I’m still curious as to whether past dynasties that danced around this by not using the specific term “private message” (eg. “privately informing the Announcer”, “may privately urge the Narrator”, “privately remind every Live Runner”) were doing that deliberately to allow Discord communication, or were just phrasing it naturally without even considering that there was any kind of relevant appendix entry.

If it’s the former, that suggests we maybe don’t need the keyword at all, if we’ve been getting along fine with plain English.

If it’s the latter, we should maybe broaden this keyword to explicitly cover any communication that’s being undertaken “privately”.

Every time I had to creating wording for private communication, I always danced around the term “private message” specifically to allow Discord communication. I would be in favor of removing the keyword. The only reason I didn’t suggest it before is that I was under the (perhaps incorrect) assumption that the keyword had accumulated some history behind its existence and there would not be much appetite for its removal.

I think I would prefer to keep something, if only to cover the edge cases where someone tries something silly like “I wrote it on some paper and threw it into the ocean, private communication!”

Surely still some silliness under this wording, though. “I scheduled an email to you which will arrive in a month’s time.”

“reasonable expectation that the receiver would see it” creates the option for a player to render some comms actions impossible (maybe in the middle of some big Imperial atomic) by announcing to the group that they will be deleting all private messages unread for the remainder of the dynasty. There should be a baseline that blog DMs are always considered to get through, if we go down this road.

Okay, I’m convinced. Edited to a flat removal.

Removal seems a bit dangerous to me. “I wrote it on some paper and threw it into the ocean, private communication!” feels rather unlikely but “I send you an email using the email address attached to your profile but you don’t actively check that email so you didn’t realize it” seems like the kind of problem that could still pop up

@Clucky that seems like the sort of flimsy purely-philosophical scam that Kevan was talking in the discord about not being worried about (and i agree)! imo, most scams only hold water if they’re supported by either the rules or common understandings of natural language, and that scam wouldn’t be supported by either — writing something on a piece of paper and then destroying it is hardly communicating at all, let alone to anyone!

Writing to a known-to-be-unchecked email address would be flimsy as a scam if done intentionally, but is something a new player might try to do unwittingly if they weren’t on Discord and hadn’t noticed or understood the blog’s private message system, and were trying to work out what “privately inform” means.

This does seem a remote possibility, though. And mistakes made in good faith are unlikely to be critical, and are easier to recover from.