/tg/Station 13

Who are you?
Hi, I'm NamelessFairy, I'm an Admin Trainer, Morgan Robinson from Terry, strange pink cat and this terms host headmin pick. I've been playing for a little over 2 years and have been an admin for a little under 1 of them. This thread is an opportunity for people to lose whatever little hope you had in me. In other words here is your chance to ask my any questions you have.
I also like to make charts and its my defining personality trait besides being a cat What Others think about me What horrors are you going to subject us to?
I don't have any drastic plans for this term as of yet, so expect me to mostly just work on general headmin duties like working with ban appeals and policy, but there are a few things I'd like to look into doing.

Update global forum rule 9 - The fact that this rule is out of date is the greatest injustice /tg/station has ever faced, for two headmin terms I have asked to have this rule updated but no headmin as been up to the challenge. I intend to be the one who will do it or else what will follow is an eternity of me pinging every successive headmin asking them to update this rule.

Internal Admin meetings - I want to begin hosting a "admin meetings" during the course of my term. These will allow admins to bring up concerns or ideas they've had as of late with a chance to focus on them individually rather than them being lost among the rest of discord discussion. I primarily believe that these will be beneficial as a way to quickly identify general administrative issues and to discuss them with a large portion of the team.

Standardize better tracking of minor offences - To quote rule 7 "If you regularly come close to breaking the rules without actually breaking them, it will be treated as the rules being broken.". To effectively enforce this rule it is important that we pay close attention to line toeing, at present, I don't believe this is done effectively, I want to change this by encouraging admins to use notes to track things that become issues if done repeatedly, even if individually the behavior is not rulebreaking.

Anything else we should know

cat

I'd like a refund

NamelessFairy wrote:Internal Admin meetings - I want to begin hosting a "admin meetings" during the course of my term. These will allow admins to bring up concerns or ideas they've had as of late with a chance to focus on them individually rather than them being lost among the rest of discord discussion. I primarily believe that these will be beneficial as a way to quickly identify general administrative issues and to discuss them with a large portion of the team.

Would these discussions be publicly viewable to the players. If not, why not?

NamelessFairy wrote:Standardize better tracking of minor offences - To quote rule 7 "If you regularly come close to breaking the rules without actually breaking them, it will be treated as the rules being broken.". To effectively enforce this rule it is important that we pay close attention to line toeing, at present, I don't believe this is done effectively, I want to change this by encouraging admins to use notes to track things that become issues if done repeatedly, even if individually the behavior is not rulebreaking.

Could you give a few examples of line-toeing behavior that you don't believe is tracked by admins enough?

Further, I am curious on your view of the following excerpt from "The Secret Rule" which is found on the official TG rules page. Note I am not quoting it to defend any behavior, I would just like to bring up the sentiment behind it:

This is about the personal freedom and responsibility an experienced player will have when they have the interests of others first.

This is a game that allows a lot of potential for great things to happen, and naturally the rules restrict a lot of that to ensure the minority don't ruin every round for everyone else. If you push the limits in the pursuit of something interesting for reasons other than your own personal entertainment, breaking the rules may be excused to allow for that freedom. This will always be at the admin's discretion of course, but if you want a large amount of freedom to make great things happen, you'll have to take on the responsibility for them. You won't be faulted if they go wrong in ways beyond your control, but this is a difficult line to tread so use it well.

The fact that a lot of line-toeing behavior doesn't get noted allows for extremely interesting situations and adds flavor to the game. I am not saying this as a tider who griefs sec every round and wants to preserve my ability to do that. I'm saying this as a tider that got shot to death by a detective for minor B&E and walking towards him with a spear. This is likely something note-able on the detective's part. But because of his line-toeing sec behavior, it actually created a neat little story that made the round more interesting and I was glad it had occurred at the end.

I think you can line-toe in good-faith and that this is extremely important for keeping rounds interesting and creating little stories within rounds. You can also line-toe in bad faith and ruin someone's round, in which case you should be noted. But I bring all this up because if you crack down on noting and encourage noting for every time someone toes the line, you will simply scare players away from doing something in good-faith out of the fear it may be considered "close" to breaking the rules. I think players should fear doing bannable behavior, they should not fear doing "close-to-bannable" behavior, because if they do, they will simply play in a more boring way out of fear of being noted.

"Close-to-bannable" behavior is intentionally ill-defined to allow admins to note things which are not bannable, but because notes are obvious blemishes on your player record, it will only result in the careful player avoiding many potentially fun and round-improving situations.

NamelessFairy wrote:Update global forum rule 9 - The fact that this rule is out of date is the greatest injustice /tg/station has ever faced, for two headmin terms I have asked to have this rule updated but no headmin as been up to the challenge. I intend to be the one who will do it or else what will follow is an eternity of me pinging every successive headmin asking them to update this rule.

The problem here is that you've been asking the wrong people.

Jordie0608 wrote:

NamelessFairy wrote:Update global forum rule 9 - The fact that this rule is out of date is the greatest injustice /tg/station has ever faced, for two headmin terms I have asked to have this rule updated but no headmin as been up to the challenge. I intend to be the one who will do it or else what will follow is an eternity of me pinging every successive headmin asking them to update this rule.

The problem here is that you've been asking the wrong people.

I had assumed it was something that had to go through MSO thus I'd been directing requests at either them or the headmins. Anyway, thanks <3

sinfulbliss wrote:

NamelessFairy wrote:Internal Admin meetings - I want to begin hosting a "admin meetings" during the course of my term. These will allow admins to bring up concerns or ideas they've had as of late with a chance to focus on them individually rather than them being lost among the rest of discord discussion. I primarily believe that these will be beneficial as a way to quickly identify general administrative issues and to discuss them with a large portion of the team.

Would these discussions be publicly viewable to the players. If not, why not?

Its certainly a possibility for public admin meetings similar to maintainer-bus and policy-bus and could be worth trialing but I think at least for the first meeting it will be discussing privately among admins to allow more freedom on what can be brought up, e.g. non-public ban/note patterns. Doing so would also gauge how important the ability to bring up non-player visible information in discussions, if its judged to critical to the discussions than public admin meetings would likely not be a viable option. An alternate solution could be to release a public overview of what was discussed after the fact to keep people aware of whats being discussed but without requiring to include potentially non-shareable information.

sinfulbliss wrote:

NamelessFairy wrote:Standardize better tracking of minor offences - To quote rule 7 "If you regularly come close to breaking the rules without actually breaking them, it will be treated as the rules being broken.". To effectively enforce this rule it is important that we pay close attention to line toeing, at present, I don't believe this is done effectively, I want to change this by encouraging admins to use notes to track things that become issues if done repeatedly, even if individually the behavior is not rulebreaking.

Could you give a few examples of line-toeing behavior that you don't believe is tracked by admins enough?

Stating line toeing alone might have been a poor choice on my part, I'm more interested in anything that becomes a rulebreak if done repeatedly but not one if done rarely or only once.
Without bringing up any specific cases. Rule 1 precedent 4 "repeated cases of minor unprovoked grief" is a major one. I think metagrudging especially against groups rather than individuals could be tracked better. Another thing I think that could benefit from this would be people acting in very poor faith as security without crossing the line into full blown grief.

sinfulbliss wrote: Further, I am curious on your view of the following excerpt from "The Secret Rule" which is found on the official TG rules page. Note I am not quoting it to defend any behavior, I would just like to bring up the sentiment behind it:

This is about the personal freedom and responsibility an experienced player will have when they have the interests of others first.

This is a game that allows a lot of potential for great things to happen, and naturally the rules restrict a lot of that to ensure the minority don't ruin every round for everyone else. If you push the limits in the pursuit of something interesting for reasons other than your own personal entertainment, breaking the rules may be excused to allow for that freedom. This will always be at the admin's discretion of course, but if you want a large amount of freedom to make great things happen, you'll have to take on the responsibility for them. You won't be faulted if they go wrong in ways beyond your control, but this is a difficult line to tread so use it well.

The fact that a lot of line-toeing behavior doesn't get noted allows for extremely interesting situations and adds flavor to the game. I am not saying this as a tider who griefs sec every round and wants to preserve my ability to do that. I'm saying this as a tider that got shot to death by a detective for minor B&E and walking towards him with a spear. This is likely something note-able on the detective's part. But because of his line-toeing sec behavior, it actually created a neat little story that made the round more interesting and I was glad it had occurred at the end.

I think you can line-toe in good-faith and that this is extremely important for keeping rounds interesting and creating little stories within rounds. You can also line-toe in bad faith and ruin someone's round, in which case you should be noted. But I bring all this up because if you crack down on noting and encourage noting for every time someone toes the line, you will simply scare players away from doing something in good-faith out of the fear it may be considered "close" to breaking the rules. I think players should fear doing bannable behavior, they should not fear doing "close-to-bannable" behavior, because if they do, they will simply play in a more boring way out of fear of being noted.

"Close-to-bannable" behavior is intentionally ill-defined to allow admins to note things which are not bannable, but because notes are obvious blemishes on your player record, it will only result in the careful player avoiding many potentially fun and round-improving situations.

Theres a few things I can bring up here to alleviate some concerns. Firstly I don't think things that are not actually rule breaking should be permanent marks on a players history, while I'd need to take more time to work on specifics I imagine notes for things that are not rule breaking alone would be temporary and thus leave no scars if not repeated in a short timeframe. Secondly the secret rule can still be employed for line toeing as it is with normal rule breaking behavior, I trust in the admin teams ability to decide if something that may be toeing the line a bit has been done for the benefit of the round, especially if there is no victim or no victim ahelping about the situation. I don't want to mandate tracking every single discretion, what I want is when an admin thinks to themself "if they keep this up I'd note/ban them" to make a note of it so all admins are on the same page. Thats more or less the core intention of this, more consistency between what admins know about a player rather than increasing the number of rule 7 bans. Rule 7 doesn't pose much use if each admin is only keeping occasional separate mental notes of behavior that will become an issue eventually.

How proactive are you willing to be alongside your fellow headmins?

Of course headmin matters should always be handled and reach a conclusion by the three, but in case someone or something is in need of immediate input, will you sleep on laurels waiting for your headmins to respond your PMs for weeks, or will you try to appease concerned parties and control situations to the best of your ability by yourself, until the other two are available and a decision can be reached?

Sometimes all that's needed is a single post letting know people their concerns are being attended to. Even if a decision isn't gonna be reached immediately, some input lets people rest better over something they're concerned about.

Are you willing to take this responsibility head on or will you be content about leaving people in the shadows for extended periods of time as it has been done on previous terms?

Agux909 wrote:How proactive are you willing to be alongside your fellow headmins?

Of course headmin matters should always be handled and reach a conclusion by the three, but in case someone or something is in need of immediate input, will you sleep on laurels waiting for your headmins to respond your PMs for weeks, or will you try to appease concerned parties and control situations to the best of your ability by yourself, until the other two are available and a decision can be reached?

Sometimes all that's needed is a single post letting know people their concerns are being attended to. Even if a decision isn't gonna be reached immediately, some input lets people rest better over something they're concerned about.

Are you willing to take this responsibility head on or will you be content about leaving people in the shadows for extended periods of time as it has been done in previous terms?

I'm pretty confident in by ability to stay ontop of pings and discord messages directed at me, I imagine I'll be able to keep up with head-admin pings just as well, as long as I'm online when they occur. As for the forums an appeal directed at me as never been without a response for more than 24 hours so I believe I can demonstrate that I am capable of rapid responses when they are required. As for if I will have the option to act independently, this'll have to be something I discuss with the other headmins and the requirements to do so will heavily rely on how quick we can respond to things we need to, something that we can't gauge yet. So for the time being no promises if we'll agree on allowing headmins to act independently if the others are not responding in a sufficient timeframe but I'd like to assure you that I'll try my best to resolve things in a acceptable timeframe.

How do you feel about the dog?

Domitius wrote:How do you feel about the dog?

I've been advised to not feel anything about the dog

NamelessFairy wrote:

Domitius wrote:How do you feel about the dog?

I've been advised to not feel anything about the dog

Your lack of conviction on this topic is very troubling.

NamelessFairy wrote:

Domitius wrote:How do you feel about the dog?

I've been advised to not feel anything about the dog

?

NamelessFairy wrote:

Agux909 wrote:How proactive are you willing to be alongside your fellow headmins?

Of course headmin matters should always be handled and reach a conclusion by the three, but in case someone or something is in need of immediate input, will you sleep on laurels waiting for your headmins to respond your PMs for weeks, or will you try to appease concerned parties and control situations to the best of your ability by yourself, until the other two are available and a decision can be reached?

Sometimes all that's needed is a single post letting know people their concerns are being attended to. Even if a decision isn't gonna be reached immediately, some input lets people rest better over something they're concerned about.

Are you willing to take this responsibility head on or will you be content about leaving people in the shadows for extended periods of time as it has been done in previous terms?

I'm pretty confident in by ability to stay ontop of pings and discord messages directed at me, I imagine I'll be able to keep up with head-admin pings just as well, as long as I'm online when they occur. As for the forums an appeal directed at me as never been without a response for more than 24 hours so I believe I can demonstrate that I am capable of rapid responses when they are required. As for if I will have the option to act independently, this'll have to be something I discuss with the other headmins and the requirements to do so will heavily rely on how quick we can respond to things we need to, something that we can't gauge yet. So for the time being no promises if we'll agree on allowing headmins to act independently if the others are not responding in a sufficient timeframe but I'd like to assure you that I'll try my best to resolve things in a acceptable timeframe.

Your response is appreciated.