Frances

As far as I know mods can be coders/devs, they just won't have dev flags because that would technically make them admins in all but name.

I just don't understand how someone can even accumulate 28 warnings. At some point, a mod or admin would look at Techno's notes and go: "Hey, that's a lot of warnings, perhaps we should go have a longer talk with him." The fact that he's accumulated such a large number of warnings without being permabanned or punished in any other way seems to be leading me to believe this might have never been done. If steps have never been taken to change the user's behavior, I'm not sure how much I even want to blame the user at that point.

What saddens me is that most of the people posting in this thread claiming to ban Techno haven't (to my knowledge) made an effort to help sort out the issues presented here. They look at the evidence, go "yep, Techno's probably a bad person", and immediately jump to passing judgement that he should be banned, for the most part without trying to communicate their objections with Techno directly, which would have been the simplest thing. There's two ways to solve these kind of problems. Either try to work with the problematic user, or ban them. As a general rule, you should try to favor the former approach, and only resort to the latter one in case of failure. The fact alone that Techno has managed to accumulate 28 warnings tells me that something is wrong. On both sides. How exactly do you warn somebody 28 times, yet never try to pull them aside to discuss underlying issues? Giving someone 28 slaps on the wrist without ever resorting to different tactics seems a bit iffy.

Most of the recent incidents that led to Techno's antag-ban are currently being reviewed (general combat incidents, see the thread about Garnascus, and his own appeal). A lot of people have a bad kneejerk reaction to characters being killed on Aurora, and I have to admit Techno has become an unjust target of at least some of this unfounded critique. (I'm not saying he's perfect, but I believe his combat-related play has been acceptable lately.) This is entirely different from his behavior, however. I don't know what mods wish to do with the forum ban, but I'd be glad to relay Techno's words to this thread in the meantime. (I'll probably hold back on participating myself if that's the case, though.)

I think most of us can all agree there's a problem to be solved. The steps to solve it need to come either from Techno, or from staff. Pretty much the only thing staff can do on their own is remove Techno. As for what Techno himself could do: he could take in reasonable criticism, and attempt to modify his behavior. I see some discussion of bad stuff Techno did, and punishments he received. There's supposed to be a link between the two - you recognize that you've been punished because the stuff was bad and you won't do it anymore - and I don't see that link being discussed very much by involved parties. Ideally, I'd like Techno to post here and tell us what he thinks of his behavior, and if he agrees or disagree with our desire to encourage him to change it (and if he understand why we don't like some of it, too.)

Actually, I think citing examples might be helpful? Most people don't mean to ruin rounds, and believe they're making enjoyable contributions. That stands true for a lot of self-antagging, too. It's gonna be easier for people to identify themselves (and discuss issues) if they see the events as clearly mentioned.

As for my own thoughts, I think Techno is too salty. He needs to take some time to think about how that reflects on how people perceive his behavior, as well as on the kind of unpleasant climate it creates for others. Example: there's nothing wrong with calling a crew transfer after joining if the round has been going on for 4 hours. If extended doesn't sound appealing to you, and you'd prefer a new round, you have the right to start that vote. The worst that can happen is that a majority of people will be content with the current round, and vote for it to continue. The behavior Techno displayed, however, is pretty unpleasant. As much as most of it may be ironic or personality quirks, liberally calling people "asshats" while going "what the fuck" at the reaction to the crew transfer paints you as a negative, intimidating and hostile person. For this reason, I'm not surprised that a lot of people are holding prejudice against Techno. And I don't think he should be judged for his actions alone; his outward behavior greatly affects how other members of the community react to him, and it's his responsibility to learn how to use this behavior to obtain favorable results instead of unfavorable ones.

Posting on Techno's behalf, because he's still forumbanned until the 17th.

Well, my line of reasoning is this: Not a lot of people play IAA. The very few people who both play IAA and pay attention to the forums (specifically incident reports) should have a generally good sense of what conducting an investigation entails. All in all, there's little risk for tampering or chucklefuckery, unless you run into a terrible IAA a la Plahunter, but that's easily dealt with (or simply, don't give them Rank 2.) Honestly, as long as the evidence gathered is solid and the investigation is done matter-of-factly, there's not much ground for complaint. Have you actually had to invoke the nature of your logs after handing out a contested punishment?

I'd just be happy if normal IAAs could get a bit involved with incident reports. Though honestly, your suggestion depends on how hard it is for a DO to solve the average case - I'd assume most of them are just one or two interviews in sequence, followed by OOC deliberation with the other DOs. That could pretty easily be translated to IAAs if wanted, and if a specific DO wants a case because they have a special idea of what to do with it they could always call dibs in advance.

What do you define as Duty Officer stuff? Having on-station Duty Officers could be a pretty big gamechanger. It might go against the "one person per case" modus that DOs currently operate under, though.

Well, IAAs can't fire people or take permanent action, because they're literally random players (and some of them are really shitty). DOs are able to do more, but it's a more difficult process (you gotta take a case, then meet with the person - I sort of wonder if DOs shouldn't simply handle cases on a whim and talk to each other as needed). What's neat about IAAs is that they can actually do a lot of data collection that could help with DOs. Say someone is targeted by a sexual harassment complaint. Pretty much all a DO can do is meet with that person, meet with the complaint's originator, and that's it. If the character is a huge pervert, there's not gonna be any way for the DO to know (unless other people make complaints) because the DO doesn't have a constant station presence. They come in a round, interview involved parties, and leave. An IAA that was intent on keeping an eye on this character, however, could write notes of further incidents, without people even needing to report them (say the character keeps hitting on people over comms. That's super easy to monitor). And then bam, IA report, adjoined to the IC case, and used to deal judgement. Of course this requires IAAs to actually remain objective in their reports (looking at you, Terrence Frank.)

Simple enough. The way things currently are, IC reports are confidential, and strictly kept between the involved parties and the DOs. This prevents people from complaining or gossiping about reports, among other things. Could it be interesting to allow IAAs to get involved in incident reports, purely on an observational basis? Basically, a report is filed, IAAs become aware of it, and they could observe the reported crew, take notes, and evaluate. Interview friends, coworkers, the complainant. They couldn't inform any uninvolved people of the complaint, naturally. This could help lighten the workload of DOs, as it's rather difficult and formal to get one specific DO to meet one specific character, while IAAs can drop in and out of cases much more casually. Thoughts?

Techno is currently forumbanned, but wished to reply to EORhappiness. Given that this is a thread he initiated and EOR's comment is directly aimed at his actions, I thought this was a reasonable request. Here's his post:

Do you have AIDS too? yes

Skull actually wrote a great post on this topic on reddit, and I don't know if anybody here saw it.

The server is heavily stacked against antags. There is a mentality that antags are there to serve the whims of every player (rather than work with them as equals to collaborate on a narrative), and that antags must specifically preserve life at all costs, while making every death "interesting". I have seen this be reinforced by both players and staff. I believe it's restricting a lot of interesting scenarios by asking for the impossible, and making antagging very difficult and frustrating.

Well, no, if Furry has an actual valid explanation for the syringe gun then there'd be no reason not to clear that (the claims of self-antagging were only a small part of the problem, however, and not one I even really considered). However, I actually tried to look through the complaints archive and couldn't find anything mentioning Safiya or a syringe gun, so the burden of proof rests on Furry at this point. (Also I understand your frustration, but there's no need to step down to his level and start spouting curse words.) And @Furry, you don't actually have to deal with any of this if you want to. But what's gonna happen if you start trouble and refuse to address it, is that the show is going to move on without you. You seem convinced that you're flawless in your actions, and I'm not sure what to say to prove you otherwise. I'd much rather you realize the issues on your own, but the absence of that doesn't really preclude admins and DOs from intervening.

No, your actions serve to establish character. Refer back to the example I gave of the uber-snowflake captain girl. She had a proper justification for all of her traits, and it would be overzealous to punish her harshly for any of these traits alone, yet the sum of their parts made for something much worse. Also, just a remark, but I think you ignored the part about the syringe gun. You tend to drop arguments that you're losing, so if you never look at those I can see how it becomes easy to imagine I'm just a bad person harassing you baselessly.

If I can try to provide an explanation, these serve to establish character. They're again minor to outright non-punishable in and of themselves, but can help further other points. For example, the idea: "Safiya is a very physical and touchy character" is backed by the notion that she once ignored a corpse to nuzzle another Tajaran working in her lab. Granted, that's not worth much alone, especially considering that was done at round end, but when your sole aim is to portray Safiya as a character who is contrarian to Tajaran lore and more in alignment with furry stereotypes, it does go a long way. When you couple it with the frequent mentions of sex she makes (and a few other claims people have brought up here), it does result in something bad. For the syringe gun, it's outright bad. You shouldn't have to take the medbay's syringe gun every round (or whenever you feel like it) and load it up with chloral, greatly affecting the balance of power in a lot of situations, simply "in case you might have to fight someone". A much easier solution would be to simply resist the urge to maul people when it's uncalled for, or face the consequences (if you had a valid reason to beat someone up I doubt you would get in major trouble for it). So that's another unfavorable trait for Safiya. Lastly, the point isn't to get you punished for any of these incidents, but establish whether Safiya is a reasonable, balanced character, or one that requires modifications to better fit in the game. Hope that sheds a bit of light on things.

I have no idea who you are, but this is really coming out of left field for me. And I mean, I'm gonna take this post seriously, because you seem to have put a lot of effort into writing it and you're obviously mad at me for something? Anyway, I'd be really curious to hear where you got the idea that I hate TheFurry, given as I've barely interacted with him either ingame or on the forums. If you're afraid of spamming up this complaint with unrelated discussion (it's pretty much solved anyway), maybe you could send me a PM? I'd be glad to give you my Skype, too. I honestly think a lot of this misses the mark on what constitutes a healthy community. Feedback and criticism are important - what do you do when two people disagree on something? How do you decide whose feelings matter in the end? I've also posted on the Furaffinity forums for over two years, so I have a pretty good idea what furry "stereotypes" are. Keep in mind I didn't say furries in general. Stereotypes.

It's gonna be handled IC, issue solved, anyway. There's something I'm really curious about. The people who have been defending TheFurry have been singling out issues to do so. Basically, going incident by incident, rather than viewing things from a holistic standpoint. What do you have to say about the list of Safiya's character traits, as a whole? This list: Like, isn't that a lot of things?

Well, the question is, how do you kidnap a DO? And do we really need to go through the charade of "you must provide the escort interesting roleplay before killing them"? That seems a bit silly past a point.

Yeah, I was observing and I can confirm the engineer who was shot was informed by their colleagues they were probably going to be shot, and only went in (with full knowledge of that) because they were the antag who originally looted the armory, and likely wanted to see what was up/confront security. They didn't walk into trouble unexpectedly and suddenly *bam*.