- Enjoy the cruise. Unplug a bit.

- Cleveland uses enl.io as well, but I'll only leave this room if asked. I realize the conflict of interest...

- I don't like enl.io. so there's that

- I have never heard of it

- It uses a very limited comm scraper to confirm that a player is enl before granting them access to a GroupMe or TG chat. It is a scraper.

- Cleveland was already set up with it before I started playing, and we've yet to find a suitable replacement process to verify new players. It's on my to do list for sure, but it's a long list

- It can do more than that

- That's all we use it for. I admittedly haven't really investigated much else

- New locals? We message them in faction comms, then take them to hangouts. From there invite them to an in-person meetup and bring them into slack if they want to be connected. I don’t know if anyone in nashville is even on .io

- We don't have the player investment or availability to meet every newbie

- It's basically me

- I'll jump out, don't want to jeopardize what you guys are doing
.....21.10.2017 09:44:44, Julie M, doozle, CLE USA: >>left group<<

- So what is the plan here now?

- I'm in enl.io too, nominally. I'm comfortable with making the distinction between that and what is on RIOT, or apologizing for my ignorance and involvement if it's "outed" and my name is released.

- I would like to see at least one more update on the Whistle Blower story. The narrative and quotes that we have tell an important part of the story and should be shared.

- A story in a general or gaming news outlet would be great.

- But I know Erich was an important resource for this, and some of the people who have left were vital to moving those efforts forward.

- Well Erich & Brian left, I know Jemstar has done some work on the site. Who else can step up on that?

- I'm operating atm, but will check in asap

- I'm still in. I just don't know what I can do. And I don't know what else I'm willing to do beyond the scope of the initial project.

- I'm also willing to leave if my nominal involvement and likely appearance in the enl.io, poptart, or cactusbot databases would be a problem (or the anomaly tools that I'm not going to disavow or leak), but I'm not bowing out unless I'm asked to do so.

- Gah. I should stop talking. I was not trying to say .io makes you dirty. I frankly don’t know what it does full well first hand. Was just trying to say that it’s probably one of those things that could die easily

- Don't stop talking, Ana

- .io is the thing that does the !met thing, right?

- We don't use it here, but I signed up because when I was in Atlanta someone wanted to mark me as met. For points or something lol I really have no clue

- "Niantic, please clarify your rules."

- Guess I'd better to get out of it

- The cognitive dissonance is caused by a poor definition of what falls within or outside "the spirit of the game."

- The company chooses to define this in a nebulous fashion that people can take a zillion different ways, while trying to stay within the personal interpretation of those rules.

- Instead of self-flaggelating, or, worse, laying into one another, consider the conditions that are causing the issue.

- The fuzziness of what falls within the bounds of fair play cause these rifts. As near as I can tell, anyhow.

- Thank you for this. As much as I sometimes take "burn it all" as a motto, I'm not here to burn other people here as witches. I continue to think that our focus for the beginning of next week should be on getting a sensible statement out of Niantic.

- Regarding a "sensible statement:" Would it be enough for them just to specifically say that players agree that they will not run their own servers for the scraping of game data? I don't know how that all works but I know that part of the RIOT problem is that they're using their own servers to do the thing

- I'll be honest in that so much of what has been broached in here in the last 12 hours deals with things I am unfamiliar with. Not sure if I'm isolated from it or just naive.

- Agreed. I have heard of ENL.io but had no idea what it was, and I hadn't heard of any of the other stuff until conversations in TGR and here. I think I'm both isolated and naive, and I'm good with that.

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to get Niantic to make a clear statement on what's black and white and I will help in any way I can to get that accomplished.

- Did I read in here at some point that the Disaster bunch is pro-black arts?

- Who?

- There's a whole slew of agents with a Disaster-something naming convention. I think they are all connected, and I think someone (@Aneristic?) said they were into some of the bad things.

- I'm wondering for V vouching purposes, because now I have to take that into consideration. Sigh.

- Yes. I have met some of that group but not in a capacity to know anything about what they do or do not use or how they play. I do have vouches/have given vouches to a few based on good interactions.

- The Disaster group in Chicago/IL area has been stated for doing some shady practices I believe it was.

- I heard this as well but can't confirm any of it

- I think it was mentioned here and in NA VL4

- Okay, thanks guys

- I'm going to posit that this group has hit its natural end of life.

- We have a pretty serious problem with people leaking content. Direct quotes are getting passed into smoky rooms full of people who don't like what we have to say.

- I don't know who's doing it, and I don't really care. It's not an interesting problem.

- But I think we're putting people in awkward positions about having to decide whether to stay or not, and I'm not comfortable with that.

- Can you kill it or do we need to leave before that can happen?

- We're also getting direct quotes passed into us.

- you mean these quotes in here coming back to you?

- It's become clear that things that are being said here are being directly handed off. Based on the pattern, I suspect by screenshot.

- thats not cool

- Again, it's fine. I'm not on a witch hunt. I just think we've exceeded the reasonable threshold for that kind of thing, and it's time for this swarm to disassemble.

- based on what?

- It's not a bad thing, but perhaps a necessary thing.

- makes sense, and i agree.

- Erich forwarded something said in another room back to here. I didn't blow the whistle on that; one of the ways in which I maintain my balance between being distinctly anomaly OG and hanging out in this circle is by respecting everyone's right to privacy.

- That said, Semi is correct.

- Many disasters are in Chicago, and I would definitely NOT lump them all together

- I'd prefer not to go down that long road. I hope it's enough to say that I've pieced enough together to feel that we've edged as closely up against problematic as we safely can.

- I'm sorry if that's unsatisfying.

- I'm sad. We had work to do

- Okay, that's fair and I respect that. But I have to say that makes me question doing anything important with the possibility that it could happen again. Chris fucking got doxxed.

- Swarms are temporary by nature. Part of the job is knowing when to dissolve, and how to reform.

- I have some disaster insight if anyone wants to dm me . I don't want to slander them as a group. They are not a cohesive group.

- I definitely will, thank you

- Swarm Dissolve 10/21/2017 7:00 PM Eastern

Grab whatever history you feel like you need to gang, this swarm has hit EOL. We did a good job, and we'll do more of them in the future.

Everything Will Be Fine.
.....21.10.2017 13:12:31, Charlie Arnold: >>unsupported service message type: messageActionPinMessage<<

- This is scary and sad :(. But agreed, maybe best to end this. We do still have work to do, but we did a hell of a lot and I'm proud to have worked with all of you on this 💚

- Lori is so right. Love you awesome nerds

- Thanks for letting me mostly observe and learn. You are an incredible group of peeps.

- Glad to be of some help. Take care folks.
.....21.10.2017 13:22:22, matt - deaf1 - maine: >>left group<<

- Thanks for letting me be part of it, even if life and work made me mostly useless.
.....21.10.2017 13:23:16, Mantispidae - west tn: >>left group<<

- Yeah. Same. I'm the mantispidae of Rochester.

- Lol. I made grammar edits and a Reddit post. Not the pinnacle of usefulness here either

- I'm upset and scared that things were being leaked intentionally, but I'm on board for future work with this. At least for now.

- Word is that everyone in this room got removed from Bovine Ethology. Can people check and confirm?

- I think I left it a couple weeks ago

- I left it a while back.

- I haven't had an active installation for about 6 months now?

- around the time they switched to slack iirc.

- What’s that?

- circle the wagons!

- 😂

- A restricted access toolkit. It has a lot of functions, I don't know them all. I coveted the one that lets you pull total MU for a field construct with a single click, for a while.

- load up Yackety Sax

- but, eh. whatever. It's just bells and whistles.

- I haven't checked into it in a long minute, but its most interesting aspect IMO was that it demystified how MU is actually calculated, largely from user-submitted field data.

- Huh, that actually is vaguely interesting. Never heard of it before today

- Yeah. The shaky bit is the scraping for MU counts.

- Same

- This is distressing. I thought we had more trust in here than that.

- Is Tiernan a BE dev? I have no idea.

- I don't *think* so.

- I'd forgotten about that one. I knew about it but never sought access because the numbers never interested me beyond what popped up as the fields were established. I know it's scrapery but my impression was that it was a narrowly focused research project. I hope it's not shutting down but I get the worry.

- That's not a reasonable expectation. This is not solely a TGR group, and spinning it off of the main changed the nature and tenor of the conversation.

We brushed up against very hard topics about which people have very strong opinions.

Leaks were to be expected. Once they occurred, extraordinary reactions were to be expected.

- Much of the content from the room ended up facing D0gboy and Sarah New in real time. Foggy was talking about it. There was a lot of finger wagging and stern dadding. It was pretty humorous, tbh.

- I'm sure they'll read this too.

Fuck 'em.

- There's a big difference between talking about what was going on to the "wrong" people and leaking, and sharing screenshots. Maybe I should be mad. But I'm just sad and disappointed.

- It's just a reasonable expectation. People have competing loyalties and we can't all possibly share the same ideals on something as polarizing as this stuff.

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