We need to draw a line

https://i.imgur.com/i6IqDDj.png please see this too for more examples on what we need to stop

Please see this example...I literally saw this within 30 seconds of maximizing my chat window after leaving the forums. Please, staff and players, look at these suggestions for real chat taking place...

https://i.imgur.com/9Mz56mH.png

any staff that is not willing to start cleaning things up needs to go immediately. we have veteran players 15+ years that are starting to quit. we need to act fast please. see ephemerals thread under the SSCU Trenchwars discussion area.. if it takes ending all discussion of this sort as of tomorrow, then just do it. we can work from there but perhaps a clean slate will help for right now... im glad to hop back on as a moderator if needed. if not, thats fine as well. i will be fine with only enforcing the type of crap ephemeral is pointing out, or rab, or turban..etc...every that actually cares about the game is apparently seeing it.

so it sounds like turban is saying he wants a similar policy to what rab is pushing for..

[Turban]

Our public arena has never been a great experience for any player and it is mostly because we allow several extremely disruptive players to run rampant without any severe consequences--a short period of silence or formal warning simply is not enough for these people to learn. It would be better for the game to permanently get rid of these players, as unjust as it may seem for some of you, to improve the overall experience of every other player who are simply trying to enjoy an old spaceship shooter game.

I do not want to log into the game and immediately see random arguments about religion, politics, or any other miscellaneous topic that turns usually into a heated debate, or watch immature adults trying their hardest to be racist as inconspicuously as possible.

"There is a simple line you can see when a player is being racist and disrupting the peace. I see no reason to stop political discussion or allow non staff to silence players because this would be easily abused for the lols which we don't need happening either. Staff has a protocol since 1998 or so that have been listed in public arena. It has worked. Trolls need to be stopped and that is staffs job."

Jessup, ideally i want it like this ...the only reason i am also on board for stopping anything of the sort after a long discussion ensues is because staff has a historically bad reputation of "well thats not really racism"...the common sense just falls through and players end up pushing the limit further and further...which is what has happened at this point..its gone too far...

everyone laughed when i started issuing silences and bans as a moderator, now its a huge fuckin problem...so yea, i agree this is simple...have common sense...and stop not acknowledging when something has obvious racial undertones even if its not blatant racist terminology...if staff actually follows through this time and does what you are saying im all for it. if they cant handle that subtlety, then im for rabs version of this...

[Jessup]

An interesting way to handle this might involve players moderating (as unless ban regulations are changed, staff don't have a way to enforce it ... especially when it's hard to say what "it" is, other than a "certain" standard of decency).

Some games use a simple vote system to vote to mute annoying or offensive players for a time.

I'd imagine this would work by two players typing something like !votemute <name>, and then the bot would start a vote to mute the player. Obviously, this would get abused, and so it would need to be implemented properly, but it might stand some chance of working properly. Might need to have a ban list to prevent certain players from using it, and require names to have recently and actively played a certain amount of time to have a vote. (Certainly spectators wouldn't have one.)

I think the solution is to just have staff monitor pub more and do silences on offending players. There is a simple line you can see when a player is being racist and disrupting the peace. I see no reason to stop political discussion or allow non staff to silence players because this would be easily abused for the lols which we don't need happening either. Staff has a protocol since 1998 or so that have been listed in public arena. It has worked. Trolls need to be stopped and that is staffs job.

The real goal should be to decide what constitutes stepping over the line. Public rules listed covers all this but still needs staff sorting when things are on the edge of getting out of control. I suggest staff council may be the solution. 2 or 3 <ER> / higher rank staff should discuss the situation and make a decision. In short this is a STAFF job to be done when it comes to keeping the peace.

i agree its really not as complicated as it may seem. id be okay with what rab just stated as well.. pub chat needs to be somewhat preserved for general discussion OTHER than the aforementioned topics. if the few players that constantly talk about these issues want to go on their own freq or chat they can do so. stop polluting it for everyone every.single.day, though.

what rab is talking about is basically doing what the moderators used to do before 2007.

i recently joined a reddit mma discord group that will auto remove any message with "obama" or "trump" in it. of course, you can private message people or create your own chat with them as you meet them, but they WILL NOT ALLOW IT in their main chat room. looks like it is working out fine. no one has left, and its a huge reddit community of like 500+ people talking about MMA...

just saying its not so complicated to put a stop to this...add to A1: No excessive political arguments in public chats.

If someone says something that happens to trigger an opinionated response, and they go back and forth a couple times i get it...we are people...but if staff sees it going on for more than 10 minutes straight someone needs to tell them to stop it OR take it private/create a chat for everyone to continue discussing. no one is going to change each other on this game. if someone like manco starts talking about how some races have a different shaped skull and brain out of no where or some other nazi/white supremacist bullshit, it needs to be stopped immediately if seen. it does NOTHING EXCEPT cause a disturbance and trigger people into 30 minute+ long arguments.

[Rab]

qan there's a difference between what we think is currently moderated. I would argue that racism, spam, and harassment rules are not currently being moderated.

I understand you need something defining before you will action it, so here goes.

The Problem
What is happening is people bait each other into arguments about politics, race, gender, sexuality, religion.

The Solution
New rule: No discussions of politics, race, gender, sexuality, religion.

This is first and foremost a spaceship game. There's no good reason to be discussing this stuff in the public chat. People may make a chat channel and continue their discussion on an opt-in basis.

Job done.

and just want to add one more thing...if people quit this game because they cant blurt out the most ignorant racist and/or bigoted shit that can be said on the internet, then why any staff want them to remain in this community?

• Talking about politics in a politically-incorrect/unpopular way? (e.g., "immigration is bad"/"I hate immigrants"/"religion should be banned"/"all Christians deserve death")
  
  YES. and lets be "clear" about it--not just christians or immigrants etc...ANY racial vilification or vilification of specific groups of people/cultures/countries/races/sexual orientation needs to be silenced. there needs to be some COMMON SENSE with enforcing these policies...enough of "well i mean thats just their opinion"...if someone starts saying things with obvious undertones of said vilification, then enforce the rule. also, if someone tries to purposely incite shit by saying "yea anyone that voted for trump is dumb in my opinion" COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTEXT just to trigger people or distrupt the game--thats trolling, we need it to stop.
  
  now, i just used an example of someone "against trump" or "against right wing" doing this--but the truth is that it comes from the racist right wing types way, way more often. thats not just an opinion of mine its just simple observation and i feel like this conversation cant be successful if staff doesnt even acknowledge that they are the type of people being the major problem here.
  
  but i dont want anyone to think i have some double standard. any purposeful trolling of this type needs to stop. even if by chance its from someone that wants to trigger a trump voter or a right wing ideologue. however, its very doubtful, and i want to know if staff will acknowledge this so we can move forward with the focus of the type of content that is enforced. this is how we can start to define what type of trolling is happening, and what kind of racism and socio-political triggering that is happening (admittedly i care more about that but its all important to put a stop as much as possible). so, will staff acknowledge what is actually happening here? when manco starts saying his pseudo "scientific" type of statements that are blatantly racist can we please have some common sense and tell him to stop? thats just ONE example from ONE player. im not just trying to target only manco.

[qan]

I thought it was pretty clear that I didn't mean "let's literally do nothing." We're trying to figure out what to do. There's a problem; let's do something about it. You seem to want everything to be fixed for you. Rather than trying to add your own effort to the effort of others. Staff's an absolute skeleton crew, and one of the reasons is because "players" don't seem to see staff as people so much as their servants or their mother/father who will take care of everything. But this is just a community of players. I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but we're just players who are volunteers. You've done your share of volunteering and found out it wasn't "fun." Yeah, no kidding. Meanwhile quite literally very nearly anyone is welcome to join staff in 2018, so long as they can abide by the rules and will put in some work. (And can bypass ZH/ER tags for long-time members of the community who are deeply familiar with the game, in some cases.)


The point I was trying to make was that there's absolutely no problem expanding what we moderate, so long as we define it clearly. What should be moderated, and what shouldn't?

Currently moderated:

• Racism
• Spam
• Pornography
• Harassment after the person being harassed has used ?ignore and the harasser is attempting to evade their ignore

What additional things should be moderated?

• Sexual talk? Just sexual talk of a highly graphical nature? (What is highly graphic/where is the line? Providing a significant example set is probably enough.)
• Sexual harassment?
• Harassment based on gender, sexuality, or sexual identification?
• Harassment/bullying in general?
  • (For the previous 3, in order to moderate harassment, we have to define what qualifies as harassment, and what doesn't.)
• Talking about politics in a politically-incorrect/unpopular way? (e.g., "immigration is bad"/"I hate immigrants"/"religion should be banned"/"all Christians deserve death")
• Denying the holocaust or other genocides?
• Expressing your belief that any group is in any way superior to any other?

There are problems with moderating all of these. If we do so, we need to clearly define what is being moderated and why, to prevent mods from abusing their power for personal vendettas. But that is something that we can define.

But we should keep in mind that the more speech is moderated, the more power it gains. I've always felt that ridiculing a "Nazi" for being a laughable anachronism is far more effective than a punch to the face. The only logical position is one of pragmatism: focus on effect.

[Rab]

That leaves us pretty much nowhere.

Typical of all interactions with staff IMO.
Do SOMETHING.

[qan]

Silencing is definitely a bit destructive, yeah. Especially as it follows you across arenas and prevents bot interaction. And it reduces your command use to literally only ?go. You can't type ?chat, ?lag, ?messages, etc.

Unfortunately I was under the impression that *lockpublic could be PMd. But this just toggles the arena-wide (or spectator-wide) setting, even when sent in PM.

I'm not sure enabling STFU permanently is the right way to go. We'd just see a lot more people idling in-game, upsetting the team balance, pretty sure. This already happens during STFU.

Another option would be to buy blueout. Not all that much that's positive gets said during a game anyhow. Could focus people on communicating with their team and winning.

If we did end up going the silence route, it could be done for only a short amount of time. Might be enough. And there might be a way to make sure it only affects pub, though the silence system as it is is already a bit janky...



As for "just give me powers and I'll clean up everything," I received a similar offer last night, oddly enough. Unfortunately, I'm guessing that like that individual, you're not able to offer concrete criteria as to what you would moderate or not? One reason TW's endured is because we have a fairly strict and clear ban protocol, and mods who don't follow it don't stay mods very long. There's not much room left for personal interpretation, which prevents it from being used in a tyrannical manner. Though, the Ban Ops and Head Sysops still have a fairly free hand in the matter. Within reason.

We do generally enforce the list of rules, though in a specific manner that isn't satisfying for everyone. The rule we don't enforce these days is #12, "Harassment or otherwise insulting behavior towards zone staff." And not enforcing that has gone a long way toward stemming the tide of outright evil mods. (Remember when PMing a mod something racist was enough to get you banned? Remember how much it was abused?)

The catch-all rule, being "highly disruptive," is the one that most people cite when they want to get rid of "trolls." (This is generally not a correct attribution, either, as for the most part they aren't trolling. They just hold undesirable opinions and say undesirable things.) The problem is in determining what is disruptive and what is not. And again, nobody's putting in the time or energy it would take to establish a fair system to weed out "undesirables" but keep relatively free speech intact. That leaves us pretty much nowhere.

[Rab]

Is "mute" the same as "silence"? Silencing is very harsh, you're basically prevented from playing the game. First step should be making "stfu" permanently applied.

Second step is for the rules of the zone to actually be enforced. They're clearly written at A1 but when staff are requested to enforce them, staff never actually do. I want to know why they aren't doing what they say they'll do.

Feel free to give me power to ban people and I'll have this sorted out within 5 mins.