An0n3 wrote:/vg/ has public logs because they need to them to facilitate ban requests and appeals.
Unlike us they communicate mostly through anonymous general threads on 4chan, so players need that to expedite any kind of out-of-game requests of the admin staff. We don't have that situation so, like every other SS13 server, we don't offer our logs to the public.
Here when anyone wants to bring up a claim of shittery against another player and no admins were present we have them make a thread in our FNR forum. If they haven't logged the situation themselves (though most players already do) we can go dive through the register pretty quickly and find the relevant information. It's a much better system than providing public logs to the players and then having them post complaints in generals threads hoping an admin sees them.
The argument for public logs is that it'll give the players more transparency into what adminbus does and allow them to keep tabs on eachother better.
The argument against public logs is that our community is mostly fueled by spite and will use the logs to harass eachother. That a certain amount of anonymity people enjoy playing here will be lost if everything they do and say ICly is a matter of public record. That hours and hours of people's time will get wasted in the name of people stitching together ban requests for players they don't like over situations they weren't there for and are removed from their context.
I would sooner refurbish and revive the admin observer role and find a few people in the community I could enlist to help me police the admins for abuse (and trust not to start expunging details and humiliating anecdotes of players they don't like) than I would turn everything that happens here into something everyone could browse and read and share whether they were present or not.
Ultimately I don't think having another avenue for transparency will actually change people's minds, if /vg/ is any example people will continue to sling the same shit and act just as awful and biased no matter how much evidence they're provided to the contrary. I think people want to be upset and hold grudges. Rather than alleviate that tension in the community public logs will just give people more ammunition to misconstrue and act like spoiled brats over.
We already do so many more things than any other server to bring the playerbase into the decision making process and show them as much of our workings as is feasible. To ask for even more is really ungrateful and I promise you it's something I will continue to stonewall as long I'm able to. If what we offer you now is not enough for you, you're frankly shit out of luck. You can go play on /vg/ where they have public logs, but no public elections and no static forums to air complaints with specific admins or issue other feedback. You can go play on Goon or Bay or Hippie or wherever else where they have neither public logs nor elected headmins and often when it comes to policy they just tell you how it is or what is changing and don't give a fuck what you think about it.
You have it really good here, and it's really shitty to act like you're entitled to more when you just plain aren't. When giving you more actively fucks up the system and adds more workload to an already overstressed portion of the machine.
Although this has already been discussed in #adminbus I know but I'm just going to bring up a few points corresponding to what you have said. Again I would like to highlight my main points here are the fact decisions like this should be up to whoever is elected to be a headmin.
1. What everyone else does is not what we should do, as a server for a while now things have been focused on a democratic process which basically no other server does. I'm not saying you should enforce either decision one way or another but just leave it up to the head admins who are democratically elected. As you've said you want to let them run the server so why not let them?
2. Public logs of player interactions don't have to be necessary if they are going to cause huge problems, as I will explain below.
3. Just to expand on that argument it provides trust between players and admins, It negates any claim of admins showing favoritism, hatred and abuse towards any particular player, misconceptions on what actually happened in certain situations i.e "I was banned for punching X when he started the fight! Admins said I was banbating what a load of shit!" to "Looks like you stole all of his items called him a fuckface and dared him to attack you then succumbed when you hit critical" and claims of admin abuse going unnoticed or being "covered up"
4.Public logs can either be filtered to avoid showing ckeys or we could just have player logs unavaliable. Or better yet ban people who consistently wish to bring up out of context and unneeded ban requests. In any case there is no need for a toxic minority to ruin things for the majority. Also I don't think the majority of people here are fueled by spite, I just don't think that' true at all and in some ways insulting to the people that play here.
5. It's certainly an alternative, if they were elected by the community and were of course present and allowed to talk about how admins interact with people to the players.
6. /vg/ lacks the hundreds of posts we have about certain admin, I read the thread and to compare us with them only shows how much more drama we have than they do. I see at best an off handed comment about how X admin is shitty or a log post of admins "circlejerking" which is either ignored or challenged. Furthermore these "spoiled brats" are nothing but the vocal minority.
7. People don't want to play on goon hippie vg or bay. They want to play here, the reason they do is because they are allowed to have a say on who makes the policy and they have a voice in how the server is run. Again It's not asking you to actually go implement them it's asking that the decision be left up to the people who were elected by the community that plays here. It's not ungrateful to ask for decisions to be left up to the people they elect.
8. The people who play on the server and pay for it's upkeep are entitled to this and it's not in the least bit shitty to ask that the people they elect are given the power to make these decisions rather than yourself. Hell when easily the favourite head admin is not running again over misgivings about you being able to simply overrule them on decisions like this maybe it's an indicator that you should just step back a bit? There will be three headmins one the players elect, one the admins elect and one you elect or choose they represent the community as a whole the people who play, the people who make sure it's not a total shit fest and the person who looks after the server itself why not just let them decide how things are done?
In the end it's your opinion being forced here, It would be equally terrible if you just said yes we must have public logs without letting anyone else decide on it but yourself, which is exactly the reason you made the server crowdfunded so you couldn't say "Well I pay for this server so this how things should be" that exact reason.
tl;dr
Let the people who are elected decide what happens, not yourself.
EDIT: Oh well it seems the points I'm making are just being ignored by yourself again.