Third ARK is opening a Discord server. Before anyone joins it, you should know what it is for and what it must never become, because the second part is the part that matters.
Discord is where the people are. It is the right place to meet them, help them, and let them show each other sealed work. It is the wrong place for the work itself. Everything typed into Discord sits on Discord's servers under Discord's terms. Our data page says the vault on your machine is "not a policy setting, it is the architecture". Discord is a policy setting. So we treat it as one. The room, never the workshop.
These go in the welcome channel, word for word. They are not community guidelines. They are the terms of the room.
One. Your vault stays on your machine. Nothing you keep is posted here.
Two. Only sealed, public work is shared here. If it has no seal, it is a message, not a record.
Three. Nothing is kept here. If the only copy of a thing is a Discord message, it is already lost.
Four. Who you are here is your key, not your handle. Roles follow keys.
Each one is a consequence of the product. ARK O/S is a vault on a person's own Mac. It keeps what you choose as plain files, answers questions by naming the note each answer came from, and seals what you make: a hash and a signature a stranger can check against a public register without asking us. The seal is what makes a public room safe. A sealed file is a plain file, the seal travels with it, and anyone can check it. So Discord can be untrusted and it does not matter. A file posted in a channel is either sealed, and provable, or it is noise.
Three things, and a fourth that is private.
Questions. A forum, so a question keeps its thread and the answer stays findable. A person reads it and a person answers, and says when they do not know. The app names the note every answer came from. People in the room do the same. A claim without a source is an opinion, and opinions are welcome as long as they are called that.
Show your seal. A forum where people post sealed public work. The habit we want is checked, then read. Praise comes second.
Testers. A private channel, by role, for the people holding the first build.
And the welcome, which holds the four rules and one link to the website. No shop, no quests, no sponsored anything. The voice of the website is the voice of the server: heavy words, short sentences, no exclamation marks, and no coined names for things that have plain ones.
Say it straight, because the room will be held to the same rule. The server opens in the launch week, the week of 9 November, with the first public build and the first testers. Not before. An empty room repels, and we open the door when there is something to do inside.
No bot exists yet. Two are planned, and neither is built.
The first checks a seal. Post a file or a hash and it answers with the register's verdict and nothing else: sealed by which key, chain unbroken, or not found on the register. It never stores the file, keeps a copy, or scores it. Until it exists, you check a seal yourself at verify.third-ark.com, which does exist today. One limit to know: the register accepts only Third ARK's own key for now, so it can only answer for things Third ARK sealed. The register accepting other keys is not shipped yet.
The second binds a role to a key. The bot issues a short random challenge, you sign it in the app, and your role in the room follows your key from then on. A Discord handle proves nothing. A signature does. This needs a "sign this" command in the app, which is not shipped yet. Until both are built, the fourth rule is a promise rather than a mechanism, and we say so on the door.
Nothing kept in Discord will ever be the record. The record of who made what is the chain of seals, held in each person's own vault. The server's own history is a plain text file, one dated line per decision, kept by the person who runs it. If the only copy of something is a message, we have built the flood with our name on the door, and we will not.
That is the whole arrangement. The vault stays on the machine. Only sealed work is posted. Roles follow keys. Nothing is kept in the room. None of it changes when the room fills.
