I don’t remember this discussion. The flexibility seems useful: that if a player is talking to the Emperor on Slack, they can throw a quick game action into the conversation rather than having to switch to PMs and say “I have sent you a PM”. It’s not like PMs are publicly archived at the end of each dynasty, or anything.

What’s the worst case? That the Emperor takes a “privately inform” action through Slack (or email or carrier pigeon) and the player, looking only at the blog, doesn’t immediately realise it’s happened?

Its not even just “immediately realize it happened”. Someone legit just didn’t think to log into the slack for a couple of days so could miss important communication.

There are also concerns with knowing for sure who is who on the slack, and with the slack’s lack of message permeance.

can see convo here: https://blognomic.com/archive/appendix_slacktivism#comments

I think I’ve always written and read “privately inform” (whether that’s as Emperor, or as a player taking some secret action by contacting the Emperor) as meaning “private blog message by default, but if you’re talking on Slack or having an actual coffee together or something and know that the other person is listening, it’s not illegal to inform them that way instead”.

Which maybe seems like a better definition to actually use? “Privately inform” is such a plain phrase that some players are going to assume it has no deeper game meaning, and go ahead and send an (illegal) Slack message. (Other dynasties have used “privately notify”, “contact” and “tell” in the past.)

per Kevan

most of my concern boils down to needing to check multiple places that you’ve gotten the message. you could have some dynasties where a player is required to privately inform another player of something but for whatever reason has an incentive for that communication not to be received.

to give the actual scenario now that its probably okay to talk about it: I went to Heuristic Systems Research to basically check if it was monitored. It was, so my suspicion went up. But I didn’t get a private message despite having Human in my understanding. This originally lead me to believe that Heuristic Systems Research was no longer monitored. It wasn’t until I signed into slack and saw my message there that I realized it was still monitored there. Had I not thought to sign into slack, I could’ve performed actions thinking it was not monitored. this means if you’re allowed to send players messages via slack, players are suddenly required to actively check their slack messages. Plus any other form of communication someone might think to use to communicate with them.

overall I also feel like “privately message” “privately inform” and “privately contact” should all mean the same thing. Which sure, this doesn’t fully fix. But we already have the issue that “privately message” currently doesn’t mean the same thing as “privately inform” and “privately contact” isn’t in the rules

CoV per kevan– maybe a “should” somewhere would suffice?

to clear the queue up