[discussion] moderator actions

[Voodoo]

I saw that a lot of people have questions about the moderator team and their actions in the last time. This topic should be transparent as possible in my eyes. Thats why i think you should have the opportunity to post your thoughts about this here. We will answer all your questions as good as possible in this thread but please ask in a respectful way.

I'm sorry that i had to close the last two threads about this topic but the discussion wasn't constructive in my eyes as it was more about the ban of one player and a lot of users were off topic.

You can find the Lobby/Forum rules here: /viewtopic.php?f=12&t=581 and at the wiki: http://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?tit ... orum_Rules
administrative actions are listed here: /viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1838

There are 11 moderators at the moment: Legion Darrath, Viking, Voodoo, ToejamS, uberge3k, nemir, SiN, BRNKoINSANITY, Nombringer, Gorton, Deering

So let's start this.

-Voodoo

[nine2]

because i am not an insulting offensive wanker, i have never had an issue with the moderators maybe people should try being less wanky? also I feel sorry for you mods having to put up with all this crap all of the time for little thanks. i believe you do keep the community nicer!

[nine2]

however ... since you are so transparent ...

why did lame get PERM banned? why not 6 month ban, or banned from talking but not playing ladder? or anything less extreme than perm.

its just after all of the investment of time to getting to his level ... perm seems unnecessarily ... punishing. it's too much.

[Voodoo]

Lame was banned for his bad behavior. He was trolling and insulting other users.

An overview of his history:

- warned (Feb 03, 2014)
- banned from a tourney chat (Mar 02, 2014)
- 24 hours chat ban from aeolus (Mar 10, 2014)
- 48 hours chat ban (Apr 11, 2014)
- one week chat ban (May 02, 2014)
- one months FAF ban (Oct 29, 2014)
- forum ban (Nov 07, 2014)
- permanent ban (Dec 12, 2014)

He was reported many times and i have a lot of replays where he is insulting other users. He started a flame war against the moderator team after every ban and insulted us. To say he learned nothing and won't change his behavior. So if we would unban him after 6 months he would go on with his insults against other players. We have a thread with 7 pages about him with reports, replays and screen shots. There is a point where we have to say that we can't tolerate it anymore. We tried to deal with him for nearly 11 months.

[nine2]

ok that is fair and thank you for your transparency. i guess he can always play on djsovcsx web based platform

[Sir Prize]

So there's been one specific question after 5 and a half hours. The other thread had 50 posts after 5 and a half hours. It's a bit disappointing that none of the people with actual negative experiences (in their own view) aren't taking the chance of this thread. Hopefully it comes in time, and is respectful.

I'll throw a few questions out there on some moderator actions that I don't have much/any of an opinion about, but could probably use some transparency seeing as I've seen multiple people directly affected complaining about each of these:

Why were Blackheart, Petric, Morax and Nepalm given a week's ban for the "get the dog to lick my balls" spam?

Why isn't there at least a #RusAeolus chat? We seem to get a lot of players from Russia, many of whom don't speak English at all, or don't really want to (which I think is fine in principle). What would have to happen for this or other non-English only channels to get created? In a related question...

How do moderators who appear to be abusing their power get removed? There were a few complaints about SiN in the last thread. I think BRNK gets complaints too but that might be his personality - personally I have nothing in common with him and rarely agree with his posts/attitude, but that's not mod power abuse and I'm sure plenty of people do like him, which is irrelevant anyway.

If people think mods are closing their clients (I didn't know they could do that) what can they do about it? And why do mods have this power? Couple of examples of this power being used "well", including reasoning, might be good.

How are mods selected? How often does this happen? (I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this but people wanna know)

I can't think of any other examples people gave, it's not like many people were being very specific in their accusations. Hopefully they post here with "X banned Y for Z reason and that's bad because blah, please explain Voodoo" soon.

PS I've been ninja editing this post on my phone to try and make it respectful and add things I've remembered.

[BRNKoINSANITY]

I will try to address all these, and Voodoo can add/edit where he sees fit.

Blackheart, Petric, and Morax are all members of the same clan, along with a few other members who were not named and so shall not be brought up here. This group of people tried, as a whole, to push things as far as they possibly could to see how much they could get away with while avoiding a ban. Offensive names are specifically banned by the rules, and we had placed temporary bans on their accounts several times before for various renames. The innuendo kept getting more and more vague until they separated that phrase into different names and started talking to each other in chat so they were in order. All the names involved were banned as this was an ongoing issue. Thankfully these people have apparently finally grown out of that phase. The reason for a week ban was because that is the amount of time till the next name change.

We are discussing the possibility of more chat channels that are readily available. There are a lot of things coming with the next client update, so please be patient and by all means suggest anything you think should be added like this in the "suggestions" forum.

As to the mods closing your clients, a few examples of needing to close them - If someone is an AFK observer and can't kick someone who disconnected (this is actually solved now as autokick is a thing). If someone has 2k+ ping and refuses to leave, but all remaining players in the game are in agreement that he should be removed (I have done this only a couple times, and only if provided with a screenshot of high ping/talked to different people and all agree to removal). If someone is trying to break a host or spamming join/chat and the host of that game requests that person be removed from lobby. Closing a lobby that has a vulgar title but is locked to private so we may not speak to the host. This is a very rarely used tool, but does prove useful at times.

Mods are selected by (1) someone submits an application (2) application is posted to our discussion board and everyone voices opinion (3) some research into past history and verification of stability (4) a final round of approval by 100% vote "for" from all current mods (5) a trial period where only chat powers are given, not client powers. The last several times mods have been added, it has been because certain time zones did not have consistent coverage. We have turned down several applications recently because we simply don't need any more mods at this time.

In my time here, only one mod has been removed, and that was because of multiple player complaints. After a thorough review from some of the longer serving mods, that mod refused to apologize or admit to any wrong doing. He was given a chance to reform, chose not to, and so was removed. We take complaints from the community very seriously, and even though you may not see anything going on in the public eye, in some cases these things go on for days and are not closed until things have been resolved. Can a mod be disciplined? Absolutely, although you may not be able to observe the dressing down of that individual.

Now, as to me personally, I will say this as concisely as I can. I have an odd sense of humor with the full American measure of jovial sarcasm, and I think many people read me wrong. I have a good bit of patience and very thick skin, but I am of the mind that once a person has gone to a certain length to bend the rules, there is not any sense putting up with them. People will be warned once or twice, depending on the severity of the infraction, but after that there will be kicks progressing into bans. The problem I think arises when I have warned people multiple times earlier in the day, or the previous day, or even over the course of the last week, and they continue to do the same things again and again. I will take action right then and there, not bothering with the warnings that were not heeded the first time, and remove the problem. Other people, who may have joined the chat 10-30 minutes before, and did not see the previous infractions, take it upon themselves to kick back against my decision, and on a couple of occasions this has led to multiple people being removed because they aggressively pursue action against a moderator in public and end up disrupting chat to great length. Then everyone complains louder because of perceived injustice, and the situation progressively gets worse.

I would encourage everyone, when you see a moderator take action (not just me, this goes for all of us) keep in mind that you don't necessarily know the whole story. We may be dealing with something that happened before you were there, that happened in game, or maybe in PM or was screen-shot from the night before and we are just now getting to. By all means if you see something amiss, PLEASE report it by message to the IRC moderator group on the forum. It goes not only to the moderator that you are concerned about, but also to the entire admin/mod team so that EVERYONE sees it. There is no way for any one moderator to block or intercept that message. Like I said before, we take these things very seriously, so all you need to do is speak up in a message. There is no need to make a huge disruption in public chat, and <- this is the main reason that problems have occured in the past. Additionally, if you are concerned that some people are being punished for the same things that others get away with, realize that we don't sit in chat 100% of the time and watch you. We have lives and business to attend to, and may not be watching that window at that moment. If you see something that shouldn't be happening then ping or private message one of the names in white. If you are doing questionable things and you get away with it the first time..... well.... that doesn't mean you will get away with the second go 'round

One last item. When I was first made a moderator many many moons ago (or maybe not so many, but it seems like it) I was a little less patient and a bit more abrasive. I don't regret any of the actions that I took against certain parties, but I could have been more reserved/diplomatic in the execution. I am one of the mods who got a bit of a talking to on at least one occasion (see? those messages did do some good!) and I did learn from it. The only reason that things turned so ugly recently is that there were a couple of people on a quite personal vendetta against me, because of action that had to be taken in response to their poor choices, which has since been put to rest. Had I not been in chat, other mods would have taken the same action, and these actions were discussed among the mod team present at the event, so I wash my hands of anything that they brought down upon their own heads.

I hope that things can return to their happy, politics discussing, conspiracy propogating, random topic entertaining, philosophical normality

[Casimus]

Firstly I think it is a positive step to post a new thread so well done on that front.

I don't want to go into specific mods or their actions or lack of, I want to discuss the system, which in my opinion is flawed.

1) Why do we have the current set of mods - I don't think anyone will disagree that this is historic and most were in the beginning asked by Zep, others were pals of the existing mods, this is where my problem starts. Brink mentions this, all new mods are to be approved by existing mods none of which were chosen or approved by the community.

2) What specific guidelines do mods follow, who are they accountable to (it appears Voodoo but I see no evidence of this) there should be a very specific set of guidelines, open to the community to read and understand. This should include a procedure for complaints against moderators and a transparent system for accountability when that happens. We can read Moderator Actions in the forums, but this is far from transparent

3) What happens when mods abuse their powers, Brink mentions that 1 mod has been removed for poor behavior, which I think is scandalous considering the amount of mod abuse I have witnessed since the start of FAF.

Lets start with these 3 points, I am not looking for a witch hunt. FAF has grown and like any organisation as it grows the structure must evolve to compensate.

I should note that I never had issues with mods on GPG nor in the early days of FAF, I firmly believe that the problems we have now are as a result of rapid growth without scope for change.

[Sir Prize]

I think just asserting that mods abuse their powers without giving examples will only start another shitstorm, going on page one of the other thread. Give some examples of this mod abuse maybe? Get them to explain it? I know you said you don't want to discuss moderator actions but you can't make a case for change without saying who did what and why that's a scandalous systemic failure. It's actually less likely to start a fight imo.

I think a couple of your points, including pretty much all of 1) and 3), are already answered in BRNK and Voodoo's posts. 2) is an interesting idea.

Also I meant to say thanks BRNK, that all made good sense to me as a devil's advocate and tallied with my limited understanding of the facts, and opinions where I had them.

[Casimus]

I think just asserting that mods abuse their powers without giving examples will only start another shitstorm, going on page one of the other thread. Give some examples of this mod abuse maybe? Get them to explain it? I know you said you don't want to discuss moderator actions but you can't make a case for change without saying who did what and why that's a scandalous systemic failure. It's actually less likely to start a fight imo.

Also a couple of your points, including pretty much all of 1) and 3), are already answered in BRNK and Voodoo's posts.

Also I meant to say thanks BRNK, that all made good sense to me as a devil's advocate and tallied with my limited understanding of the facts, and opinions where I had them.

I disagree specificity would lead to an argument about each case, as the last closed thread proved there was a large proportion of the community that thinks the moderation system need improvement. I am not looking for an argument I have had plenty of those already. I am looking for positive, constructive debate on the system and how we can improve it.