[gamerandyeahmick] Hamurlik - permanent ban

[W4ndermu]

BYOND account: Hamurlik
Character name:
Ban type: Server
Ban length: Permanent
Ban reason: Died in game as Hamurlik and rejoined the same round on a new account called Gamerring and lied about it
Time ban was placed: 2021-12-12 20:21:40
Server you were playing on when banned:
Round ID in which ban was placed:
Your side of the story: Another topic here:

► Show Spoiler

viewtopic.php?p=660923

. Writing this is kind of weird, but I'm glad if this would be a tradeoff.
Why you think you should be unbanned: I'm sorry, I won't do it again.

► Show Spoiler

though I cannot speak for myself because I have no access to account Hamurlik and never did, but I think that this is anyway one-day account for ban evasion of someone and noone will log on it ever again.

. As an admin of another server I have quite an experience of dealing with how the bans and evasions works

► Show Spoiler

and it was quite sus that admin would not specify ban reason on a open codebase server uhh...

, so I'm very sorry for all of the things anyone with my CIDs and me ever did. Please, I just want to chill on Terry for a few shifts.
References of good conduct: All of the things I said in another topic linked at a spoiler above.
Anything else we should know:

[Timberpoes]

gamerandyeahmick is no longer a part of the admin team. Ordinarily any admin could pick up this appeal, but I know this is very related to the below appeal:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=33080

As a result, I'm going to ask Vekter if he wants to take this appeal up since he's already looked at your history on our servers as part of the above one and seems like he's got a plan.

Please stand by while I run through this process and figure out if Vekter's the right match to take this appeal.

[Vekter]

Hey, thanks for appealing this. Timber's right, I did want to go ahead and handle both of these.

We poured through the logs on this and both think there's just enough margin for error here that your story checks out. There was a slight overlap in your connection history with Hamurlik's which would've been enough to, at first glance, connect you two. That being said, with a more in-depth look it doesn't look likely that you and Hamurlik are the same person.

I'll be lifting this ban. I apologize for the inconvenience.

[Timberpoes]

Vekter asked me to help peer review your wandermu ban, so I'll give a few bonus closing remarks of my own.

We do not reveal the means or factors relied upon when we place evasion bans, because it's an ever-escalating arms race against more sophistacted evasion techniques.

The tgstation playerbase generally trust that we have robust background processes for vetting and administrating evaders fairly in this goal.

Evasion on tgstation is a cat-and-mouse race where evaders either give up subtlety entirely, or end up following the rules for fear of attracting admin attention and potentially getting banned again.

The evaders that give up subtlety are easy to spot and ban. The ones that are now following the rules are just doing what we wanted from them in the first place and aren't worth losing sleep over even if they're evading.

Evasion bans that get appealed with "I wasn't evading" will get special attention as the admin team internally checks, double-checks and double-verifies the basis for placing that ban. We don't automatically assume an evasion ban is correct just because it was placed. It's all a black-box process that we don't talk about in public much though, for obvious reasons.

I will state that the grounds for linking you with hamurlik (a serial ban evader at this point) passed our threshold for suspected evasion, but there are enough mitigating factors overall to give you the benefit of the doubt that those links are probably coincidental when considered alongside the effort taken to appeal where we'd normally see hamurlik just do even more evading instead.