compensated with the %disableav and %curl commands (and others) but that still contains info where a user should at least know what’s going on on their PC. You don’t want to know the amount of times I helped someone through team viewer and it was just a simply solved by using a VPN or disabling (or adding exclusions) their AV even though they said they already did.

I also recall a couple of surveys that were performed through the FiveM main menu client that asked for things like “what do you like the most/least about FiveM”, “What would you like to see”. And most answers were super non informative things like “less crashes” “fix fivem”.

Discord is/was also an “information hub” and for me at times was very helpful (and I bet for others too), but from a moderation point of view it was sometimes unbearable. I don’t get how huge guilds like the Fortnite handle outages but the amount of unfiltered garbage that was sprouted during FiveM service issues was immense. Users couldn’t even read a sticky that was literally the first thing they see if they’d read? I guess one should argue large guilds, that are tied to some service, are run by organizations that have a staff team that are professional community managers. Not to mention backed by millions of $.

Sometimes I don’t think players understand the magnitude of FiveM and the impact it has on the gaming community, especially GTA V. It’s a concurrent top 20, sometimes top 10 game on Steam for godsakes. If FiveM wouldn’t have to watch out for any mishaps that could get it shutdown by R*, I bet it would’ve been its own registered company now with a good amount of generating revenue that is used to hire actual professionals.

Long rant oops.

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Thanks for the detailed explanation, much appreciated.

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We understand how difficult moderation is for such a large guild, however is it possible for discord to return for patrons only? As that would result in 0 to very little moderation and still provide the benefits most of us use the FiveM Discord for?

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Even a lot of patrons seem unable to use search features and channels specifically designed for getting information about common issues (i.e. former #quick-support). A lot of them also seem to think they’re entitled to support.

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Just a thought…
Maybe push out a beta chat feature with discourse, Since it has the ability for a chatroom maybe push a beta out and only have select “Trust Levels” and or “Groups” have permission to use it and slowly add more people to it as you get more moderators this is pretty much best of both worlds.

  • People can ask for support and get answers in a quick timely manner (Nothing against anyone just people want instant results as humans and would be more keen to ask in their and get a quick response without flooding the forums with the same issues everyone always has)
  • Ability to moderate automatically, have keywords, as well as censor links to prevent spam in chat. (Considering hopefully for the first while it would be in beta this could ease into what to censor what not to)
  • Have a requirement level of the user (How long they’ve been apart of the forums, possibly Post amount requirement before typing in any of the chats on the forum.
  • Requires no 3rd party programs for the community member to download at all and simple easy access for staff to manage all in the same place.

I mean yea ideally this would be good, and I understand the amount of users that actively use the forums are ALOT and pushing this out to the public would cause the chat to be a mess of chaos but like I stated maybe a beta stage would be easier until all the moderation and censoring has been done. just a suggestion but in my opinion why not use the platform you guys are already using why use a 3rd party ya know. :slight_smile: but curious what the Mods and Elements think about this. what could be so wrong with that? I can show you like 3 discourse plugins that are available for such a thing.

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The only issue with that is the fact that moderation would be very difficult and quite unorganized as well.

Better off just using Telegram as it’s WAY more organized and moderation is much easier.

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Forums aren’t intended to have chat rooms, though. I like having things threaded and in places where they don’t get lost. Chat rooms are typically just shit posts half of the time and don’t provide anything meaningful. The forum should stick as a proper place for discussions and support receiving.

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Hello!

I wanted to clear up some confusion about the behavior and purpose of discord_vigilante/DiscordSidekick. discord_vigilante is a project we started with the intent of adding rich presence to third party games which don’t directly implement the Rich Presence SDK. The idea was that we would write scripts (or contract other people to write scripts) for the most popular games on Discord, with the possibility of maybe opening the repository up to contributions from the public once we had some confidence in it. I’m making that repository public so that you can read the documentation we wrote there: https://github.com/discordapp/discord_vigilante/. You’ll notice we never actually got around to using it. I’ll also provide a short explanation here:

First, the distinction between discord_vigilante and DiscordSidekick: discord_vigilante is a shared library (we call these “native modules” internally) that exposes functionality to our JavaScript application, and DiscordSidekick is the helper process that it launches.

The discord_vigilante module only exports two functions (you should be able to verify this in the disassembly, if you want): hasSidekick and spawnSidekick.

hasSidekick just returns whether the provided game/application ID has an associated Lua script (it just checks for the existence of a scripts\{application_id}.lua file.)

spawnSidekick will launch DiscordSidekick_x86/x64.exe (depending on the architecture of the target game process) and pass it the process ID of the game, and it’s application ID.

When DiscordSidekick launches, it loads the sidekick script into a sandboxed Lua environment (if you’re familiar with how Lua works, it only has access to the base, coroutine, table, string, math, and utf8 libraries. We also remove the dofie, loadfile, and load functions.) It also adds four functions (Read, Find, GetModuleInfo) for reading data from the game’s process memory.

Periodically, the sidekick will call the script’s get_presence function to ask the script to read rich presence information from the game process. If the script returns presence information, sidekick updates your rich presence using the discord-rpc library (see https://github.com/discordapp/discord-rpc).

Notably, it is not possible for the sidekick script to communicate with the outside world in any way, other than through the rich presence information it returns to DiscordSidekick. That information is only used by DiscordSidekick to publish rich presence updates.

Admittedly, the name was a poor choice (the idea being it’s “vigilante rich presence”) that perhaps makes the module look more sinister than it actually is, but hopefully this explanation is enough to assuage your concerns.

Regarding the Spotify pausing issue (which looks like it was discussed elsewhere/has since been deleted maybe?), this was something Spotify asked us to implement as part of our integration, and it’s implemented by making an API request to Spotify’s servers. We do not interact with your desktop Spotify client, and we do not send this pause request unless you’ve linked your Spotify account with Discord.

I think that addresses all of the concerns I’ve seen raised in the thread, but please let me know if I missed something. I’m also happy to answer any further questions if you have them.

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Right. That would explain why the RPC interop SDK is linked in there - it could’ve been it had some other IPC purpose, so this was slightly dismissed.

Correct. I didn’t directly try checking the native module since the V8 module API leads to a tad ugly disassembly - this analysis might’ve been a bit… rushed out of other annoyances.

In theory the JS application host code could’ve dropped one of these - the restrictions already seemed odd and like an unfinished package; but the plans of course weren’t directly clear.

Correct, I already noticed io and os were missing. Exfiltrating user data would still only have relied on stdout; but so would the ‘legitimate’ purpose of integrating with existing applications to get state.

And this interaction also wasn’t directly visible in the disassembly at first glance.

This is understandable, yes. Our initial concern was the module was some attempt at either a targeted data exfiltration module or a sneaky unfinished anticheat module (we’ve seen commercial game publishers come up with… weirder anticheat modules) that wasn’t mentioned anywhere in policies/ToS.

Understandable, again. It might’ve been someone accidentally signed in to the SSO service somewhere, or the ‘automatically detect other apps’ triggered such an SSO session?

If this only occurs using the Spotify Connect service and not some local socket, would removing the authorization on both sides be sufficient to stop this control ability?

Yes, that’s indeed fine in that regard. There were some other concerns that led us to this attempted switch decision, but that’s mainly the lack of more ‘advanced’ built-in anti-spam functionality and/or community bots that are ‘trustworthy’ enough to give access to a guild with >100K users to mitigate certain common scenarios that some individuals sadly have to commit to.

We’ll take this post in mind when it comes to our decision making process, and again would consider it a great loss as well to see a larger already-established community on Discord disappear over some tiny potentially-correctable issues, compounded by effort needing to be put into correctly setting up and maintaining a newer community on a different platform.

As a final note, are there any recommendations as to third-party moderation tools to fill the gaps in current moderation functionality that come with a set of best practices, and is there any ‘easier’ point to get in touch with regards to platform concerns than the whole support email/contact form pipeline? One large point in decision making was that we felt generally ‘ignored’ compared to many smaller (and larger) guilds for more ‘mainstream’ interests/focus groups when it comes to having a point of contact, and that most (if not all) recent features have been focused on the needs of smaller communities.

If any information needs to be discussed that is not considered appropriate for a forum discussion, I can be reached at the pr@fivem.net alias, which should only be monitored by me.

-- deterministic_bubble/hydrogen
FiveM project lead

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Forum trust levels should convert over to the discord server. Discord is used many communities and it’s not that bad, some things might not be the best but I think it would be cool if there was a community poll to keep the discord or not. Thanks

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There are 600k users on this forum and 100k users in the Discord. Discord would certainly not like such a high amount of requests and would certainly end up being rate limited. Seems a good idea but likely impossible with the huge player base.

Not really fair because a lot of people misuse the Discord and post irrelevant stuff in there which is not what it is intended for. If the project lead decides to shut down the Discord for reasons, that’s completely allowed. Not to mention the fact that the place is barely controllable, even with as much moderators as there is. The auto-moderation from Snaily recently has helped, though.

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Maybe it should be locked down so only people with patron access can talk in it, or people with regular rank on forums & above aswell. Could be better for moderation, and then they need to pay for access, or be active on here and helping people.

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Trust level based access has been discussed before but as far as I know, was not able to be implemented at the time. Although, this was before the days of Snaily so it may be something worth looking into again.

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what have I missed?

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Life :rofl:
Maybe just read above

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that’s pretty much what there doing when they lock the channels lol only patreon member/ nitro boosters member which may I add are all payed services… surprised they don’t turn fivem /redm in to a paid service kinda like a pay to play with a monthly sub

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Good idea, then we don’t have to deal with muppets such as yourself.

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