/tg/Station 13

These are rampant in the Admin Complaints forum right now; people will post admin complaints specifically because an admin did not server ban the opposing party in an ahelp.
There are THREE open as of the posting of this thread.
Ban Requests were terrible drama farms that were generally unhelpful for the community, so why are we still allowing them to exist? They contribute to admin burnout by making people slug it out on the forums, and for what? Because a player disagrees with the punishment the admin chose to use, which could've been a note, a simple talking to, or a roleban, which aren't as visible to the offended player?
It should be the admins' decision as to whether or not the players' actions deserved punishment, or if they had sufficient context to act the way they did.

TL;DR: Let's disallow admin complaints based on another player's punishment(or lack thereof), except for cases where they exhibit a pattern of admin favoritism.

I agree with this; there should be a separate process for reporting rule breaks (ahelp, asking a headmin, etc). Making ban requests private is important to reduce the toxicity and witch hunting of the community. Overall, it’s more cleaner. A lot of others would agree.

I was honestly under the impression that we already disallow things like this. If we don't, we really should. "You didn't kick someone's teeth in hard enough" shouldn't be a valid reason for a complaint.

I believe that's admin complaints functioning as intended. I always told people who didn't like my rulling to go make a complaint on forums. If a player believes an admin misapplied the rules - he makes a complaint.
A successful complaint should NOT result in a player getting banned, at worst they could be messaged and told "Hey, remember how an admin didn't ban you for that one thing? Well, that's actually pretty bannable, so don't do it again please and thanks."

Striders13 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 15, 2022 4:31 pm I believe that's admin complaints functioning as intended. I always told people who didn't like my rulling to go make a complaint on forums. If a player believes an admin misapplied the rules - he makes a complaint.
A successful complaint should NOT result in a player getting banned, at worst they could be messaged and told "Hey, remember how an admin didn't ban you for that one thing? Well, that's actually pretty bannable, so don't do it again please and thanks."

Yeah I'm kind of with this.

I come from a world professionally where appeals are used strictly for when there is new or missing information that would 'alter adjudication' or someone believes that bias is present. Complaints get used as a bucket for literally everything else.

Here a complaint could include the strong belief that an admin didn't do their due diligence and ban someone. If the admin made that mistake, not allowing a complaint to occur so that said admin can learn from it is a serious failing.

It doesn't have to result in someone getting banned, but everything about an interaction could have been something to potentially ban for that was mishandled and be something to learn from, or showcase for others to learn from.

I'm on Strider's side here. The issues here aren't "BAN HIM HE BAD" they're morso "I don't believe the admin has a correct grasp of the rules and these actions should get you banned" which is fine.

Misdoubtful wrote: ↑Thu Dec 15, 2022 4:59 pm

Striders13 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 15, 2022 4:31 pm I believe that's admin complaints functioning as intended. I always told people who didn't like my rulling to go make a complaint on forums. If a player believes an admin misapplied the rules - he makes a complaint.
A successful complaint should NOT result in a player getting banned, at worst they could be messaged and told "Hey, remember how an admin didn't ban you for that one thing? Well, that's actually pretty bannable, so don't do it again please and thanks."

Yeah I'm kind of with this.

I come from a world professionally where appeals are used strictly for when there is new or missing information that would 'alter adjudication' or someone believes that bias is present. Complaints get used as a bucket for literally everything else.

Here a complaint could include the strong belief that an admin didn't do their due diligence and ban someone. If the admin made that mistake, not allowing a complaint to occur so that said admin can learn from it is a serious failing.

There are a lot of different tools at an admin's disposal for punishment. This can be anywhere from simply talking to the offending party, to permanently banning them from the server. It is not and should not be the ahelping player's job to decide what form the punishment takes, because they will always be biased against the person that wronged them.

Striders13 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 15, 2022 4:31 pm I believe that's admin complaints functioning as intended. I always told people who didn't like my rulling to go make a complaint on forums. If a player believes an admin misapplied the rules - he makes a complaint.

It's not the wronged player's job to decide what an appropriate punishment is. If it was, we'd have stricter punishments for everything. The admins have a lot of different tools for handling these issues, and "you slapped this guy on the wrist instead of punching them in the face!" shouldn't be valid grounds for a complaint unless it can be proved that the admin is clearly biased towards the other player.

Misdoubtful wrote:It doesn't have to result in someone getting banned, but everything about an interaction could have been something to potentially ban for that was mishandled and be something to learn from, or showcase for others to learn from.

Striders13 wrote:A successful complaint should NOT result in a player getting banned, at worst they could be messaged and told "Hey, remember how an admin didn't ban you for that one thing? Well, that's actually pretty bannable, so don't do it again please and thanks."

I could agree with this being a policy change of some sort. A successful admin complaint about this sort of ahelp conduct should, at maximum, result in the admin being talked to and a note on the offending party. Players shouldn't be demanding that other players be banned in the admin complaints forums.

kieth4 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 15, 2022 7:20 pm I'm on Strider's side here. The issues here aren't "BAN HIM HE BAD" they're morso "I don't believe the admin has a correct grasp of the rules and these actions should get you banned" which is fine.

The problem here is that two of the three of the complaints listed don't have the required nuance to say anything more than "ban him he bad". They don't go into the rules, they just state the situation and that the player disagrees with the punishment delivered because it wasn't visible to them(or didn't exist). Zybwivcz's complaint, for what it's worth, does make an attempt to go into the rules, but shows a flagrant and flawed understanding of the rules that seems like ignorance but is more likely to be malice. They by and large aren't interested in enforcing the rules as a whole and are more interested in getting revenge for perceived slights that happened in-game.

Yeah the 'ban this dude' part is 100% mega lame.

However, there is nothing wrong with filing a complaint for something that someone has seen or experienced.

What I said isn't about what punishment someone gets at all. Its about spurring on accountability. At no point was what punishment is correct mentioned. Making mistakes was mentioned. Clearing up mistakes was mentioned. Providing clarity for everyone was mentioned.

I said nothing to condone proxy ban requests, I replied to Striders post and agreed with them on admin complaints and rules misunderstandings in general.

Sometimes complaints just end up being spaces for further discussion than could occur in a ticket.
Sometimes tickets are too brief.
Some of them do not allow for a full understanding by each side to be made. Or for readers to understand.

If everyone had an understanding and agreement of things by the end of a ticket, these sorts of threads would more than likely not even rear their heads. But... since that is a high expectation to ask for, sometimes complaints (and appeals) become the place to fully clear up specific issues that may or may not require any headmin oversight in the slightest. Sometimes another person may have concerns and lack the understanding on an issue that they saw someone else deal with.

But do please remember the following regarding the status quo:

Admin's banning conduct can not be the subject of an admin complaint. That is what appeals are for, and the appeal leading to the ban being overturn is the minimum bar required before a complaint can be filed that references the ban conduct.

viewtopic.php?p=586754#p586754

Sorry about the delayed response, I had to mull it over for a few days and haven't been having a good time in general.

Misdoubtful wrote: ↑Thu Dec 15, 2022 8:21 pm However, there is nothing wrong with filing a complaint for something that someone has seen or experienced.

What I said isn't about what punishment someone gets at all. Its about spurring on accountability. At no point was what punishment is correct mentioned. Making mistakes was mentioned. Clearing up mistakes was mentioned. Providing clarity for everyone was mentioned.

I said nothing to condone proxy ban requests, I replied to Striders post and agreed with them on admin complaints and rules misunderstandings in general.

My bad for misunderstanding that and just immediately jumping on you. I definitely misinterpreted that. If the angle of the complaint is "I don't think the admin investigated enough, rules X, Y, and Z were broken but it was never brought up." or similar, and not "this guy sucks why didn't you fucking ban him i'm so angry oh my god", that's probably acceptable. It's when they don't specifically focus on the admins' work and more on why the 'griefer' was still playing next round that we run into a problem.

Sometimes complaints just end up being spaces for further discussion than could occur in a ticket.
Sometimes tickets are too brief.
Some of them do not allow for a full understanding by each side to be made. Or for readers to understand.

If everyone had an understanding and agreement of things by the end of a ticket, these sorts of threads would more than likely not even rear their heads. But... since that is a high expectation to ask for, sometimes complaints (and appeals) become the place to fully clear up specific issues that may or may not require any headmin oversight in the slightest. Sometimes another person may have concerns and lack the understanding on an issue that they saw someone else deal with.

There should be a space for this that isn't the admin complaints forum. To my understanding, the admin complaints forum is about investigating possible admin wrongdoing, not simply getting clarification on a ticket. If you end up there, there has been a massive problem between the admin and the other side of the ticket.

There's an inherent aggressiveness to posting a complaint, regardless of how its written. It's easy to misunderstand it as an attack on the admin in question as opposed to a search for information. I don't recall seeing it used for simple clarification very often.

But do please remember the following regarding the status quo:

Admin's banning conduct can not be the subject of an admin complaint. That is what appeals are for, and the appeal leading to the ban being overturn is the minimum bar required before a complaint can be filed that references the ban conduct.

viewtopic.php?p=586754#p586754

While the rules are technically already written to cover proxy ban requests, it's not currently enforced that way(from what I can tell).

Thinly veiled ban requests in admin complaints are already against the rules. Headmins just nee to get on cleaning it up.

Direct or thinly veiled ban requests are already easily dismissed by presiding headmin teams - engagement with them is purely at the discretion of the presiding term (something we could not rule on anyway) we're potentially interested in serial misuse of the system resulting in action being taken, but till now we have been (I hope understandably) leery about evicting players from the admin complaint subforum.

The reason for retaining some of the lower quality complaints in this vein is that we maintain that players having the opportunity and power to submit complaints in good faith about admin actions they believe were not carried out with sufficient due diligence or in (non-discretionary or badly discretionary) violation of the rules as written is an important counterbalance on rule 6 and the intractable final say admins have over their judgements while on the game servers.

Spook: As above
Rave: Agreed with above
San: Agree with above