Ban appeals should not be deleted, only moved to resolved

[iamgoofball]

Community transparency about bans is the cornerstone of /tg/'s stability and it is unacceptable that sinfulbliss's ban appeal was deleted entirely and their defense against being banned being kept confidential from the playerbase.

I'm not here to argue the specifics of Sinfulbliss's ban, the ban reason speaks for itself on that one, but what I am not okay with is that a player's attempt to defend themselves from these accusations was hidden away from the community. There is no good reason to hide someone defending themselves from an accusation. It just looks like you're trying to cover up someone criticizing your decisionmaking.



The accusations here are serious, and thus the user should have the right to defend themselves from said accusations publicly. It is the cornerstone of our community and why we've had over twenty peaceful transfers of power without incident. Other SS13 servers regularly have massive administrative corruption issues, and they run private ban appeals with zero admin accountability. Our public ban appeal system massively improves admin accountability, and failure to uphold it compromises that value of /tg/. Even when a user is blacklisted and their appeal immediately closed, we still allow it to stay visible. This break from the standard is disgusting as a result. Admins, at the time in the peanut thread, argued that all blacklist appeals are hidden by default. This is categorically false.

Jackrip's blacklist appeals are public. Slurge's blacklist appeals are public. Mrty/Lucy/steamport's blacklist appeals are public. There is no good or justifiable reason to hide them as a result, the precedent doesn't exist, and admins claiming such are either lying or being willfully ignorant of this community's history.

If a community member has done something egregious enough to warrant a permanent removal from the community, they have a right to post an appeal, even if blacklisted and immediately denied, and crucially, the community has a right to know what they did and to read their defense of themselves. Anything less is tantamount to allowing bad faith actors on the administration team to get away with potentially silencing people inconvenient to them. The transparency of the ban appeals system prevents administrators from misusing bans, and hiding/deleting ban appeals that aren't literal spam prevents this from occuring.

Our administration team is not immune to having bad faith actors; you need only look at past disgraced headmins such as Ausops, who got caught blackmailing community members and fabricating evidence, and Nervere, who was banning political opponents in the election for posting on digg and trying to smuggle permabanned friends of theirs back in by blocking admins from reviewing their ban appeals, and ChangelingRain, who was actively abusing their administrative powers to cheat in gamemodes.

I've personally been on the receiving end of false accusations of behavior from administrators; my history on this is public knowledge and well known by community veterans. I know first hand what it's like to have head administrators conspiring with colleagues to prevent you from participating in a community because you're inconvenient to their re-election chances or had the gall to disagree with them in public.

I expect someone, probably an admin, to kramer in here to whine about how people who get mad and tell others to get mad should be banned, as they usually do every time this comes up, and I'd like to refer you to our host MSO's opinion on that:

[Vekter]

Please stop editing your post; I have to re-approve it every time and the forums don't have a good diff checking feature so I have to read everything again every time.

I'm not going to discuss the specific appeal posted here because I didn't move it and it's not my place to talk about who did, but I personally think that unless:

1) The appeal was made in bad faith (clearly trolling, explicitly lying about situations to make admins look bad in future interactions, etc.)
2) The appeal was made by mistake, or
3) The appeal reveals information that is sensitive/potentially harmful and the OP refuses to edit it out (things like passwords, people's IP addresses/locations, etc.)

Then the appeal should probably stay public knowledge.

E: It's worth noting that the specific instance Goof is talking about relates to a blacklist, which is not appealable in the same way that a normal ban is - they generally have to go directly through MSO and have only been appealed successfully in very specific situations.

[iamgoofball]

E: It's worth noting that the specific instance Goof is talking about relates to a blacklist, which is not appealable in the same way that a normal ban is - they generally have to go directly through MSO and have only been appealed successfully in very specific situations.

This is only partially the case; as demonstrated by Archie and Slurg's blacklists, denied blacklist appeals still go on the forums, and approved blacklist appeals like Lucy/Mrty/steamport's blacklist appeals also still go on the forums.

[Vekter]

E: It's worth noting that the specific instance Goof is talking about relates to a blacklist, which is not appealable in the same way that a normal ban is - they generally have to go directly through MSO and have only been appealed successfully in very specific situations.

This is only partially the case; as demonstrated by Archie and Slurg's blacklists, denied blacklist appeals still go on the forums, and approved blacklist appeals like Lucy/Mrty/steamport's blacklist appeals also still go on the forums.

Fair enough, though I think the argument is that Sinful's appeal reads in bad faith in that it's less an attempt to actually be unbanned and an attempt to sway others to believing that he was banned for things he didn't do. Cheshify (the headmin who hid the ban appeal to begin with) asked me to post this:

"Sinful's goal was to create an environment toxic to the admin team, and in doing so made the game less fun, burnt people out, and created a toxic metacord where sensitive player info was leaked and server rules were broken. Since he was blacklisted, and the appeal was not valid and not in good faith, I don't have any interest in platforming that toxicity, lies, and nonsense"

The general concern is that making his appeal public is going to galvanize the people who were involved in that Discord to cause further issues for other admins down the line. Keep in mind that the issues he was banned for weren't theoretical - we have screenshot proof that he explicitly discussed making banning him so difficult via long, drawn-out appeals that admins would not bother banning him in the future and even expressed that he hoped some would quit out of burnout due to it. Sinfulbliss is not someone who was banned due to good faith mistakes or poor gameplay, he was banned for drama stirring, and his appeal was less an actual, good faith attempt to be unbanned and more just further shit-flinging.

[iamgoofball]

I'd like to avoid focusing too heavily on sinfulbliss here, as mentioned in the appeal I'm not here to re-litigate their ban, only that their appeal got nuked against community tradition and protocol and justification for this was given that is objectively provable as incorrect, and that we shouldn't do this again in the future because it's going to cause harm to the community's structural support beam of public ban appeals to let this become normalized. The ability for this to be weaponized by bad faith admins is too strong, and we already had prior instances of headmins abusing removing people's appeals to prevent the community from finding out their ban was full of shit in the past(see: ausops), so this isn't a hypothetical, it's an "this already happened once" problem.

[Vekter]

I agree with the idea that the vast, vast majority of ban appeals should stay public and only specific instances where them being public could cause marked harm to the community or those involved should result in them being hidden.

I'd support a situation where headmins are encouraged to make a statement when this is done, but I also think that would lead to a bunch of shit-flinging about RELEASE THE (x) TAPES or some shit so maybe that's a bad idea.

I guess if we need to enshrine it in policy, it should only be something that can be done if all headmins or the host agree on it and should only be used in cases where the appeal is in bad faith and leaving it up would cause more harm than deleting it.

E: To respond directly to the subject and rhetorical goal of this thread, I don't think "never" is good because there are some very valid reasons to not keep a ban appeal around (they're objectively just being made to troll and thus actually just trash, they present markedly false information for the purpose of stirring drama and thus keeping them around allows the person involved to use it as a rhetorical weapon outside of the community, ie "See! They're trying to silence me!" bullshit), but it should be a very specific exception to the norm.

[iwishforducks]

then just say "We're not going to give this appeal the time of day. We have evidence of [x], and we have confirmed [x] to be true by many accounts." and then close it. I simply do not understand the mental gymnastics that is whatever the hell is going on here. Clearly deleting ban appeals of "bad faith trolling" has NOT stopped shit from stirring up (lol, this policy thread was made, streisand effect moment)

[iamgoofball]

1) The appeal was made in bad faith (clearly trolling, explicitly lying about situations to make admins look bad in future interactions, etc.)

I can't condone removing an appeal because the appealer is assumed to be in bad faith; there's no real way to prove that without explicit evidence from the individual admitting it's in bad faith, and I'd like to once again refer you to MSO's quote in the OP about there being safety in numbers and no practical distinction between that and rabblerousing. Players absolutely should be speaking up when they feel there's been an injustice committed and people have the right to ask people for help in that situation; if their claim is bullshit, players won't side with it. This is the fundamental basis of the court of public opinion that we ensure our stability with.

To use the obvious example, Sinfulbliss was being roundly mocked by the entire community at the time, for example, and he wouldn't of gotten widespread backing from the community as a result. Public opinion shifted towards his favor arguably more when admins nuked his thread, not when he posted it in the first place where people just mostly made fun of him for posting a screed with no evidence to justify himself. Admins have a habit of footgunning themselves thinking they're pre-emptively solving a problem that they've now accidentally created. Sun Tzu said something about not interrupting your enemy when they're making a mistake, and if the admin team followed that advice more, they'd have way less issues with procedural problems like this.

[dendydoom]

i personally don't mind restoring the appeal as long as it's understood that blacklists aren't shifting from their position of being an absolute removal of someone from the community.

he didn't say anything particularly insane or outlandish in the appeal, but at the time when part of his ban detailed burning out admins, we were, quite unbelievably, burnt out from dealing with it.

the evidence required to publicly disprove his claims of "i didn't do anything" would require logs from a personal and private chat to be shared out in the open. last term refused to do this because the breach of privacy was unconscionable, and i'm in total agreement with this decision.

so, to sum it up: yeah, restore the appeal, no, i don't want to talk about its contents...

[Not-Dorsidarf]

I also agree with goofball that deleting bad-faith / lying appeals is incorrect. If someone is making shit up about a ban in their appeal to stir trouble, closing it and saying "This appeal is inaccurate, you were banned for X, Y, Z, there's nothing more to it" is probbably playing into them less than just trying to memoryhole it.

[MrStonedOne]

This is not something that is allowed in the normal sense and required headmin backing to apply in the specific sense.

Because the appeals subforum can be posted at by people without byond linked accounts, including spammers, admins have move powers to move spam away from the subforum. Admins also have soft delete powers in this forum because this is required to let them see deleted posts, and letting admins see deleted posts in appeals is important so that a post deleted as peanut that the banning admin feels brings up something important can still be acted upon.

Because this is not something that is allowed in the normal sense, there isn't much to this policy discussion except the specific sense:

There can be no ban appeal for a blacklisting that was at the core about them and their discord intentionally using ban appeals to create drama and burn out admins. like, If you get blacklisted, in part for appeals conduct, letting you appeal would kinda defeat the point of the blacklisting for that conduct.

[GPeckman]

You guys seem to be conflating "this ban appeal was made in bad faith/has no chance of succeeding, and thus should be closed summarily" with "this ban appeal should be deleted." If the issue with the appeal is admin burnout, as MSO suggested, then I don't see why locking the thread wouldn't solve the problem. In fact, hiding the thread likely led to far more drama due to the bad optics of it, which would probably make the burnout issue worse if anything.

On a somewhat different note, I'm interested to hear what the other headmins have to say about it, especially Kieth. As I recall he was very critical of the whole affair while it was going down, and didn't really dislike sinful or have any bad blood with him. It's obvious that nobody is interested in actually publicizing the evidence, but having all the current headmins say "yeah, I've seen the evidence, it really is blacklist worthy" would honestly be enough to convince me at this point.

[dendydoom]

after deliberating with the other headmins we quickly reached the conclusion that while we have absolutely 0 interest in digging up and discussing the contents of the thread, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to see the appeal. it has been restored to the resolved appeals subforum.

i will be locking this thread as it's resolved but since specific headmins have been requested to share their input, i have notified them and they can still post if they so choose, the rules don't apply to us and our awesome infallible power.