[DEPRECATED] Community-Driven Silence Program (!report)

[the_paul]

Does ?ignore not work anymore? All of the discussion I've seen about new rules makes it sound like ?ignore doesn't exist anymore

[rothe]

This sounds like mob rule. Considering some of the reports I remember this sounds scary.

[Falconeer]

We've used additive punishments for a very long time, and it does have some success.

But in this instance, as players' chat is not violating a rule, and the mute is not a punishment for anything, additive "punishment" doesn't seem to fit.

Referring to any chat as cancer is a bit heavy-handed, I'll agree. The kind of speech that will be regulated with this is not necessarily just what is called "cancer" by some people. For example, it could be used to mute someone who is using profanity.

Players may get tired of reporting the same people, but that's where it balances out: if you don't care enough to make the effort, it may not be upsetting enough for you to bother. Finding the right balance is key, as tucker (voth) has said.


As for single players reporting, it doesn't work like that. Staff will not see anything from single uses of !report. Many people will need to do it, and it will need to be done in a certain window of time, before the reports of others expire, in order to send a notification for action. We're being intentionally vague on the details for the time being to avoid encouraging gaming the system. However, if anyone should attempt to do that, the punishments are very clear both here and after the command itself is used.

And again, moderators themselves will play very little role in determining if a silence should go through. Once certain conditions are met, unless something's amiss, the moderator should be applying the mute. The idea is to remove moderators as much as possible from the process. They are the sanity check, and are not meant to be a large determining factor.

yeah i saw rab mentioning many reports, and voth agreeing, but in the original post i didn't see a mention of many reports? did i miss it? can someone point it out for me if it's not too much trouble? maybe it was only mentioned once and it's easy to miss? i don't know..

many reports is better, and fixes the problems i brought up, as long as it's more than 3 reports, with the attitude that more reports means it's more serious/urgent.

EDIT: never mind i found it..

There is a coded mechanism into the bot that will automatically notify staff to review a player?s speech if a certain number of unique reports are received in a predetermined time frame.

Okay this means the reports themselves are the community votes that someone should be muted, while leaving the ultimate decision up to staff so it's less of a mob rule. Sounds a lot better now.

One thing i'll throw out there is maybe when someone is reported, have the bot say a player was reported, but not by who. This way it serves as an early warning system for the player to tone it down before it leads to a silence that can't be stopped. You can make the bot PM the offending player that they were reported (for each report that was sent out) or it can be public. unsure if having that info public would stir drama or not. If the goal is to get people to moderate their own speech and to stop and recognize when speech is bad, this would serve that purpose. The gag should only come if people continue.

EDIT 2: to hide the number of reports, just only report the first report to the offending player. This way they know they should tone it down, but at the same time don't know how many people reported them, probably best?

[qan]

Seems reasonable.

[Rab]

Will you share with us, say in a couple of weeks, some information about how much the system is being used?

[qan]

We've used additive punishments for a very long time, and it does have some success.

But in this instance, as players' chat is not violating a rule, and the mute is not a punishment for anything, additive "punishment" doesn't seem to fit.

Referring to any chat as cancer is a bit heavy-handed, I'll agree. The kind of speech that will be regulated with this is not necessarily just what is called "cancer" by some people. For example, it could be used to mute someone who is using profanity.

Players may get tired of reporting the same people, but that's where it balances out: if you don't care enough to make the effort, it may not be upsetting enough for you to bother. Finding the right balance is key, as tucker (voth) has said.


As for single players reporting, it doesn't work like that. Staff will not see anything from single uses of !report. Many people will need to do it, and it will need to be done in a certain window of time, before the reports of others expire, in order to send a notification for action. We're being intentionally vague on the details for the time being to avoid encouraging gaming the system. However, if anyone should attempt to do that, the punishments are very clear both here and after the command itself is used.

And again, moderators themselves will play very little role in determining if a silence should go through. Once certain conditions are met, unless something's amiss, the moderator should be applying the mute. The idea is to remove moderators as much as possible from the process. They are the sanity check, and are not meant to be a large determining factor.

[Falconeer]

Well Voth is an example of staff bias, I've done nothing derailing here, completely on topic. Bringing up your negative opinions and biases of me, for no apparent reason however is derailing. And it also proves my point that staff isn't objective.

Anyway, an additive punishment system doesn't deter people more than the same punishment happening frequently would. Additive punishment would just ensure people blame staff more and have vendettas. It basically only cuts down on how frequently staff have to get involved, so it's a more lazy method lets say. I don't need to test it because I've seen it in action in many zones over many years. But go ahead and test additive/history based punishments, and you'll see it creates more toxic attitudes toward staff in a few years when it's too late. If you want additive punishments then you need to bring in bans for text to get rid of the problem entirely (something i don't agree with).

Also referring to people as cancer probably isn't good.

[Voth]

And to be clear, more minor changes with regards to the reports and time frames are open to tweaking. Obviously, if we as staff see a clear issue in pub with a lot of cancer prevalent and not one report comes in, we know that reporting guidelines need to be tightened. If it is the exact opposite and we are spammed with reports, perhaps we ease them off a little. It's finding the balance that we aim for. This is the first shot.

[Voth]

FYI: I'd probably just stop responding to Falconeer if you really want to discuss this. He only derails conversations and is just a blockade of nonsense to an otherwise decent discussion.

[Voth]

qan yeah I get it, and I do appreciate the progress in the right direction, I just foresee 2 things:
1. Staff will get annoyed having to appove reports against the same handful of people. As already confirmed, you'll have the data so if you choose to take extra steps you'll be able to. An alternative to more severe punishment might be automatic approval for known offenders.
2. Players will get tired of reporting the same handful of people, knowing there'll only be a 1 hour silence and they'll have to report again. Some players will stop using the feature, then the reporting threshold will not be met, then no reports will escalate to staff. It would be easy to conclude that less reports means the system was working, but in this scenario less reports is a bad thing. I'm not even sure we'll ever hit sufficient reports to hit the unknown threshold, reporting people requires a degree of giving-a-fuck that most people don't have, even if they would prefer for the players to be silenced.

1. Staff that are still here are already callous enough to deal with the issue of the cancers of this zone. They have generally been dealing with the same players for years. Automatic approval probably won't happen. Increased penalties is on the table in my mind, but at this point, we will see how this goes.

2. Could be. That might be when we explore a "ladder" system similar to BanCs. If we need to go that route because this is happening, we will. I don't think it will be hard to tell between the two options: either the system is working and the cancer is significantly reduced, or it isn't working and the cancer continues with people whining about it but not using the !report function.

We will see.

[Rab]

It's up to people to decide whether to report for that.
Personally I would report if it was spam. When I look at my chat window and most of the content is from one person that's usually a good sign something's wrong.
My judgement would be that chat would be improved by that person's content being hidden.
Imagine you're a new player and the first thing that happens is you get killed 10 times in a row and the guy says ez every time. You're gonna quit and game and leave a steam review about how toxic the community is.

[Falconeer]

does this apply to people saying ez and 2ez after every kill in pub? might as well let us know if that's enough to get silenced for 60 minutes. seems like there will be multiple double standards and hypocrisy going around if every decision is community based. Some players will be silenced for saying ez after every kill, and others wouldn't, because the players people tend to hate would be reported more.

[Rab]

qan yeah I get it, and I do appreciate the progress in the right direction, I just foresee 2 things:
1. Staff will get annoyed having to appove reports against the same handful of people. As already confirmed, you'll have the data so if you choose to take extra steps you'll be able to. An alternative to more severe punishment might be automatic approval for known offenders.
2. Players will get tired of reporting the same handful of people, knowing there'll only be a 1 hour silence and they'll have to report again. Some players will stop using the feature, then the reporting threshold will not be met, then no reports will escalate to staff. It would be easy to conclude that less reports means the system was working, but in this scenario less reports is a bad thing. I'm not even sure we'll ever hit sufficient reports to hit the unknown threshold, reporting people requires a degree of giving-a-fuck that most people don't have, even if they would prefer for the players to be silenced.

[Lupin]

Sounds good, thank you!

[Falconeer]

To be absolutely clear, these silences have nothing to do with breaking any rules. Those being silenced are not offenders except in the sense of the public taste. It's a way for the community to enforce its own standards. Which standards those are depends on who is currently in the game. This allows the public to decide at any point what is or is not disruptive, much like the mute or gag functions in many games.

This means that players can be silenced for having unpopular political views, rambling on excessively, being rude, making tasteless jokes, excessive sexual talk, etc. We have established absolutely no guidelines in terms of what constitutes "disruptive" speech; that's something every person can decide for themselves. So long as a reasonable case can be made that the talk is disruptive, and several people report it in a certain amount of time, the mute will be issued. The chief role of moderators in this process is ensuring reports are not fraudulent. Even if the moderator does not find the speech personally offensive, they are still obligated to perform their duty.

For the system to function best, players who take offense to certain kinds of speech should simply !report whenever this happens.

Over time, those who are muted regularly are likely to do one of the following: continue to receive regular mutes; modify their behavior so as not to receive mutes; or quit.

There are no plans at this time to issue game bans for anyone receiving mutes due to violating standards of public decency.

Yeah but qan most games you are comparing this too have a vote gag system. This sounds like its 1 report, and the vote happens privately in staff after, based on just 1 person being "offended" (them being offended could not even be the case). Doesn't seem like it's about setting community standards when only one person in the community decided to report it.

If you want the community to decide, then after the report comes in staff might as well run a public pub poll asking if the person should be silenced. lol This is something you can do on the bot. Even though that's mob rule, at least it's better because it takes power away from one individual who may be seeking to only do harm, and leaves power with the community. You can have a registration system for bot polls so only registered voters can vote. This ensures no cheating.

or better yet the poll should ask if the speech was offensive.