My suggestion?
Have the admins do a vote in their secret admin forum to determine who they think would make the best headmin amongst themselves. Let current headmins vote on it, too.
The people with significant numbers of votes are moved on to a poll for players to vote on. If the most-voted admin lines up in both polls, you've got a pretty clear candidate because you've got somebody who's both respected by the playerbase and accepted under the scrutiny of the admins we've already got.
If the playerbase and admin staff don't agree on a person between these elections, cut out the back of the pack and have a re-vote between a smaller number of candidates so that the people are voting to their preferred choice. Do this both in the admin forums and the public forums.
If you get two candidates and they're both about even on votes, there are a few possibilities: give it over to the headmins to decide; ask each candidate if they'd like to defer to the other; or simply add two headmins.
If we get all of the current admins on a level split of votes, buy a lotto ticket and wear ice skates to your funeral - Hell has frozen over and this isn't going to happen.
To clarify:
1)Admins vote; the most successful and close contenders (no less than 3) move on to a player poll.
2)The players vote; if the players and admins both ended up voting the same admin to the top far away and above, that's a clear candidate.
3)If they didn't end up doing that and there's a contest between two or three admins out of all of those in the #2 voting pool, remove the underdogs and revote amongst the admins -
if a popular candidate from the first admin vote was deemed extremely unpopular by the player vote, keep them in unless they end up voted out in this vote.
4)Take it to a player vote again and see if you can find a popular candidate between both the staff and the playerbase.
5)Hopefully take your final candidate(s) and make them into a headmin(s) or get a headmin ruling on which, if not both, will finally be elected. If impossible because of too many candidates, repeat steps 3-4.
6???) Just ask Scaredy.
Both votes are important. The people who have to interpret and enforce policy are admins, and headmins are the predicators of policy and the settlers of issues within the staff. It's important for them to both have a good scope on the game's community, as hopefully reflected by the player vote; and it's important for them to be well-liked and respected by the admins that they're going to be guiding in how they rule over the game.
Scaredy is supposed to be the host and El Jefe Spacerino
Would it be too much to ask him to just look at everyone that wants the position and make the decision himself?
And yeah I think forcing random for at least a month would do a lot of good by forcing people to:
1) Stop the metafuckery
2) Metacommunicate to continue the metafuckery, in which case you become a very easy target for permabanning and we've rid ourselves of a shitter
3) Leave, if metafuckery with your circlejerk is the only reason you play
I also think Hitler did nothing wrong and I'm the next Bearded Hitler and a horrible oppressive asshole etc. etc. etc.
This is fine too. Asking Scaredy would simplify things a lot. Having player/admin polls to get an idea of how people feel about different admins, anyway, wouldn't be a bad idea to give Scaredy some more scope on the matter within the community.
AS FOR RANDOM:
No. At least not on Artyom.
There's an overlap between what you're hitting with "metafuckery" (which could do with some better description) and RP, and I'm pretty sure we already had this argument back when IC lovers were breaking into the brig to rescue their waifus/husbandos every round. (Dalta pls.)
First, though, how about antag meta from consistent characters?
While removing all consistent characters would be more honest to SS13 as a paranoid game of workplace alienation, the server is "light RP;" that's a large part of what people find enjoyable, playing their special snowflakes out amongst other recognizable special snowflakes in a cast of special snowflakes that, at any given point, could have a snowflake licensed as "valid" with the ability to kill everyone on the station. This is what people enjoy and this is still SS13 - anyone could be a potato. Anyone could be a cult. Some people might not be these things because they don't have their preferences set to them and this might become recognizable over time, but in the most common modes, like traitor, that's hardly the case - everyone's rolling for their license to antag. When there are enough people for the more obscure modes, there are enough people to offset these patterns of preference.
No random. Random not good.
Flying from the hip on your definition of metafuckery, how about IC interactions between characters?
Antags have license to do whatever they want within some basic laws of the server. Non-antag players are also subject to those rules and a few more. Everyone has the ability to roll for antag unless they've fucked up in the past. People like to RP and guide their actions along that. As you aren't already punishing people for breaking those basic laws, you're arguing that they'll break the metacomms rules to continue doing things that weren't breaking the rules beforehand i.e. RPing, thus allowing you to ban them as a 'shitter' for an offense that is usually an issue because of gameplay concerns where antags and greentext are concerned - not RP.
People don't get banned for metacomms because Medbay McStutterwhore OOCly told Science Seductress that Security Harshman cheated on her character with La Capitana. People don't get banned for their character visiting a friend in the brig - they get banned for bombing the brig the second their friend is arrested for 10 minutes without attempting to verify anything or asking beforehand, which is itself a dick move towards security now that antag-sec and imprison objectives are gone, meta though that be. We already argued that back in the aforementioned days when Dalta, Jarsh, et. al. used to have problems with doing that.
What you're suggesting is pretty much entrapment for something that isn't breaking the rules in the first place. Why? I don't know. You can explain that yourself. If people are already breaking the rules by RPing then there are a lot of people who need to be banned; and your suggestion of random as a solution to people RPing is unfun and baseless relative to any of our current rules.
As for circlejerks?
"Leave, if playing and RPing with consistent characters and people you get along with is the only reason you play."
Ban people for things that break the rules. Not for things that they like to do that don't fundamentally damage the game.