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Free Speech & Privacy |
Free Speech
We support freedom of speech and free exchange of ideas.
We do not restrict people's right to free speech but for practical reasons we must
impose some limits so that some chatters do not infringe upon the rights of other
chatters to enjoy the chat.
The point of the guidelines is to keep the chat friendly and clean enough so
the majority are not bothered by the content and to prevent activities intended
to disrupt the chatting of others.
Operators are asked to be flexible and to try and reason with errant users,
kick or ban as a last restort only, and to deal impartially with users
(not show favortism).
Respect for Privacy
We do not monitor or record private messages or what goes on in private rooms. There is no
commmand that Committee, Office Staff, or even the chat programmer can type to view anyones
messages. The only exception to this is if an Op does an /abuse report then the Committee can
see the private messages in both Ops buffer at the time of the /abuse report. This is just
to make sure one is not intentionally antagonizing the other. These abuse logs are private
and any Op using /abuse repeatedly to record private messages will be suspended.
Anything that looks like a network address is dumped to a log, this log is then dumped when
the server is restarted. This logging is only to check if someone is targeting Alamak users
to promote another chat. We figure if other chats are going to solicit for Ops they should
go pay for thier own ads on search engines and not use Alamak unfairly.
We also log kick, ban, unban and signoff messages by Operators to check for renegade Ops
who are abusing.
If the server is crashing will can switch into full debug to see what is being typed that
causes the server to crash. This is only for short periods of time as it fills up our log
fast and hasn't been needed in ages.
Other than these exceptions, Alamak does not monitor the chat.
All information other than what we monitor is kept in memory (no files) and persists only as
long as the server is running. Private messages persist in memory until they scroll off the
/mold log. They used to persist only 3 minutes but it's nice to be able to view your old
messages with /mold.
Private rooms hold only the last 60 lines typed and are destroyed after 5 minutes of
inactivity. We do not tap into others' conversations, see into private rooms or break
into private rooms that are locked for any reason.
We do not support this kind of invasion of privacy.
Chat Policy Changes
Some new services and improvements are developed by Alamak staff in response to requests by users.
Policy changes are almost always discussed with a randomly selected group of users and Ops
before they are introduced. The final decision balances the chat's needs and the user and
Ops response to the proposed changes.
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