Discord Historical Preservation Act (DHPA)

20260814-4 \\ ??? words \\ Passed \\ Score: 0 \\ No summary

Preamble: Multiple incidents in recent times have led to the unlawful deletion of a number of discord channels. While the individuals can be impeached, or removed from their position of power, the channels, and their extensive message history, cannot return. While restoring an archive is technically difficult, making one is relatively easy.

Article I: The Archive Bot

1. The main official TeenGovernment Discord server shall be required to have an archival bot at all times.

1. The bot shall be given access by the moderators to every channel in the server.

1. The bot shall save every message, and associated metadata, sent by users on the Discord server in a structured database.

1. The archive shall be read only, and no message deletion may lead to deletion in the database.

1. The President shall appoint one citizen to serve as the Archive Administrator.

1. The Archive Administrator shall be responsible for hosting and maintaining the archive bot, its database, and the website used to access the archive.

1. The Archive Administrator shall make reasonable efforts to keep the bot and archive operational and to prevent the loss of archived data.

1. The Archive Administrator may only be replaced upon resignation, impeachment or a justified 50%+1 vote from council. Upon replacement, the former archive administrator shall make reasonable efforts to help the next Archive Administrator take over.

1. Unlawful deletion or modification of the archive, extended outage of the archive or the bot caused by factors controllable by the Archive Administrator, or general lack of duty, shall be grounds for impeachment of the Archive Administrator.

1. The Archive Administrator shall be given a visual role by the discord moderators.

1. Archived messages shall not be publicly accessible.

1. The archive shall be accessed through a website requiring the user to sign in with their Discord account.

1. A user may only see the archived messages of channels their roles currently allow them to access.

1. The Archive Administrator shall be forbidden to access archived messages beyond their role, except if reasonably required on technical grounds.

1. Sharing contents of the archive to a member without access shall be illegal unless parties mentioned in the shared content consent, or if otherwise required by law.

1. Archived messages shall be stored as they existed on Discord and shall not be intentionally altered, falsified, or removed from the archive.

1. If a message is edited, all edits shall be saved.

1. If a message is deleted, the archive shall be retained.

1. It shall be illegal to purposefully alter the database in any way that changes the content or the context.

1. Access to the archive does not by itself give a person permission to publicly release its contents.

1. Archived material may be used where permitted or required by existing law, including legitimate judicial proceedings, investigations, or other official purposes.

1. Any information which is protected from disclosure under another law shall remain protected merely because it has been recorded by the archive.

1. Nothing in this Act shall override existing laws regarding private information, judicially protected information, or other restricted material.

1. The Archive Administrator shall determine the specific hosting infrastructure and technical design of the archive.

1. Any code exclusively developed for the archive shall be publicly released under a license allowing access, modification and reuse of the source code.

1. Problems outside the reasonable control of the Archive Administrator preventing access to the archive shall not constitute a violation of this Act.

1. The Archive Administrator may keep the archive offline if reasonably required for maintenance purposes.

1. The President shall appoint an Archive Administrator within a reasonable amount of time.

1. The bot and archive website shall be established within a reasonable amount of time following that appointment.

1. Article VII shall take effect upon enactment. Article I - VI shall take effect once there is an appointed Administrator, and they declare the bot and archive website ready.