ADR 0071: Presence as consent, as an owner-configured voice policy

Status: accepted (James, 2026-07-26). Implemented in the voice consent registry, the Discord settings schema, and the bridge's voice session composition, with the policy behavior pinned by tests.

Current status (2026-08-19)

The consent policy remains current for Clankie's Discord room. Mid-play room input reaches only Clankie's own play through @clankie/play-voice; external harnesses are outside this consent and transport path under ADR 0129. Possession comparisons below are historical.

Context

ADR 0045's consent boundary is explicit and session-bound: nobody's audio is captured until they run /clankie voice-consent opt-in from inside his active channel, and a restart, leave, or rejoin empties the registry. That is the right default for a deployment whose participants are strangers.

In practice this deployment is one private server whose participants are known to the owner (the same trade ADR 0053 records for unannounced possession). The explicit ceremony had real costs there: every bridge restart silently un-consented everyone, the most common symptom is "he talks but never replies to me," diagnosing it required reading receipts, and the fix is command liturgy retyped in chat after every session.

Decision

Consent policy becomes an owner setting, discord.voiceConsentPolicy:

• explicit (default): exactly ADR 0045's behavior, unchanged.
• presence: being in Clankie's active voice channel is consent. The registry permits any speaker in the session's guild and channel — audio only arrives from that room's participants — and captures nobody anywhere else.

Two guardrails hold under either policy:

• A refusal always wins. /clankie voice-consent opt-out binds for the rest of the session, survives leaving and rejoining the channel, and is cleared only by that user's own later opt-in. Presence implies yes; it never overrides a spoken no.
• The setting is deny-by-default (explicit) and lives in the operator settings with the usual env override (DISCORD_VOICE_CONSENT_POLICY), so choosing presence is a deliberate, recorded owner act — not something a restart or a stray export can flip.

Consequences

• On this deployment, anyone in the channel with him can talk to him — in conversation and mid-playthrough through the possessor seam — with no per-session ceremony, and chat carries no consent commands.
• The owner handles disclosure: participants of a presence-policy room should know he transcribes while he is in it. The trade rests on the deployment being private and its participants known, and it should be revisited if that stops being true — the same trigger ADR 0053 records.
• explicit deployments are untouched; the registry's default construction and every existing test keep their behavior.