So this is about 1 year?

I would kindly request you not to analyse peoples chat messages and then publish names out of that.

People did not consent to this and FAF could get in trouble for such a thing.

For things like who played against whom, replays are a bad start. Its easier to scrape the api and put it in a graph database (SQL is incredibly inefficient on this particular kind of queies)

@brutus5000 Arent all the replays and their chat histories searchable by username? Like, publicly?

Your camera doesn't stop you to film other people. Yet if you upload a video to YouTube that is not allowed.
Similar to IRC. You can keep a chat log of everything. But publishing it is a grey area.

Just to get this right:

• You are allowed to analyze this data for private purposes.
• You are allowed to share insights (e.g. see the funny cloud diagram of most used words in chat)
• You are not allowed to analyze single person behaviors or do a social rating and publish this (or basically do anything that relates back to a single user)

If I see it on the official FAF platform anywhere I will remove it and give that person a warning (or have moderation do it).
However, I cannot prevent you from publishing it elsewhere and if you do so and it falls back to us legally in worst case we'll have to take other measures whatever they might be (e.g. take down the replay vault as the final action if no other solution).

That's why I'm asking kindly for now. Just let's stay out of trouble and everybody can still have fun.

2 questions from an amateur:

1. Could you upload a bigger dataset as well?
2. Is there some webservice or database or something where I can translate userid to username easily?

The chat logs are already published in the vault so I don't see how this is any different tbh

You don't see a difference between browsing through chat logs manually and mass-profiling single users and publish the results?

I mean, it's just presenting public information in a more organized and readable way. It's the same difference as instead of looking at rating changes from each game in the replay vault there is a tool that shows you rating changes of each user every day and other similar tools eg. Kazbeks tool that allows you to see what map a specific user plays. Yes, in theory, it can be used in a harmful way, idk shaming someone for thrash-talking people or swearing at them or something.

Not to mention commands like top words that achieve the same thing but on a smaller scale.

How would FAF not be liable for some information issue here?

They :

1. have made replay information public for everyone
2. have made a parser to allow you to, uh, parse this information and even included instructions on how to use it

No idea about Europe but in the US there is a liability doctrine that doesn't let you just give a person tools, say "don't do that bad thing with the tools" and then wash your hands when you put zero effort into making it difficult to actually do said bad thing.

The only thing FAF hasn't done is give you step-by-step instructions on how to download replays from the vault to then use the tool.

I mean I don't get the issue in the first place, do people have legal ownership over the words they write in game or something? Wouldn't this already make the replay vault a "legal liability" unless you requested consent before publishing any replay?

Also, "You are not allowed to analyze single person behaviors or do a social rating and publish this (or basically do anything that relates back to a single user)" isn't this essentially what moderation does? Don't report results get reported back to the person that made the report? That's a publication of the analysis of a singular person's behavior.

I dont mean to have caused any legal trouble here, I was just interested in some data analysis. I should probably have started with things other than text chat first and gauge a response but text chat was the easiest for me to parse and make sense of.

from my perspective the information is already highly available in the replay vault publicly.

I do understand open source data can become sensitive when massed together.

Perhaps we need a disclaimer that replays and all information contained are available publicly? along with name history and rating history and anything else, ect? It has always been very obvious to me that they are but to others it may not be?

Legality aside there are clear morality concerns. A LOT of miscellaneous personal information is public on the internet if you try hard enough to search for it, but collecting and publishing it on public forums is not really ok. Argument that "it's already public" only stands up if you delve into technicalities. And if we had some certain moderator still active giving them this kind of idea would likely result into a mass mega ban or a big drama fest.

Everything is open assuming good will:
a) don't misuse the data
b) don't cause performance issues on the server

As long as everybody behaves we're good. If I see misuse I'll shut it down / make it unavailable to the public.
So far no lines where crossed, but I hope I made my point clear where the red lines are.

So @Nooby you did not cause any trouble yet. I just tried to proactively step in before things go in the wrong direction.