Moderation system change

[Voodoo]

Hi all,

I had a great idea when I tried to sleep, so I stand up again to write it down.

The situation

At the moment the moderation team has 7 members who are more or less active. They are entrusted with the following tasks:

- uploading / handing out avatars
- moderating aeolus / the forum / discord / (mumble?)
- checking reports - ban players or warn them
- assisting of tournament directors (smurf checks / avatars / forum post editing)
- helping other players
- checking/banning cheat maps
- kicking players from game if they lost the connection e. g.
- closing game lobbys with offensive names

and more

That is a lot of work and you need a lot of tools and knowledge to handle it. You need an irc prog /account and you have to know how irc works. You get access to the FAF administration access panel, to the moderation client, you get forum rights to delete/edit threads or posts, you get access to the google form, you have to use slack as it's the best tool to discuss moderation actions and you get access to discord.

The problem

We aren't enough people to handle all this. There are players who are active in aeolus every day but they never visited the forum. On the other side there are some people who are writing in the forum every day but not in aeolus. Some people don't know that discord exists, some never heard about irc. They would like to join the team but they don't want to read the forum and so on. That's why I had this idea:

The solution

I will change the moderation system and split it in groups:

Global moderators
rights: all

chat moderators
rights: kick/ban players from #aeolus

forum moderators
rights: editing/deleting forum posts/threads

discord moderators
rights: kick / ban players from discord

These groups and tasks aren't final and open for discussion. It's just a start to create a system. There will be also a discord admin e. g.

So let's start with the chat moderators for example. I don't want to force them to use an irc program, the forum or slack. If you want to help us, I will give you the right to kick / ban players with your FAF account. You can do this by using the commands !kick, !ban and !unban. We do not note any kicks but bans. So if you ban someone you can just pm a global moderator and he will note it at the moderation forum. At the end you can moderate #aeolus without any tool/account and chat moderators receive an nice avatar of course

It will be nearly the same for the forum / discord. I can create new hidden subforum or slack groups if required and forum moderators will receive a shiny colour.

You can write a private message to the irc forum group or you can also pm me in aeolus directly if you are interested.

[biass]

The only thing that separates this system from what we already have in place is one of two forum moderators, the roles etc already exist.

You should probably mention that being a moderator is an actual responsibility on which the lifespan of this community depends upon and

" If you want to help us, I will give you the right to kick / ban players with your FAF account.
and chat moderators receive an nice avatar" is only barely scraping the surface.

Y'know, lest the wrong people apply.

[Apofenas]

Not quite sure how this changes things really.

Isn't it better to let such moderators to simply focus on one area, but still be able to do things in other?

Currently there are time periods when there is no moderator online to even manage the chat. With such change you may get situations when for example you have an issue in aeolus and only present moderator manages discord so he's completely helpless.

Yet, no changes about FAF language policy makes me sad. This language discrimination is disgusting.

[PhilipJFry]

what language discrimination?

do you mean the fact that #aeolus is english only or the way it is moderated in terms of tone?

[Apofenas]

The fact that FAF doesn't really give you an option to talk your native language in it. Not rare for me to see some new russian players to hop into aeolus asking things about FAF and how things work in russian or a lot of russians occupy aeolus when there is no moderator online. I see other languages too, but i mostly ignore them since can't understand them.

What does moderator team do about it? Warn->kick->ban combo for years. Funniest part is when moderator warns russian to speak english in aeolus when the guy asks for some discord channel to speak his launguage there... I remember times when Maverick was being kicked/banned from aeolus almost every week.

Sure you can manually join the language channel, but FAF kinda doesn't explain that to players. I counted this manually: currently there are 95 ppl from russian speaking countries and yet there are 5 in russian channel. And that's after ZLO explaining the whole process to set up auto-join. Not quite sure how new comers are meant that find it out. Pretty sure you'd rather kick them instead of trying to explain how to do it.

FAF offiicial Discrod channel is awesome and has tonns of interesting stuff but shares same issue with this rule in "information" section

First and foremost; this Discord follows the same rules as FAF client chat , they can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=581

For that reason in russian VK community you are likely to find about links to 7-8 different discord channels and none to official FAF. But having everybody in signle official channel would be much better in pretty much any situation.

So yea, i'm not pleased with how FAF and moderator team manages languages.

[PhilipJFry]

as always this has mostly to do with coding and people spending time on it

if someone would write a tool for the client where it asks you for your language and then gives you a channel to join (maybe even with multiple languages as an option) then everyone would get the chance to easily join a channel on the irc where their native language would be present

at that point i'd like to have more mods that speak russian as well (preferably some that know and follow the rules)

about maverick: he has been around for a long time and should know the rules by now - he just doesn't care

in case someone wants to help: here is a link to the client repo for the python client and here is one for downlords java client

[speed2]

Using Maverick as an example is the worst example you could have picked.

Before we start kicking we inform players that aeolus is only for english, I always use google translate to see what they are talking about, if it's some noob question, I let it pass, also the answer in russian. But if I see someone ignoring the warning, then the kick happens.

And as it was said many times before, if everyone talked in their native language in aeolus, it would be a mess.

[Apofenas]

Spoiler: show

Using Maverick as an example is the worst example you could have picked.

Before we start kicking we inform players that aeolus is only for english, I always use google translate to see what they are talking about, if it's some noob question, I let it pass, also the answer in russian. But if I see someone ignoring the warning, then the kick happens.

And as it was said many times before, if everyone talked in their native language in aeolus, it would be a mess.

The time that happened (at least when I saw that) there was no language channels or auto-join. Sure Mav wasn't the best example, but you surely know his name. If I would call you players that were kicked once or twice for that and stop, you'd be surely unable to remember that even happening.

[Exotic_Retard]

there is an auto join feature to channels now (Options> chat > set autojoin channels), and there is #russian so you can join that and chat as much as you want.

a potential problem with this split moderation idea is that new players will be pining some forum mod or w.e. to kick someone from their game for example. for me the ingame kick doesnt work and no one except me knows that so i always have to tell them to ping someone else xD

not a huge issue but its gonna be there


otherwise its nice to have more mods, not enough people to look through this stuff i guess

[Voodoo]

So yea, i'm not pleased with how FAF and moderator team manages languages.

We could change this rule to "An other language in aeolus is allowed if a chat moderator who speaks this language is online.".