Community Arbitrators

[saragei]

I do not like the idea of ahaving an arbitrator (or a committee) who possesses powers like recommending a ban. The thought itself of having a jurisdictional institution for the armagetronad community is imo at least questionable.

[Z-Man]

The recommended ban list is probably a good idea. We did this on the Dedcon servers and it worked well. Apart from the fact that it was a huge waste of time in the end because practically nobody ever made it onto the list beyond the level where they'd get warnings (but of course, you can argue that was a direct consequence of the list's existence). It would also give the arbitrator its legitimacy; the more server admins use the list, the better for him. And it is in line with my personal default policy that server admins should hold the most power.

[Hoax]

Would an elected arbitrator really have enough of a mandate?
Not sure I really like this idea; what next?
It could be contructive though since most arguements can be solved when someone external points out what the people involved are missing about thier own actions.

[Lucifer]

Would an elected arbitrator really have enough of a mandate?

To be honest, it seems to me that server operators that are part of the system are the ones that give the arbitrator the mandate, so they're really the only ones who'd have to vote. You wouldn't need 100 community members, you'd only need the 10 or so server admins that participate (or more, however many there are). This makes sense because at the end of the day, it's the server admins who decide what is/isn't acceptable on their server, so the arbitrator would represent the compromise of all server admins and probably help set a minimum level of conduct in the community.

The idea could probably be extended to a group of community moderators who would have the ability to set bans across several servers for people who misbehave. It would give the community a way to respond quickly to smegheads spewing crap all over the place. The smeghead in question wouldn't be able to go server after server causing trouble, s/he'd get stopped on the first community moderator that sees him.

These community moderators would need to be picked with enough care that they hopefully won't make the player/moderator feuds worse. Maybe a senate-type arrangement would work where each server admin nominates a community moderator, and let each server admin decide how they'll make their nomination on their own (i.e. put it to a vote among their players, user their own judgement, etc).

And these community moderators should agree ahead of time to take any player/moderator feuds in which they get embroiled straight to the arbitrator.

/me is a Federalist.

[Phytotron]

Not that it applies to or would ever concern me, but I'm am nonetheless compelled to declare this idea so stupid it's dupid, approaching 2020 proportions.

Mmmm, self-imposed insulation and myopia reinforced by inflating the trivial to the monumental. "Economic collapse? Huh? Mommy and daddy will take care of it. We must concern ourselves with our playhouse club. We are the fun generation."

[wrtlprnft]

If Jonathan calls himself a forum polluter, what would Phytotron be?

[Z-Man]

Lucifer: This sounds like it could work. But I'd suggest to make it more anarchic Just
- let everyone who likes become a self-proclaimed community moderator. Recommended would be that moderators are actually moderators on a server and have read access to the full server logs, of course.
- each community moderator publishes his recommended ban/warning list
- server admins include lists from community moderators they trust
- provide a subforum for community moderation issues here where community moderators can document the individual cases on their ban list

We should probably provide tools to manage and merge ban/warning lists so that someone who is on several ban lists only get one warning. Oh wait, we don't support individualized greeting messages. But anyway, with those tools, people can declare themselves community metamoderators and publish (automatically updated) compilations of banlists from moderators they trust. And there could be metametamoderators publishing compilation compilations We probably want a quick way for everyone to determine the direct and indirect 'power level' of each moderator: the number of servers directly or indirectly including that moderator's ban list.

In that model, at least for resolving ban (player vs. moderator) disputes, there wouldn't need to be a single Arbitrator. If a player finds himself on one of the published ban lists and thinks it's not justified, he can post about it on the moderation subforum (where his case SHOULD already be documented). After reviewing the evidence (aka mudslinging), meta(^n)moderators and server admins can then decide for themselves whether they withdraw their trust from the moderator issuing the ban (and the metamoderator trusting that moderator if he chooses to keep trusting the moderator). That way, moderators turning into smegheads should get removed from having power quickly.

Player vs. player disputes can then be taken to the moderator most familiar with the issue. Say Y constantly TKs Z, and only Z, on server X. Z can then complain to a moderator on X, and he can inform the nearest metamoderator, who then reviews the logs and takes appropriate action. Typically banning both Y and Z for being annoying twats.

Clan vs. clan disputes should simply be handled on the player vs. player level, too After all, it's still individual players misbehaving, and that a member of clan X was nasty to a member of clan Y yesterday is no excuse at all for a member of Y to be nasty back today. Clans with poor anger management will simply find all members on the recommended ban lists.

[Lucifer]

To avoid a "General" topic degenerating into technical discussion and scaring people off from discussing the overall idea, I started a new thread for technical discussion:

http://forums.armagetronad.net/viewtopi ... 800#203800

[Lackadaisical]

I kinda agree with Phytotron here.. seems like a lot of resources spent on something that's really not so big of a problem.

[Z-Man]

True. But if you look at it that way, pretty much all we ever done here can be described like that. And we're not really doing all that much As far as I understand the current plan, we provide a bit of infrastructure to make it easy for server admins and moderators to share and merge ban lists and let the natural group mechanics do the rest.

[2020]

Mmmm, self-imposed insulation and myopia reinforced by inflating the trivial to the monumental. "Economic collapse? Huh? Mommy and daddy will take care of it. We must concern ourselves with our playhouse club. We are the fun generation."

a fine self-description

[2020]

z-man's suggestion makes sense to me
though the creation of a cartel of server-admins might occur way off in the future...

wrt the thread generally
i believe this is an attempt to think preventatively
to avoid future problems from arising in the first place...
and therefore should be applauded

it's not about blowing things out of proportion
but preventing those blow-outs to occur in the first place
between individuals and certainly between clans

we can't expect everyone to have more wisdom than intellect
let's take out our differences on the grid

[fingerbib]

personally, i've heard nothing yet to convince me that this is a good idea. it seems like it has the potential to alienate swathes of people in one foul swoop. are server admins not already fulfilling this role, without this level of power? if someone/ some people are worthy of bans from multiple servers, it seems to me like that's what they usually end up getting. and if they don't, they probably don't deserve it...

if i'm fundamentally misunderstanding the role that the arbitrator would have then please tell me. if not, i really don't see the point in this role. it seems like it is destined to do more harm than good.

[Z-Man]

if someone/ some people are worthy of bans from multiple servers, it seems to me like that's what they usually end up getting.

True, but it's a slow and inefficient process. On each server, the misbehavior needs to be noticed and acted upon individually. It would be easier to put someone on a more widely used ban list after they misbehaved on two or three different servers. Give the first ban a timeout of a couple of days to give that person a little demonstration of what to expect if they continue that way.

if i'm fundamentally misunderstanding the role that the arbitrator would have then please tell me. if not, i really don't see the point in this role. it seems like it is destined to do more harm than good.

We sort of deconstructed it already True power will always lie with the server admins. The currently discussed model simply aims at letting them delegate some work to a chosen group of trusted moderators.

[Lucifer]

personally, i've heard nothing yet to convince me that this is a good idea. it seems like it has the potential to alienate swathes of people in one foul swoop. are server admins not already fulfilling this role, without this level of power? if someone/ some people are worthy of bans from multiple servers, it seems to me like that's what they usually end up getting. and if they don't, they probably don't deserve it...

Well, let's be honest, there isn't really a minimum standard of good behavior here. People come in and regress a few years in maturity, and with (as some have pointed out) a lot of players that were already pretty young, that can make for some very uncomfortable situations on servers.

Then we've got other issues people want solved, like how to stop people from kicking every newbie that shows up on a fortress server. When fortress servers are the most popular at a particular time, then kicking newbie players from the server essentially kicks them from the community.

Not to mention players that join team games and then just use the game as a chat room. That really hurts the team they just joined. (I'm talking to Durka! )

Server admins aren't always available. Moderators for particular servers are likewise not always available. I don't expect any community moderators to be always available, but they're not there to deal with specific in-game situations. It would take a fair amount of code and/or collaboration on the part of server admins to make it so that community moderators can instantly kick players that are causing problems. For that role, server-specific moderators will continue to be needed.

But for the role where you have particular players that tend to cause problems on particular servers, but not all servers, those specific servers where they cause problems suffer. But on other servers, they don't have problems. This actually happens a lot with some clan members, where they behave on the clan server and then turn around and misbehave very badly on other suffers, often-times spewing crap about how their clan is better then everyone and nobody there is good enough to be in their clan, etc. (Ironically, it's been my experience that most players have received invites to several clans already, at least those of us that have been around for awhile, and many turn down the invites). So what do you do with those players?

Well, in my mind, the threat of being banned from the servers where you like to behave in addition to the servers where you misbehave is a strong threat. So a community moderator would have the power to come to such a player and say "hey, you need to behave better on these servers or you might find yourself banned also from the servers you like".

In player vs player feuds, and I know you've seen some of these, when two players involved in a feud join a server at the same time, they tend to feud instead of playing. This makes other players uncomfortable, annoyed, and generally creates an environment full of hostility, even if it is only directed between the two feuding players. At that time, instead of being fun, the game becomes a significant source of stress. So, here comes the community moderator. He can say "Hey, take this feud out of the servers or work it out. I'm willing to arbitrate." And if they refuse to stop feuding whenever they meet in-game, they can be banned from a lot of servers.

So, you could argue then that server moderators can already do that, and they can take instant action to kick/ban the feuding players. Sure, that's a good argument. But their ability to stop the feud from bleeding all over the place is limited to the one server. A community moderator would have the ability to stop the feud from bleeding into many servers, hopefully at least all the really popular servers. Players that insist on feuding whenever they meet will have to go into the less-populated servers to feud.

In the end, we'll hopefully see the community establishing a better minimum standard of behavior that holds for at least the most popular servers, and we'll see less feuding that takes the fun from uninvolved players.

The threat of a multi-server ban that may not take effect immediately, but may easily last several days or longer should be enough to push a lot of borderline cases up into the green area, where the party(ies) involved will behave better and possibly even resolve their feuds. Some of the borderline cases will remain unresolved, no doubt, and probably get players banned. And then there are players who absolutely won't change their behavior and will find themselves unable to play on the more popular servers.

So it still depends on server admins to buy into the system. (By "buy" I don't mean "spend money", of course) It also depends on good moderators appearing and taking their roles seriously enough. In some other thread, I described our anarchic approach as "Everyone contributes what they can when they can to the best of their ability." By allowing people to declare themselves moderators and letting server admins decide which ones they'll trust, we should see the best community moderators rising to the top and being trusted by many server admins. They should also be able to make the most difference and hopefully also show good judgment on when to act, and when to leave well enough alone.