Status API and lastLogin/lastLogout

[mdashlw]

So, on September 30, 2021, it was made that lastLogin and lastLogout fields are no longer populated for players who have disabled the status api. This is a huge change that has never been announced or communicated in any way.
I hosted a poll and intentionally waited a few days for the results, and here they are:

It's not necessarily to show that the change is bad, but that there should have been at least some discussion about it.
This also makes removal of settings completely useless now. You can tell with 100% reliability that someone has Status API disabled if they don't have lastLogin and lastLogout fields. You can also tell that someone has Recent Games API disabled if they don't have any recent games.

I will quote your own words:

So I want to shine some perspective on this and why we believe hiding further stats would be a step too far with this "issue" and a slippery slope. As you well know, the API is used by thousands of developers daily to create mods, stats websites, discord bots, and more. However, the moment we start restricting information in the API too heavily, it starts to limit the services the developers can provide and creates more issues in regards to integration, especially with more common fields such as wins, losses, etc.

I couldn't agree more with that. But I think that's exactly what's happening now, lastLogin and lastLogout are extremely common fields, almost all bots and websites display them, I imagine some mods use them. But there are now fields missing that should be there, as you said. Why? What kind of abuse are they susceptible to?
I assume it has to do with bw sniping, since there is now a setting for win streaks. But does it make it any harder? I'd imagine not. You can tell if someone is online in-game, or by tracking their activity.
We both know why /hidefromapi exists for staff. At first the same fields were removed for staff, it helped, but then people switched to tracking staff activity, /hidefromapi was introduced, it cut it off completely. This is the only way to stop it, but there is no way regular players are getting that command, so removing the fields simply achieves nothing.

There are also ways in-game where these stats are visible, so we then also get into the next question of if anything was changed, do we start hiding that information in-game also?

I also completely agree with this, but does it not apply here? Some commands show your last login, many others show whether you are online or not. Changing this would do more harm than good.

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I also wanna point out that none of the changes (except additions) are announced. Like at all, let alone in advance. Again, this one is a big change that affected everyone and confused some people (see https://hypixel.net/threads/can-not-find-lastlogin-and-lastlogout-in-api.4577810). This change had been implemented, something could have been said about it somewhere, it would have been really helpful for a lot of people (judging by the likes on my post in the linked thread).

I think there should be a special thread for API changes (like there's for map rotations). Even new features are announced in code creations, to subscribe to them you'd have to subscribe to the whole code creations forum, which is probably not suitable for most people.