[MegaBlues]

So it's come to my attention that by opening the BYOND cache, it's trivial to tell who is playing a certain character, due to their BYOND key being attached to their face icon.

There are multiple reasons why this is a bad thing, and apparently, it's an open secret. Please change it so that file names saved to the cache are encrypted somehow.

[Noxid]

Yeah it's pretty crazy. Heard rumours of it for years myself but never had any actionalbe proof and I wasn't too interested in going around asking for how to do such an exploit. To make matters worse people keep little spreadsheets of ckeys and who they belong to, so they can cross reference and meta exclude people rather than simply react to the character IC. If it's someone they can't identify? Just ignore them because it might be one of the untouchable folk. Most shockingly of all though I know at least one of the people exploiting this method would later join the GM team! Good choice lads. Feel free to ignore/not believe me, the people who have done and still use this method, you know who you are.

[Balor]

This is one of the worst kept secrets of the community, and has been prevalent for years. Often times it has been used to harass, other times to give people fair warning against stalkers and other harassers attempting to get close anonymously. It is by all means a poison chalice and a relic of SL2's toxic past.

Though if the intention is to move forward with a cleaner and healthier community. Cache-checking should be outmoded as an ancient tool of exclusion.

It's also why some of my FI names and keys are silly things like "Caughtyouchecking" or "Cachethesehands"

[Autumn]

I wouldn't treat it as a horrible thing to ostracize people over, I believe that it has been made aware of at the very least in the past, it just didn't become popularized until the most recent year in Korvara. Likewise if it can be used to harass, it should be changed somehow if possible, its that shrimple.

[Miller]

It's something that came with the new chat update and it's an open 'secret' that people openly admitted to for years. An attempt I personally know of from a few years back in private DMs to report it didn't really work.

This shouldn't be a thing, people have excluded others based on who they find out via the cache and it often leads to people making whole new keys if they wanted their character to be separate from who they are OOCly. That said, it has helped others in the past with stalkers as Drez/Balor mentioned, but it was often utilized maliciously by a few actors who didn't want to deal with x or y on a personal bias basis and to exclude/ostracize or harass rather than actual concern.

I've used it myself personally admittedly a few times, just simple curiosity about who someone might be can be a driving factor to utilize these tools which can be seen as an exploit of Dev's system for handling FIs in new chat; so as Autumn said, it's not really a horrible thing on its own, just using it isn't really grounds to say someone is bad or lesser IMO.

[Grandpa]

All I'll say on the subject is that as easily as you can "avoid stalkers with it" you are just as easily stalked with it, if not even easier. I think it's just as bad as all other methods of tracking players that people shouldn't be using but do anyway. 

It's not about "it can be used for good!" it's about it is actively being used to harm others and break rules.

[Miller]

All I'll say on the subject is that as easily as you can "avoid stalkers with it" you are just as easily stalked with it, if not even easier. I think it's just as bad as all other methods of tracking players that people shouldn't be using but do anyway. 

It's not about "it can be used for good!" it's about it is actively being used to harm others and break rules.

I agree, the bits about it potentially being used for 'good' were mostly brought up in light of Noxid's post which derides anyone who has used this themselves to check who is potentially playing a character.

Noxid
Most shockingly of all though I know at least one of the people exploiting this method would later join the GM team! Good choice lads. Feel free to ignore/not believe me, the people who have done and still use this method, you know who you are.

I can personally understand where the contempt comes from considering how malicious the tools can be used to harass and ostracize people; but while a tool is more aligned towards negativity, it doesn't mean all uses of said tool are inherently negative or bad-meaning. Though this post kind of diverges from the main topic, I figured I'd explain my PoV for the sake of clearing possible misunderstandings.

[Neus]

If your concern is this being abused then putting a spotlight on it by making a public topic about it probably wasn't the way to go. I also don't think it's that big of a deal, especially in Korvara, because everyone posts their characters in the character profile channels anyway.

That said, the key will no longer be visible in the next version (2.74).