[Headmins] False Doxing Ban

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wesoda25
Joined: Thu Aug 10, 2017 9:32 pm
Byond Username: Wesoda25

[Headmins] False Doxing Ban

Post by wesoda25 » #463655

Byond account and character name: wesoda25 / Ryan Cobb

Admin: Nervere, Arianya, Tribe of Beavers

Time and Server(Bagil or Sybil) incident occurred: 12/19/18 - Bagil

ROUND ID HERE: irrelevant

Detailed summary: First off, I'd be fine if you locked this right away. I don't want a 3 page screech off and shit, just the complaint noted.

Anyways, I'm understandably pissed about this ban I received yesterday: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... ead#unread. Not only do I think it was a hasty ban made without enough information, there are several other things that I'm mad about too. While I understand that doxing is sometimes too serious for a drawn out investigation, its nature makes it vital to ensure you are correct in accusing someone of it. You fuckers banned me with no warning, proceeded to tell other servers that I doxed someone, and banned me from discord. I don't think I have to explain why you instantly alerting half of the ss13 playerbases that I doxed someone makes me mad.

However, even that isn't too bad in and of itself. Just standard procedure for a doxing incident, right? I'd imagine after all this, you would continue the investigation, making sure that I was 100% responsible for the Clockwork account. But from what little information I have gathered, it seems you argued all of yesterday with oranges about my ban. Honestly if it weren't for him (and it would seem MSO, but not sure how involved he was) I'm certain I would still be banned after a week without any information.

Which leads me to my next point, I was completely ignored throughout all of this. I understand why you might ban me ASAP, to prevent me from actually doxing (even though I don't know the first fucking thing about it) however after the ban was in place? I specifically messaged Nervere several times after the ban was placed, first asking if he banned the wrong person and then explaining some things I'd found out on my own. Still haven't gotten a response, nor a statement from any other headmins. I get you were probably busy, but I know for sure you had time to just type out a 3 second reply, even telling me to shut up would have done. Instead you didn't say jack shit, and at least one of you started shit posting on discord. Not to mention, for the span of an hour or two I was worried I was hacked, and went ahead and changed all of my passwords due to your lack of communication.

In summary, the situation was handled poorly and has left a really bad taste in my mouth. Lets hope the next headmin team doesn't make false doxing accusations a trend.
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lmwevil
Joined: Sun Mar 01, 2015 3:09 pm
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Re: [Headmins] False Doxing Ban

Post by lmwevil » #463659

i do think it could have been handled better, but in defence of the headmins the information they were provided *SEEMED* ironclad (none of them were oranges with his networking knowledge, and it revealed MSO while stoned also had another glitch that linked you that's not worth mentioning)

coming as someone who observed the latter half of the discussions i think oranges did the right thing by not exactly coming up to bat for you at first but really making damn sure it was valid. i'm fairly certain if it wasn't for him maybe MSO would have noticed given time or perhaps another admin, but you can assure the reinvestigation from a technical standpoint was the based fruit
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oranges
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Re: [Headmins] False Doxing Ban

Post by oranges » #463661

Eh, all of yesterday is not right, I raised it last night after spotting the appeal and some admin bus discussion.

To their credit they gave plenty of information out and were willing to discuss the ban (Shout out to TribeofBeavers), although the general feel at first was that they "had their man" so to speak.

MSO was luckily around to review, so it didn't take long to investigate the things I raised.

I think we can have an internal discussion about how we apply community bans, because there were a couple of things that immediately sprung to my mind as legitimate defences for the evidence they had, but they do require a technical understanding of how the linkage works. Maybe we should circulate those to the wider admin team for review before we apply the community blacklists (the entire team)

I think I agree with the general thrust that you were treated as guilty the whole time and didn't really have much of a chance to argue your own case, which is disappointing to me.
Last edited by oranges on Thu Dec 20, 2018 9:55 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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MrStonedOne
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Re: [Headmins] False Doxing Ban

Post by MrStonedOne » #463666

But from what little information I have gathered, it seems you argued all of yesterday with oranges about my ban. Honestly if it weren't for him (and it would seem MSO, but not sure how involved he was)
I'm the only one with access to the webserver logs, so I was the main one who did the linking of accounts.

That being said, I am sorry we didn't get back to you last night. The headmins asked me to post a post explaining the evidence, I understand it better then they do, from their prospective they insert discord username#hash and receive an ip (they usually ping me with the discord userid, and ask me to find their ip).

The reason why I had not posted that post is that by the time I got back from running errands oranges had asked me some questions about how we had linked you and I spent time going over the evidence with him, by the time we figured out it might not be you you had already gone to bed. (at this point i issued a retraction in host chat, even thou we weren't sure yet it wasn't you)

We waited until this morning to unban you because we wanted to see if you could join the discord after getting unbanned.

That, Ya, that was a bit of a test. Discord won't let you join a server if you've recently used the same ip as somebody banned. We unbanned you but not clockwork to see if discord would link you to clockwork's ban. When discord did not we knew.

So your complaint boils down to two questions. Should they have banned you given the information they knew, and should they have been more communicative.

And sadly both of those fall on me. They should have banned you given the information they got from me, I'm the one who fucked up. And they requested I provide more information to you, something I failed to do because I got distracted investigating things further.

The discord pm related complaint can't stand. its specifically against the rules to discuss such matters over discord pms unless the admin wants to. I'm not gonna punish you for breaking that rule, because you were rightly frustrated, but understand no admin is ever required to engage with a player over discord pms.

Regardless you had a under 24 hour turn around time on a ban like this. We all have lives that we intersperse with spacemens, You can expect reasonable turn around times, but thats on the order of a day or so, not hours.
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wesoda25
Joined: Thu Aug 10, 2017 9:32 pm
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Re: [Headmins] False Doxing Ban

Post by wesoda25 » #464213

Seems I once again didn’t know enough and my frustration was semi misguided. Don’t really know whether I should change the title of this thread now and the subjects of the complaint. However, I will maintain that you, even with what I know now, were more helpful and kind than the headmins. And honestly I don’t even care much anymore, I can’t stay mad.

I didn’t really care about how long I was banned, it was just the nature of the ban and events surrounding it. I was slapped with a community ban and really just got a short, uninformative reply and my thread locked for no reason. And I know since it is against the rules you can’t take on my complaint about the discord messages but honestly, I think that rule was mainly put in place to stop harassment and annoying players who can’t comprehend their own logic fallacies. I often see admins perfectly willing to talk about such matters in discord, hell, a former admin even advised me to. Which I guess forces me to see that most of my complaint is centered around how I felt during the ban.

I guess the complaint isn’t completely substantial, its not a thesis with well reasoned points pertaining to the rules and how headmins broke them, because they didn’t. It centers around how I think lead administration acted poorly without stepping out of line, not giving me the benefit of the doubt for something as serious as doxing.

At this point I’m gonna start rambling if I haven’t already, so I’ll end it here. I guess since there’s nothing too substantial about my complaint you’ll probably just move it to rejected complaints. Just wanna be done with this shit.
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Rustledjimm
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Re: [Headmins] False Doxing Ban

Post by Rustledjimm » #464221

I will note that in the adminbus discussion many admins that know you well did stand up to say they did not believe you were capable of such an action. I was not one as I do not know you well enough sorry wesoda but several admins did do so. Few admins have the technical knowledge of oranges and MSO. If during my headmin term this had happened and MSO told me that clockwork was yourself (based on something just slightly faulty) then I would also have placed the ban because I put trust in what MSO says, as I'm sure many admins and players do. MSO has admitted to his mistake and its rare he makes such a mistake.

Sorry if this is peanut posting but I felt it was information relevant for wesoda to know. It wasn't just oranges standing up for you.
So uhh, I'm an admin. Please leave feedback! Oops took me a while to strike that through.

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TribeOfBeavers
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Re: [Headmins] False Doxing Ban

Post by TribeOfBeavers » #464230

I guess this thread is resolved (?), but ill wait for mso to lock and move it since its a complaint against the headmins.

Anyway, first of all I would like to apologize to you for the false accusation.

Doxxing is a serious issue, and we have to be a bit heavy handed at times as it can be extremely difficult to deal with otherwise.
At the time we were working off the assumption that the tools and techniques being used to find out who the person behind the doxxing was were reliable enough to be fairly certain it was you. But evidently false positives are possible, as in your case, and im really really sorry you got caught up in all this. We'll keep the flaws that were uncovered in mind in the future if/when this needs to be done again and hopefully prevent any similar incidents. Ideally discord will provide us with better tools for handling this sort of thing in the future.

The short reply and the locked thread were a placeholder until mso could come in and explain how he got your IP from the dox account. However, as mentioned, that never ended up happening as he got caught up in running some more tests and talking with oranges about it. We did try to contact you once the potential false positive had been brought up, but by that point you had already gone to bed. We probably should have expanded more in the post, but it was decided to just let the guy who understood it best be the one to explain it, rather than try to do so ourselves.

There isnt much more to be done at this point except to say sorry.
So... sorry for inconveniencing and upsetting you.
Hopefully you can forgive us, we're just doing our best to keep the community safe.
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