/tg/Station 13

Well, I’ve noticed a common gripe among players is that notes are used as ban support, a permanent black mark that makes you more able to be shitcanned. Being that we just the whole “situation” that happened last headmin term, I propose a process to remove old notes after a longer period of time, maybe a year or so, if the player has enough good character references. I’m more than happy to hear any ideas from the administration team with this policy, being that it primarily effects them.

Papa bless

Adam Klein wrote: ↑Wed Oct 13, 2021 7:06 pm Well, I’ve noticed a common gripe among players is that notes are used as ban support, a permanent black mark that makes you more able to be shitcanned.

that's kind of... the point? if you do something dumb an admin talks to you about it, they leave a note so if you do the same thing in the future, other admins can see "oh, we talked to this dude already and told him not to do this but here he is doing it again" which will probably result in it being stepped up to a ban or something. old notes/bans/etc are already automatically hidden on a player's notes/bans page after a few months. straight up deleting records of a player's potentially bad behavior, even if it's after a long period of time like a year just strikes me as unwise.

That’s fine and dandy, and I’m not asking for notes to automatically be deleted, I’m asking for a new pathway to get forgiveness for notes of the past. Again the Ath situation comes up, and I’m aware that the offending admin retired, but what I’m asking for is for a pathway for people like Ath to prove that the note isn’t who they are. A governors pardon is what I’m asking for. Everyone who’s willing to work on it should deserve a second chance if notes are still to be considered punishments

Prove it isn’t who you are by not doing that sort of behavior again. I have like 40+ notes between my two accounts or some shit that are all greyed out and have no effect on me because I proved I left that behavior in the past. Since you’re using him as an example, Ath still pulls this stuff which is why his past haunts him. Regardless the ban in question was overturned so in the end the fact that they were dated won out.

Old notes are sunset after 6 months, but there are some specific behaviors that we can't afford to look past.

A way to look at it would be, decisions based on "how many notes have you racked up" take into account notes from the last 6 months only more or less.

On the other hand, if someone is doing Rule 8 stuff and I see that they have faded Rule 8 notes you better believe I'm going to take those into account in my ruling.

Notes are already sunset after six months. It's still on your record, but unless what you did was very bad admins aren't going to look at it and take it into account when punishing you in the future. You can prove that the note isn't a good reflection of you by not doing that thing in the future.

I have somewhere between 30 and 50 notes which are likely all greyed out by now because a) I don't play and b) I quit the behavior resulting in those notes. If I went and did something wrong on the servers today I doubt those notes would be very heavily taken into account (except for the fact that I should theoretically know better for having played so long).

RaveRadbury wrote: ↑Wed Oct 13, 2021 8:15 pm Old notes are sunset after 6 months

You keep saying this but it is defacto false because old notes for even mundane shit keep getting pointed at when bans happen, usually under the vague guise of "you have a bad record"

Unless there becomes an issue where retention of all notes is not possible id be very wary of this idea in terms of admins not being able to access that information after X time.

If you are noted, your options are to

1. Appeal if its untrue or overly harsh
2. Simply not do the thing you were asked to stop doing.
3. Continue to do the thing and surprised pikachu when you cop a ban for it
4. Not play at all

There are also 2 ways to go to the no no zone

1. Several notes of the same action
2. Many notes within a short period of time

If theres some injustice to that or someone is inappropriately evaluating players then ok lets discuss it, but on either account at some point you as the person taking the L need to realize "maybe i need to skim through the rules a bit more" or "maybe i need to play the game differently or join a server more tailored to how i want to play the game"

The best the admin team can do is enlighten the players on how our processes work, what tools we have and how we use them. I hope to provide some insight into the how (and why) historic notes are used and how admins are able to view these notes.

How do admins see notes?

I have noticed that no admins are actually taking the time to post the kind of ways a player's history is presented to us. I think showcasing this can provide some important context, so I'll use my own note history as an example to give that context and showcase some of the tools admins have to view notes and how notes are presented in those tools.
Via the in-game panel, historic notes fade out and very historic notes require clicking a button to view. When that button to show hidden messages is clicked, the admin view is basically the same as your own access to View Admin Remarks in the OOC verb tab. For more recent notes and bans (the feature has been added in the past year or so) we see the player's living hours at the time of the note/ban too, so it's easier to distinguish between players who just play a shit ton in a short period of time and rack up notes versus those who come back to shit the servers up every month.

This is also the primary panel admins use to place new notes. Admins are almost guaranteed to see this panel and how faded the most recent notes are as part of any administrative process they do.

While it is true that our external tools don't "sunset" ancient notes and bans, I still ask that you believe we (the admin team as a whole) don't take historic notes into account outside of exceptional circumstances. These out of game tools are far more investigative in nature than the tools on live servers, which are more functional. We can't add, remove or edit notes and/or bans externally. We have to go through the live server tools in order to do those tasks. And the live server tools are where the information is displayed in the fairest manner.

The in-game tool represents a good picture of what admins mean when they say that, broadly speaking, we don't take historic notes into account.

How are historic notes used?

Examples where we'll dig into historic notes are for rule breaks of very strictly enforced rules (Rule 2 Metacomms, Rule 8 ERP, ban evasion) where once you've broken that rule, you have used up your single life. The kindness and use of discretion of the banning admin in any future encounter is the only thing between you and a perma.

Also for players who just keep breaking the rules - there have been players permabanned this year which have managed to tally upwards of 20-30 notes and bans in 6 months. We have the ability to use historic notes to showcase a pattern of bad-faith play over months or even years in the case of some players. This ties very closely into Rule 7 Line Toeing as well.

As an aside, I believe that acquiring 4-5 notes per month (where we'd expect to see the most active and addicted players getting 4-5 across an entire year as a worst-case scenario) for any length of time without being permabanned highlights how much credit players are given by the admin team to categorically prove to us they shouldn't be here.

Finally, sometimes admins leave notes that they've told a player something, or they've explained a certain rule to the player and the player has stated they understand/accept it. These documentary aspects of notes are going to lose relevance at a much slower rate than the enforcement/rule break aspects of notes.

Broadly speaking, that's actually the full extent to which admins use historic notes.

For the reasons outlined in this thread we are not interested in adjusting the existing note sunsetting system at this time

Headmin Votes:
RaveRadbury: Yes
NamelessFairy: Yes
Dragomagol: Yes