Private games becoming public

Hello!
I'm not sure if this is something the community is aware of, but I couldn't find any discussion at a glance.

Recently I noticed that a lot of my private games became public without me changing their settings. Upon further inspection, so did a number of games I'm in, including some old and retired ones. I can only vouch for my own games doing it on their own, but I'm reasonably sure that other ones weren't their GMs' doing either. I imagine it might have been the side effect of the site upgrade?

Either way, I just wanted to point it out since this might have caused a number of games with 18+ or otherwise sensitive content to become public. (Happened with one of mine.) Plus, not all people like being in public games. So, maybe check your games, folks.

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On the topic: mods, is there a way to request you to change the game to private if it was affected by this and the GM is inactive?
(Also, I'm pinging you specifically, @Qralloq, because your Old Gods game is now public; I don't think its horror warrants a content warning, but, you know, better safe than sorry?)

I have noticed the same thing with my games

This was an issue with the server change, and Keleth had run a script to reverse the inadvertent change. However, this was imperfect so we did recommend that GMs review their games, closed or otherwise, and adjust the settings.

For games where the GM is inactive, a player can reach out to Keleth and request the game be Private-ed.

Here's the message in the announcements forum (HERE), but I wonder if a lot of people missed this message because it is down in the replies. Might be worth re-announcing in a fresh thread.

Thank you all! I definitely didn't see the message, although it might just be because I was inactive during the period it was published - although it being in replies probably wouldn't help. Kinda wish there was a way to check if the game is public or private from the My Games page, I would've noticed it much sooner. :'D

Anyway, thanks again! ..time to go bother Keleth.

If people report the games, the mods can check and try contact the GM for confirmation. If the mods decide a game should be set to Private either Keleth or myself can make the change easily enough.

There is!

Thanks for the information! I wrote to Keleth based on Qralloq's recommendation, but I can send the list to you (or one of the mods?) too if it's more convenient? There is nothing sensitive so it's not an urgent matter with any of those games.
I appreciate the attempt to help, but I specifically meant the My Games page, https://gamersplane.com/games, because it's a full list. The profile thing is nice, but it doesn't work if you haven't posted in the game in the last week, and it certainly doesn't help with retired games unless it's a recently retired one. :'D

(Although to be fair, I think this was exactly how I discovered the first one. XD)

So as this discussion is on going, I have a potential solution. Working with vagueGM, I found a list of the state of the forums back at the upgrade. I can get a list of all games that were private at that time, and set them all to private now. Some of those games may have gone public since then, but they can always be set public again. I would NOT be changing any private games to public based on old data, unless there's some good reason to/there are old games with the GM's no longer active that were public and we'd like access to again (I'd only do this if the old data confirms that the game was public in the past, on a case by case basis). Right now, I'm proposing only to change games that were private as of the upgrade back to private. Does this seem like a reasonable first step?

That works for me. I have a now-intentionally-public game that was intentionally-private, but I’ll simply watch for the change and make it public again after you press The Button.

I think it's a good solution. A public game becoming private is less of a problem than the opposite, at least in my personal opinion. :D

Done. There were 1203 private games as of the point of upgrade, and I've made those games private again. As you all mentioned, we may have accidentally caught some games that should now have been public, but that's better than the inverse.

If this data set looks good, we can happily explore swapping games that are now private that SHOULD be public, if folks want.

Let us know if you find any games that should have been marked private. @FlyingSucculent can you check your list?

It doesn't look like anything changed, the games on my list are all still public. D:

Edit: I suppose I might be mistaken about some of these games being private earlier, but for a few I'm 98% sure, and they're still public.
Also, I turned one of my solo games which I know for sure was private before the update to a public one, to serve as a control case if you try it again.

@FlyingSucculent, Hero Girl Sprite was private for about an hour. Public now.

Thanks, @Keleth, for the heads-up!

This is bizarre. I double-checked, and none of my games reverted.
This can't be client-side, right? Can someone confirm that this game is public?

Yes, it’s public.

Thank you for checking! ..It really shouldn't be public, its GM is "inactive forever" and it was private before. D:

You're sure? I'm looking at the data from before the upgrade, and it shows as public. I can move it to private, but from what I can see, it wasn't.

I'm about 80% sure, though the fact that it didn't work is making me doubt my memory. But there is no way that all of the games on the list were public (unless it's a GM conspiracy), because I very rarely join public games.

However, I do have a game which 100% was private, and I even have a witness to confirm it. @Merivel, do you agree that A Cursed Roadtrip has always been private and you never switched it to public yourself before it got affected by the bug? And that you were the one who changed it to private today and it was still public at a time *after* this post when Keleth updated?

Also on the topic, Keleth, can you check if this game is saved as public in the data you're using? This one is another 100% private one, I never switched it to public during its existence, and it was affected by the bug. I'm absolutely sure with this one.

Yes, I had to switch the Roadtrip game to private myself, and it was after Keleth did the fix. I can't on 100% rule out a mistake on my part at creation, but I think you would have pointed it out earlier.

I'm sorry. I don't know how this data could have been corrupted; it was part of the data backed up from and used to update prod.

I appreciate you helping with it a lot, even if it didn't work.

I was thinking maybe this wasn't a singular occurrence? So a part of games became public at an earlier time, before the backup? Or maybe it happened somewhere during the transfer. Either way, probably no way to get the correct data; it did seemingly help some games, though!

On that note, do you think you can revert the games I've sent you in the private message? If it's not too much trouble?