While an IRC channel could be used, An extra channel for internal guild use would be very handy and a lot more secure.

It would be sweet if we could just prefix a channel number by 'G' to use a private guild channel. /join G7, /join G42, etc. Wouldn't have any use for that myself, but I imagine it would be handy for larger guilds.

I'm not against it, but I can't think of a solid case to support such a channel. If they want to support information interchange between clients, they could probably devise a much better method than a guild-only data channel. What about people who aren't in a guild that want to be able to exchange data, or those who are in different guilds?

If security is your only real concern, there are lua implementations of AES that appear to only rely on bitlib (which is available in the sandbox).

I would like to suggest that they add a private channel which officers and council can use to discuss private matters.

> I would like to suggest that they add a private channel which officers and council can use to discuss private matters.

yeah we have that already, it's ad-hoc, it's called group. You /group up, and you discuss your private stuff, between council / officers.

What if everyone is doing different things in different groups, and are thus unable to join a new group?
What if there are more than eight people that need to be part of the discussion?
What if a person logs in late and someone forgets to invite them?

Lets not forget the inconvenience factor of having to create the group in the first place.

A channel for guild officers is something that is pretty much standard fare in all games these days. It strikes me as odd that the officers and council should have to jump through hoops to get this type of secure communication.

There are a number of different uses for such a channel and some configuration for access would also be a good thing along with a way to locally suppress the output when desired so plugins can trade info without disrupting everything.

And It does not exactly have to be a "Guild only" thing. Having the ability to create a semi permanent private channel and being able to limit the access to it would be useful to other groups as well.

Perhaps:

/channel

create
invite
remove
toggledisplay
leave

Rather than reinventing the wheel, with a new chat channel system, why not extend the existing one?
Allow channels to have a new set of flags, such as "invite only" or "moderated". They could even have a password attached to them. Maybe they could even be named. To make sure that channels don't get locked out when a key person disappears, have them reset after a time period of inactivity.

Many channels can be handy if there'd be guild alliances in VO.

e.g. TGFT+PA+VPR+ACE+ONE+ORE are in one 'coalition', so they could use alliance channel as one channel for better cooperation and coordination. Or another example: [PA], [CBSM], [Itan]. The difference between alliance channel and simply XXXXX channel is that only alliance members are able to use it.

I'm going to say -1 nay on this one. For the same gameplay-related reasons why I oppose safe in-station trading.

We've got tons of "public" channels that nobody ever listens on that can be used for this. The possibility of someone infiltrating it and "tuning in" just makes things interesting. If the data is secret enough or the threat dire enough, it would necessitate the use of encryption or other fun stuff.

Ok, so every player gets 12 private channels. Then every guild gets 24 private channels. SO for a guild to have an alliance channel they need to get everyone to type in a special command that transfers one of their personal private channels that only they can use and no one else can see to one of the guild private channels. BUT in order to use that channel you need to type in a password that rotates every 17 minutes (for security). Oh and the only use for the private channels is whine about how difficult it is to use the game and how the devs won't bend to everyones whim(its in the EULA).

SOOO... -1, use the 2^32 options already available in game. The sheer odds of someone finding a channel that you randomly picked to use for a conversation is minimal that the odds of some creating an alt, joining a guild and spamming porn links on a "secure channel" is much higher.

OR use group chat. OR an external tool.

But maybe public data-only channels, which some 'buffer", could be neat... like a chat channel, but aimed at "multiplayer" plugins as storm locations, etc

abortretryfail said:
We've got tons of "public" channels that nobody ever listens on that can be used for this. The possibility of someone infiltrating it and "tuning in" just makes things interesting.

I would almost agree with you on this, if we had a way to see who was listening on a channel. As it stands, there is no way to even find out if your channel has been infiltrated, which makes it not interesting. If we were to request that a player listing for non-official channels be implemented, then we run into the an even worse scenario than when the APL was active. For instance if traders started using 3456 to communicate about pirate awareness or other things, as soon as this channel was found out, the pirates would be able to see what traders were logged on, but not necessarily vice versa.

[Capt.Waffles said:
...stuff...

All the more reason to not reinvent the wheel. There are lots of channels that aren't being used, and quite frankly I think this is because the chat system isn't feature-rich enough.

If the current chat channel system were enhanced to have basic IRC-like functionality (access-lists[Op, Voice], moderated, passwords) I think there would be more incentive.

* Some coalition needs a private channel? Pick an unused number, set a password on it, and you're in business.
* VPR needs a new pirate activity reporting channel that pirates can't mess with? Pick an unused number, make it moderated, and give all VPR voice and no one else.
* Need a secure data channel for some plugin? Pick an unused number, set a password on it.

As I already mentioned, if key personnel associated with a private channel disappear, it could effectively become unusable. So the simple solution would be to have the channel settings reset if unused for a period of time (eg. 1week).

Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are other solutions that don't necessarily require any effort on the part of the developers. I already mentioned the AES Lua implementation. But until there is a way to better control the channels you're using, I think they are going to remain mostly unused. Maybe they're already used more frequently than we know, and this is all unnecessary.

Not being able to see who is listening is what makes it interesting. Just like how you can't tell who is listening to your shortwave numbers station or listening in on police scanners.

Must keep interface simple...

/channel reserve

This would assign an unused random channel number above 10,000 or something to you

The reserve process creates an owner key for the channel and puts it in your keychain

Oh one more thing... If it's a data channel:

/channel <number> display off

And maybe the channel reservation should expire after 30 days of inactivity or something

A possible alternate would be for the devs to create a Guild client interface so that the guilds can run bots.
The accounts can be subscription and would have most of the normal stuff stripped out - Clients could be moved via dev-warp instead of being flown...

just a thought.

LOL that totally would not get exploited at all.

It would simply be offical recognition of what several guilds are already doing and the playerbase would have to do most of the programming. The client could not be launched into space and GS can in fact allow thier operation even when the actual sector is in shutdown. (It could also be the locus for shared storage)

Its a win for us with a better platform for running item shops and so forth
Its a win for GS with a reduction in server load and better control of the bots.
GS also wins with the additional subscriptions as well.