Joint Fleet Command Monthly Report: May 2018

Written Bydulac
Published On

‘lo folks,

 

It has been a very busy month for Obsidian Fleet and her members, with the deployment of the General Data Protection Regulations from 25 May 2018, to the development of Academy Courses, and the planning of our 17th Birthday event, Obsidian Day.  If it had gone any faster it probably would have reached infinite velocity and turned into something slimy, then probably food for Fluffy; he likes the slime-covered things. It’s a delicacy where he comes from, or so I’m told.

 

So let’s get down to business;

 

Obsidian Day!

29 July is Obsidian Fleet’s birthday, and to celebrate we will be holding festivities on Sunday 29 July.  We currently have the Golden PADD competition underway, members are typing away creating some wonderful stories for our judges to review and score and the winner will hold the Golden PADD award for this year, the prize is yet to be confirmed!

As the day approaches quickly we are looking for volunteers to help facilitate the day, from moderators of the chat rooms to events planners which would include games, talks/discussions around topics that impact you the players and the Fleet too to anything else you could imagine.  This year we will be having a Triadic Q&A session, where members of the community get to ask questions to the Joint Fleet Command directly.

So if you feel that you’d like to get more involved, host a game, facilitate a discussion or you have an idea on how to make Obsidian Day even better than last year, we want to hear from you.  Catch any of the Community Engagement Champs or the Fleet Council in Discord and they’ll talk to you about how you can make this year unforgettable!

IFS Update!

With an update to Toolset, we are now able to start work on new features for IFS, such as Manifests!  This update will allow us to resume development of the IFS2 Sim Management features, so watch this space for more exciting things!

 

Forums!

You may have noticed a problem with the Forums.  They are broken.  The broken forums come from some updates that we needed to perform on key system software and this caused conflicts between coding. Our very own Admiral du Lac is and we hope to have these restored in a timely on the case, fashion.  In the meantime, Discord is the perfect place to converge for a conversation with all people from the community; we look forward to seeing you there.

 

GDPR

Perhaps the most talked about, and hottest, a topic in the past two months is the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation from the European Union.  This law was designed and finalised in 2016 to give EU citizens the right to control their data, wherever it may be.  As a regulation around protection of data, it is great, providing the power to control your data at your fingertips.  Sites and companies are to inform you how they process your data and you have the right to refuse that data being used, with some caveats I might add.

 

Obsidian Fleet, however, will be using GDPR to ensure that everyone, not just citizens from the European Economic Area, is given the same rights and are treat equally wherever it is legally possible to do so.

So why a Privacy Policy?

The Privacy Policy explains, clearly, what data you collect and how you will be using it.  We developed a template Privacy Policy so you could easily update it to your own websites needs and we worked with our friends are Bravo Fleet and Anodyne Productions to do this.  The requirement is that the policy is visible on every page, either in a persistent title bar, header or footer and is something you follow.  You can modify the template we provide to ensure it meets your websites needs, though please note we don’t offer full legal advice.

 

With GDPR there are some issues with the Age of Consent and how it would work, so let’s clear this up a little.

The Age of Consent is relevant to the country of the individual, not the country of the website (your website hosts country by default).  Obsidian Fleet age restrictions remain unaffected and will determine the content you can write on your website. However, we won’t be issuing Website Age Limits.

 

It is the responsibility of both user and controller (website owner) to verify the data of registered users, and the controller can only make reasonable efforts to do so where the technology allows.  To this end, should you feel it necessary, you can require your users to verify their age at registration?  For more information, you can read Article 8 of the GDPR here; https://gdpr-info.eu/art-8-gdpr/

 

If anyone wants to chat about GDPR or related topics they can drop an email to the Data Controller at [email protected] or speak to Admiral Sharr in Discord.