Wizardry and Steamworks / Corrade

(Last updated on August 12th, 2024 at 02:32 pm)

Soooo, apparently Discord had a glitch and blocked me from “talking” in any WaS channels right about the time WaS tried to be honest and open by posting screenshots of my chat with their representative (user “was” with tagline “Message me for support!”). Bloody Discord…

Soooo, let’s help out here by outlining what happened. And while we’re at it, we’ll let you know why Corrade is so awesome and why you should definitely use it. If you’re not good at detecting sarcasm, read the following more carefully than usual 😉

Anyways, so we started using Corrade – WaS’ bot controller software – a little over a year ago when we realised that SL doesn’t allow for scripts inviting users to non-open groups. We needed this for our rental platform. Once we discovered Corrade, we started using it for a bunch of other stuffs too.

I like to know everything I can about the stuff I work with – it’s just how I’m built, I guess. To that end, I joined all of the useful-looking SL groups related to Corrade, and their Discord “server”.

I also created an account on their MantisBT issue tracker. And noticed right away that I couldn’t see *any* content there. Just an empty framework.

Anyways, a week or so ago they posted in their Discord that they were shutting down the Corrade channel due to “low traffic”, which is odd as that channel generated, by far, the most discussion of any of their other methods of contact. They said we should start using other discussion channels or just submit tickets to their issue tracking system.

As we no longer use SL, and can’t see any issues being tracked in their Mantis, this meant I was now completely in the dark about Corrade stuffs. And note that Corrade is not open source, so I also can’t just read the source code for any enlightenment.

So I contacted “was” in Discord to ask about their Mantis appearing empty to me. Since they apparently think that posting screenshots of a discussion is the way to disclose stuff (they literally posted them to their new “disclosures” Discord channel), we’re just gonna do the same here…

At least they left these screenshots intact – the only other post to the same “disclosures” channel is an exchange they apparently had with Linden Lab, but those are heavily redacted (perhaps WaS aren’t terribly familiar with the meaning of the word “disclosure”?).

While we’re at it, might as well also attach the text file (that WaS themselves posted in their Discord) of an “office hour” meeting. It’s a long read, so here’s the key takeaways: at one point, Corrade wouldn’t run if the WaS website was down; Corrade has historically “phoned home” with data that was being run through it (including IM chat content); they removed that code… so they say… and it’s closed source so we gots ta take their word for that; they’d prefer to keep it all easier to run for unskilled users (despite that corrade is a pain in the ass to code, etc, for to begin with) than to introduce any basic security mechanisms; they’d love you to connect corrade to IoT so you can, for instance, say “Alexa: restart my region” (if you don’t get the irony here, re-read this entire paragraph until you do); if you even remotely speak out to challenge them, they’ll silence you any way they can.

Pretty sure ’nuff said. We’ve dumped Corrade. Strongly suggest you do same (or stay away from it / them if you’re not already unfortunate enough to have invested anything in it).

Update…

Thanks to Arrhen, whose comment reminded me to *finally* add this update…

On the 25th of March 2024, I got a few emails from our site comment thingie. I’ve since deleted the emails (which is odd – I usually don’t do that… but they were essentially rubbish anyways), but they did point me to the following, posted on his Discord the same day…

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Good day!

A funny read perhaps, from Mattt, a person running a 5 person grid, has a crashing WordPress installation, yet has the time to write hit-pieces on us: https://candmworld.com/wizardry-and-steamworks-corrade

and our response:

https://grimore.org/wiki/public_relations/hate_group_2

Too bad that Mattt deletes comments too fast because we tried to pick up the conversation on his website but the comment got deleted. Weren’t you supposed to be open to discussion, unlike us?

Be vigilant!

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Note that the “crashing WordPress installation” he refers to is because there *is* a crash related to certain formats (or some such) of dodgy email addresses spammers sometimes use – they are trapped by one of the antispam techniques I implemented in the contact form code, but for some reason they sometimes cause the site to crash. Since it only happens under those circumstances, I’ve never put a lot a lot of weight on addressing it. I guess I should / will one day. But the point is that he also left several post comments (which require approval, and since they were basically rubbish I declined to do so) on the same day using clearly fake names and email addresses…

At no point did Lance try to engage me in any kind of discussion, so I sent him a couppla messages on Discord. He took the opportunity to post screenshots of some of them to his Discord group thingie (on the 26th of March)…

Annnnd, he also posted this…

I’m yet to hear from any authority, let alone SWAT. Team America woulda been *super* cool 🙂

In case you don’t notice it in the discussion thread below, note that we now use SecondBot and (particularly now the new and quite cool events system has been implemented) I thoroughly recommend that 🙂