Make All Permanent Role Bans Public

[san7890]

Bottom post of the previous page:

Hey there,

This is a thought I've had kicking around in my mind for the last month or so, making all permanent role bans show up on https://tgstation13.org/tgdb/publicbans.php. Permanent Role Bans encompass any job bans, any antagonist bans, and bans from stuff like OOC and AHELPs that do not have any expiration date. Here's a why I think it's a good idea:

The very first reason is that all permanent role bans, if the player wants to get it lifted, must be appealed. All ban appeals are public, and all ban appeals must include the reason for the ban. There is no "waiting out" a permanent ban, if you want it gone, you have to make the reason for it public in your appeal of that ban. I don't see why we should not make it public from the start, because that ties into a few positive outcomes.

• Player Transparency. While other servers resent making logs and several other forms of administrative action public, /tg/ seems to have always prioritized sharing as much information as reasonably possible (without leaking personal information you would not want publicly accessible, like CIDs and IP addresses).
• Policy Failures and Successes: While admins are easily able to look through all the notes and bans and find "problem parts" in our current policy- players are only restricted to knowing what happens at the absolute highest level of punishment (without relevant appeal). Having this information more broadly accessible (with accompanying reason for the ban, and the problematic behavior that required the ban) does provide benefit in that more minds are able to gather this information and apply it in future discussion.
• Role Ban Frequency: Role bans are not trivial when it comes to routine administrative action. They are regularly applied when necessary. There's nothing trivial about the nature of a role ban either, it is indeed a ban.
• Good Neighborship: Smaller servers/other ss13 servers do employ liberal usage of functions like https://centcom.melonmesa.com/, which allows you to look up any bans (server or role) from a collection of larger ss13 servers. It's a good utility, and if there's pertinent information about a problematic player, it's a good idea to disseminate it.

I floated this past a few people, and I heard a few criticisms that I thought would be apt to sort of answer-in-advance. Feel free to expand on these lines of thought if you think I didn't adequately address them.

Wouldn't people be able to "meta" that someone's antagonist banned? Like, you know their ckey, know their static, read the publicbans, and you know precisely what type of antagonist they can not be?

This is indeed plausible, and I do indeed see people in the modern times retain knowledge that someone can not be an antagonist (I recall after one player, Maskenary's first appeal of their antagonist ban viewtopic.php?p=651349#p651349, it was a very common topic leveraged to "dunk" on them when people weren't a fan of their playstyle). They made their ban reason and information public, and I don't doubt some people who are in-the-loop on forums stuff may have secretly applied that train-of-thought in game. It's unprovable, but it's not a conclusion without logic.

However, this fails to keep one thing in mind. What use is there in knowing if someone is an antagonist or not? Maybe you know not to grab the guy when you're starting up a cult for fear that they become a mindless husk when they get offered up to ghosts? Do you immediately buddy up with them every single shift because you know they can't be bad? If so, how does that ever have an impact on the progression of a round? I might be failing to see something key here, so input is appreciated.

With my current outlook on this though, I don't see this as a complete-blocking barrier.

This would expose a lot of role bans applied to good faith players by-request.

Firstly, players in good administrative standing request permanent server bans all the time! Just look at the ban appeals forum for "requested", and you'll see. Since it's a requested action, all an admin needs to say is "Requested by player." (could add more if requested by player, but you don't need more than that in essence).

Secondly, they still have to appeal it. It'll be public that they were role-banned for a while when they reveal the reason for the ban in the appeal.

Thirdly, it allows average joes a key insight: What is so critically un-fun in our current game that people are willing to eat a permanent ban so they never have to touch it again? This concept applies to a lot, and I think having that data be fully accessible (rather than just shuffled around admin channels sometimes) has some intrinsic value to it.

Permanent Role Bans should be accessible publically, much like how we make Permanent Server Bans accessible. From a technical standpoint, I was told it's trivial to amend the publicbans page to include these bans, I just want to hear your thoughts on this.

[Cobby]

if i crack open centcom on a new player who just joined as HoS named Dipshit McMurderCop and see that he's secbanned from goon, /tg/, fulp, skyrat, yog, paradise, and lifeweb, chances are we should probably keep a microscope on his sec gameplay

but not too hard because he can play the game just fine on all those servers presumably since he is just sec banned. Thats not considering if they have any differences between security mechanics/space law between the servers that I am not familiar with, which would further make me assume I shouldnt give him anymore special attention than John "In Space" Wayne who is a fresh account. That would be a lot different if Mr. McMurderCop was actually banned from the server due to being such a poor player and I WOULD find that extremely helpful.

The idea youre actually going to be checking centcom on people randomly is still a strange concept for me.

[Pandarsenic]

Yeah, I'd find it an immense struggle to say knowing someone has a secban (but not a server ban?) on Bay would affect how I'd treat them being shitcurity on Sybil or even Manuel.

[Domitius]

No

[MrStonedOne]

I support it as long as it doesn't separately list every single antag type individually for every antagban we apply

(or they're split onto separate pages. I just don't want the bans crowded with "This dude was banned from WIZARD and NUKE OP and TRAITOR and CHANGELING and HERETIC and SPACE DRAGON and--...")

it'd be trivial for us to handle that on the front end no problem

It has to be handled on the back end.

I've been beating this drum for a long time, but there is no reason for the game code to even file those as seperate bans, if you tick a category the role ban could just be for "CAT:categoryname" and gamecode can handle translating that into multiple bans when it fills the player's bancache. bonus points, new jobs under that department don't become a freeforall and existing department/category bans can apply to them too.


Catching this on the front end is super hard because the date column is stored in milliseconds so not even "same date" works to catch this and even with rounding to the second the bans can still end up spread across two seconds.

its a stupid fuzzymatch i hate coding.

[sinfulbliss]

If this is a problem with players being permabanned from a role, why does this benefit policy? I feel like perma role bans (that aren't requested) are a problem with the player more than the policy itself. If a player is getting a permanent role ban because of the policy, that policy should be addressed long before it reaches the point of disallowing them from playing roles permanently.

Policy gets addressed and refined only after it starts to create bans and get appeals which showcase it and work out any kinks in it.

I actually have a great example supporting San's argument here. There was a player on Sybil who played HoS a lot and eventually copped a sec roleban. Fortunately he posted this publicly to the discord for people to read. It turned out he had gotten a long secban for the offense of shooting a cuffed cultist, who a seccie was trying to deconvert, with improv shells.

As a sec player that is of great interest to me. It shows the policy that caused this ban, presumably rule 12, is not fully fleshed out or understood before getting to the stage of rolebanning a player for what many regular sec players would have considered a valid act. At the very least it shows me that rule 12 can override rule 4 in cases where the antagonist can be deconverted (a surprising conclusion I wouldn't have known without this roleban being public).

If this guy hadn't shown his sec ban, since he never appealed, no one would really be able to look at the ban and question it. I'm not sure whether admins make a habit of reviewing one another's bans in admin channels or not, but the benefit of having a massive playerbase reading them is they can form opinions and maybe even raise a policy thread about it if needed.

[Pandarsenic]

If this guy hadn't shown his sec ban, since he never appealed, no one would really be able to look at the ban and question it. I'm not sure whether admins make a habit of reviewing one another's bans in admin channels or not, but the benefit of having a massive playerbase reading them is they can form opinions and maybe even raise a policy thread about it if needed.

Typically anything that isn't EXTREMELY cut and dry gets talked about in the server with any admins on and/or in the Discord before any official action is taken.

As for the sec punishment - IMO the problem there is more that if someone is trying to deconvert someone, it's pretty universally seen as a Huge Dick Move to cut in and kill the Valid in question? But I don't know the specifics. It sounds like it might have been related to the "Stop making improv shells and using them on fucking everything" issue?

[sinfulbliss]

If this guy hadn't shown his sec ban, since he never appealed, no one would really be able to look at the ban and question it. I'm not sure whether admins make a habit of reviewing one another's bans in admin channels or not, but the benefit of having a massive playerbase reading them is they can form opinions and maybe even raise a policy thread about it if needed.

Typically anything that isn't EXTREMELY cut and dry gets talked about in the server with any admins on and/or in the Discord before any official action is taken.

As for the sec punishment - IMO the problem there is more that if someone is trying to deconvert someone, it's pretty universally seen as a Huge Dick Move to cut in and kill the Valid in question? But I don't know the specifics. It sounds like it might have been related to the "Stop making improv shells and using them on fucking everything" issue?

My point is that this is something that changed how I thought the rules were enforced. Previously I thought if you were an antagonist, anything could be done to you - point blank. Now I see there's some exceptions to this. This is something I would never have known if the roleban weren't published, and would remain unknown to everyone except admins otherwise.

That's sort of the argument. The way the rules are enforced changes over time even if the rules don't change, and publishing things like rolebans allows players to keep up with this. It also opens up the possibility for policy discussion.

[san7890]

One of the assertions I made at the beginning of this thread would that it would be easy to simplify have all permanent bans show up publicly. This is still the case, but after thinking about it a long while, I think there needs to be more selectivity/more guardedness when it comes to filtering out what bans should or shouldn’t show up- which we are not able to do on a technological level due to the way bans are entered into the database.

One day if we are able to discriminate based on “category” of ban versus just the actual type itself, this could be an easier sell. Unfortunately, it’s not in the cards. I still do deeply believe some type of system should exist for this, but we just can’t have it “simply work” right now.