Habitica: a role-playing game for self improvement

Posted Feb 28, 2018 15:51 UTC (Wed) by claytonc (guest, #98599)
Parent article: Habitica: a role-playing game for self improvement

The privacy policy for this 'free' service is a mess. Is this LWN article essentially an advertisement for this service?

Habitica: a role-playing game for self improvement

Posted Mar 2, 2018 1:50 UTC (Fri) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (1 responses)

"The privacy policy for this 'free' service is a mess. Is this LWN article essentially an advertisement for this service?"

Fair one, but then again how did you hear about Facebook, Goggle+, Altavista, LWN and Co in the first place? Crap examples but ... still ...

This is not an ad, it's journalism off of the old school, ie it's researched properly and written up with sources noted etc etc. Someone put some thought into it and shoved some words onto a page that you are prepared to pay for.

I read this article as an exploratory piece about something I might be interested in. I think we call that journalism. I don't expect that every article is "my thing" but I do expect decent journalism and I get that here.

Habitica: a role-playing game for self improvement

Posted Mar 4, 2018 1:59 UTC (Sun) by sampablokuper (guest, #53150) [Link]

> I read this article as an exploratory piece about something I might be interested in. I think we call that journalism. I don't expect that every article is "my thing" but I do expect decent journalism and I get that here.

LWN is great. Glad to have it. Not complaining about LWN in general.

This was a pretty thorough write-up of *some* aspects of an entity that is, in part, a free software codebase. But the write-up was *much* less thorough in relation to some issues that are of core concern to a number of LWN readers. These issues include licensing; privacy; and the merits or disadvantages of SaaSS, especially in relation to such personal and private data as a habit tracker is likely to store.

Factor in that Habitica is a for-profit effort, and I think it becomes clear why what in more conventional computer-orientated publications would have seemed like a perfectly ordinary article, looks in this (LWN's) context rather out of place and indeed feels uncomfortably close to being undeclared advertising.

Habitica: a role-playing game for self improvement

Posted Aug 20, 2018 4:43 UTC (Mon) by aszlig (subscriber, #91735) [Link]

This comment was the reason why I started my fork for running it self-hosted: https://github.com/headcounter/shabitica

I knew Habitica for quite some years and their privacy policy along with a myriad of external services was the reason why I did not pursue it further, as maintaining such a fork might be a lot of work. After getting annoyed about this again via this article I decided to just do the fork.

Right now the fork is NixOS-only, because there are a lot of hardcoded values in the source tree, which are replaced by NixOS configuration options during source patching/preparation.