Recently there have been a lot of questions regarding what our Discord bot’s can and cannot do. In this post, we want to address exactly what the PDCL bot and what the new bot “Praetorian” will be able to do, what permissions it has, what permissions it doesn’t have and most importantly who in Podcrash has access to them!
What’s the difference between the PDCL Discord Bot and the Praetorian Discord Bot
The PDCL discord bot has been discontinued since the PDCL disbanded in December 2019. We have maintained the basic functionality of this bot whilst Praetorian has been in development but once it goes live the PDCL bot will be fully discontinued and turned offline. We made this decision as the PDCL bot relies on a lot of old code, some of which is outdated and some just now completely redundant. We decided that to make a better bot, one that integrates with the new server, and has access to player statistics, news and more.
What Permissions does the PDCL Discord Bot have
As of right now, the PDCL discord bot has basic chat moderation features, that can delete inappropriate messages, warn users, mute users per discord of globally and logs punishment history for the BCL, CCL and MSCL discords. There is a rumour going around that the bot can also spy on your discord and logs all messages you send in private team discords. This is not the case, the PDCL discord bot has no spyware built-in.
Where this idea has a grain of truth is that Discord themselves allow any bot to read messages from channels through their API, and you can find more about that here
From the PDCL Bot a very limited amount of people can run an “eval” command that gives full access to the Discord API and therefore it is theoretically possible for only a handful of developers to access these messages, however, from an audit of the bot’s logs this has never been done.
What is Praetorian
Praetorian is the name given to the new server’s discord bot. It is still under development and is not on any production servers as of yet. Praetorian is primarily a moderation discord bot with integration into our server network so you will be able to manage your team roster, see in-game stats such as how many kills you have in a certain game, how many hours played etc.
The current feature list is:
1. In-game Stats for Players and Teams
2. Chat Moderation, by default Podcrash official servers, will have strict moderation, currently, all Partnered servers are required to have minimum moderation, which means it will filter hate speech (Racist Slurs, Homophobic & Transphobic comments and other similar slurs and insults). The leagues can individually choose to filter more if they wish but are not required to.
3. Chat Logs for Official and Partnered Servers – All official and partnered servers will have chat moderation logs, so if a message is edited or deleted, we can see it in history. This by default is disabled on Public servers that wish to invite the discord bot.
4. Voice Channel Logs – On Official servers (not partnered servers) voice calls will be recorded by the discord bot to allow moderators to make sure that any abuse can be checked and monitored, these recordings are securely stored for 7 days and only opened in the case where a report is made. If no reports are made then they are deleted. These will also be used for official tournaments to make sure that only the correct players are participating.
5. Music – All servers will be able to use this as a Music bot. Simple, choose a song from Youtube and it will play it in the call.
6. Levels & Rewards – The discord bot will level players up the more they interact. XP gain will be limited to Official servers & partnered servers.
7. In-Game Verification – Players will be asked to link their Minecraft account with their discord account on Official servers, and that information will be accessible to Partnered servers, but you will not need to have a verified account to interact on them. If you have an unverified account on an official server, then you will not be able to type in any channels or join any voice calls.
What controls do you have over Praetorian
Praetorian is being built with a full control panel at the center, so you can invite it to your own server, and manage what’s active, what’s inactive and know exactly what is happening on your instance of Praetorian. If you wish to have no automatic chat moderation, you don’t have to, if you want to enable music you can, if you want to allow players to view their own in-game stats in your server, it’s all up to you, and enabled or disabled by you. We cannot override that and we don’t access your server without you explicitly knowing about it. An example of a case where we would access your server is if there were a bug report, and we need to see logs to see what went wrong, we would pull discord bot logs for your server to see exactly what went wrong. We would not access your data to validate a report of abuse.
Who has access to the Discord bot (except the server owner)
We intend to keep a public record of who has access to the Discord Bot behind the scenes, and this will compromise of only a few senior developers for Podcrash who have all signed and agreed to non-disclosure agreements that mean even if they see a reportable offence, if they aren’t there to look specifically for that, they are required to not disclose it to any partners or moderators unless it falls under a serious threat to life.
Where to go for news about the Praetorian or the new server?
Recently we noticed that a lot of incorrect news and rumours have been popping up about the server, as such we have opened a section of our blog, which you can find here, that will provide any updates regarding Invicta or services related to Invicta (such as the Praetorian Discord Bot!)
