About the complaints system

[Scheveningen]

So, I've had an epiphany after discussing this with someone, and it's not a great one seeing as how I've also been party to essentially why the complaints system is not functioning well to ensure accountability for other players.

The Complaints boards are effectively nonfunctional because they essentially promote angry, shitposty, lynch mob-type conversations regarding what a player either did or didn't do during a round or over an OOC format. There are reasons for this.

1. There is little to no enforcement in terms of how the forum rules are supposed to function. Some members of the community maintain that the complaints system essentially enables members of the community to establish smear campaigns meant to devalue other members of the community for their contributions. I cannot count the amount of times "Oh but you did X in the past so I don't think you should have that much credit" comes up as a means to deliberately deflate others for having an inch of positivity and pride about themselves. 
2. Certain staff, whether on the moderation team or on the dev team or on the lore team, are not consistently held to the same rules, but neither are members of the community. The community sees this and thinks it's okay to replicate when it is clearly not.
3. Whitelisting staff have removed the command whitelist of an individual on the singular basis of having a lot of complaints, rather than whether or not judging their behavior was in any way wrong after checking the logs on-server and the context in which certain acts on the server were performed. The fact this happened even once shows the staff essentially took a complaint as fact without a heavy investment of looking into whether the situation was bad as it was made out to be. As soon as that got addressed, they restored the person's whitelist because of a "mistake" in their evaluation, if it can be summed up to only a single wrongdoing there. Are we supposed to trust the whitelisting team to do their job if this sort of thing happens? Edit: To clarify, it's because of how insidiously 'dug-in' the current etiquette for the complaint forums are. They're beginning to affect staff's ability to rationally make decisions because of this.
4. The threat of a complaint has been used numerous times by several members of the community as a threat in LOOC to other players if they commit to a certain action. This is a toxic behavior pattern but it is one enabled by the current state of the complaint boards.

But I will be pretty frank, because I know #3 happened because nobody wants to seriously handle the forums for complaints given how the system exists as-is. So I don't necessarily blame them, but I seriously think it's time to take some actual steps in the direction of allowing the administration to establish an actual investigation rather than wait for the next dumpster fire of a complaint thread to put itself out.

So rather than keeping on with this current trend of how the complaints system essentially enables the current nonsense we see in complaints, here are a couple (rather proactive) solutions to fix this problem:

I.) Within the player complaints and staff complaints sections, anyone can create a thread, but only moderation staff can post replies or comments in it.
II.) The expected reply from the first staff member is that they are taking the case as an investigation. The same post should encourage other witnesses (including the reported player/staffmember) to the instance to DM them through discord or PM them through the forums with any evidence pertaining to what the initial complaint topic references.
III.) After cross-referencing server logs, testimonies and any other evidence, the staff member should conclusively decide what happened and whether or not any action should be taken. Review with other staff if necessary. After, speak to the 'offending' player/staffmember to clarify any issues in a forum PM or over Discord, whichever they prefer.
IV.) The reviewing staffmember is then expected to make a follow-up post based off of their own discretion. They can either make a simple post clearing the individual of any wrongdoing or one that states the subject of the complaint was guilty of the aforementioned behavior.
V.) The staffmember should then be expected to close up the complaint in the usual timeframe before it is locked and considered resolved.

What does this fix?
A.) It totally neutralizes the peanut gallery. I'm guilty in participating in this, but I honestly think that if you want to prevent the peanut gallery from happening at all, you either need to punish people for doing it or neutralize the ability for them to do so. The staff really hasn't done the former, so there's a fair deal of evidence to show already that reactive measures do not work.
B.) It prevents complaint threads from reaching beyond 2 pages in terms of insanity to parse through and deal with.
C.) It allows complaints to be investigated with the same amount of upheld integrity as the CCIA have for their IC reports forum, without having to worry about moderating the complaint boards.
D.) Given the above, it allows complaints to be resolved in much more expeditiousness than what we've commonly seen in the complaints.

What are some issues with this?
A.) Muh freeze peach, I guess. Does your right to post meanspirited implications about how other should be shut out from playing this server, somehow rank higher than the need to keep the complaint boards sanitized of toxicity and enabled to be actually functional? I don't think so. This is essentially the only ethical problem that really exists here, but the complaint boards should not be meant to enable anyone who has absolutely nothing to add to a thread to do so in such a manner. The goal of the complaints is to take evidence into account to make fair and as unbiased as possible judgments. Complaint threads should never go down into a 5-10 page shitshow where all that is contained within it is opinions and none of them matter.

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In short, complaints should be resolved strictly by evidence-based decision-making and nothing more. The ability to add fluff like "It's no secret this user and I have not gotten along" should not be possible at all.

With the system listed above, you can essentially add far more to an investigation of a possible rule-break by DMing the assigned staffmember with the necessary information and enabling them to do their job with zero strings attached.

Edited December 21, 2018 by Scheveningen

[Kaed]

I don't have a whole lot of faith in staff member's abilities to make arbitrated judgements based on vague information and round logs, generally speaking, because almost no staff member I have ever talked to has anything that I would call resembling a nonpartisan standpoint on server politics. But that's not really the issue here, and I don't suppose having a half dozen or more people screaming accusations in the thread particularly makes their attempt to arbitrate a dispute.

And yet, I find myself largely despising this idea and feeling strong scorn towards you for basically implying that the 'peanut gallery' as you call it are a bunch of meanie meanpants who don't deserve to give testimony on an issue on account of not being one of the lofty madmins selected by the server administration from an unclear combination of supposedly being suitable for the position and having sheer insanity to willingly moderate a server full of screaming maniacs pretending to be characters in a severely overcomplicated atmos simulator without monetary recompensation.

I don't particularly like the idea of relegating discussion on matters to undocumented mediums like discord or PM, where no one can see what was said and it leaves everyone wondering what happened, but I can support a bit of tightening on the matter that only people actually involved in the complaint itself, i.e. the complainers, and the complainees should be posting there, but not like Joe McBystander who once had a snit with the complainee two months ago and wants to vent now about how much of a chodesucker this person is, complete with half remembered details that are difficult or impossible to verify.

Edited December 20, 2018 by Kaed

[Scheveningen]

2 hours ago, Kaed said:

I don't have a whole lot of faith in staff member's abilities to make arbitrated judgements based on vague information and round logs, generally speaking, because almost no staff member I have ever talked to has anything that I would call resembling a nonpartisan standpoint on server politics. But that's not really the issue here, and I don't suppose having a half dozen or more people screaming accusations in the thread particularly makes their attempt to arbitrate a dispute.

And yet, I find myself largely despising this idea and feeling strong scorn towards you for basically implying that the 'peanut gallery' as you call it are a bunch of meanie meanpants who don't deserve to give testimony on an issue on account of not being one of the lofty madmins selected by the server administration from an unclear combination of supposedly being suitable for the position and having sheer insanity to willingly moderate a server full of screaming maniacs pretending to be characters in a severely overcomplicated atmos simulator without monetary recompensation.

I place more faith in the administrators of the server to be more rational and fair than its community. I have my doubts about them too at times, but the goal of this is not to worry as much about server politics as it is preserving the intended function of what complaints are supposed to do and what decisions are supposed to come of them.

I trust the administration far more to weigh in on a specific issue and to be able to comprehensively investigate than what the peanut gallery often has to offer, yes. I will chance taking more than a bit of scorn in that belief. What value does a statement have, after all, if it is only designed to be said for the sake of setting whatever witch of the week the complaint boards seems to be set after, on fire?

I have a firm belief that discretion is important to administrating, and so is giving the benefit of the doubt even to a party that may be guilty. We do not need more of this dogpiling behavior in the complaints anymore, they have proven to negatively compromise how administrators make decisions. Removing it entirely will make for a better OOC environment and will permit for this forum to have a better reputation than it being "the place you go to complain and watch other people explode through text."

Complaints are strictly evidence-based and should have none of the over-complications often seen in comments to complaints. When that happens it just makes the administration want to put off dealing with the complaint even as it bloats with information and steadily gets more difficult to filter, while a terrible thing to do because it is essentially betraying a sense of duty, it is a very human thing to do to want to stay away from toxicity until it stops. Administrators are, unfortunately for them, human, and have identical thresholds of frustration and dealing with negativity just like the rest of us. If we can minimize this to better enable them to do their jobs, so be it. They're the ones with the responsibility to handle those complaints after all, not us.

I'm sure in the far future when we finally make mechanics on Aurora for-profit at some point that we will need transparency. Now, however, I do not think the community finds itself privy to the business between player and admin beyond the absolute minimum necessary.
 

2 hours ago, Kaed said:

I don't particularly like the idea of relegating discussion on matters to undocumented mediums like discord or PM, where no one can see what was said and it leaves everyone wondering what happened, but I can support a bit of tightening on the matter that only people actually involved in the complaint itself, i.e. the complainers, and the complainees should be posting there, but not like Joe McBystander who once had a snit with the complainee two months ago and wants to vent now about how much of a chodesucker this person is, complete with half remembered details that are difficult or impossible to verify.

I particularly love the idea of relegating discussion on such mediums, because it is within my fervent belief that the overall, often uninvolved community does not need to be involved in an issue between roughly 4 parties; the accuser, the accused, witnesses and the investigating staff member. Nobody else really needs to know.

Direct call-out threads masquerading as complaint threads do not work to improve behavior, considering how call-out complaints aren't intended to improve player/staff behavior, but rather are intended to shame them and devalue them. Call-out culture itself does not lend itself to rational, well-reasoned debate, it almost always leads to the feeling of either being the persecutor or the persecuted. Complaints should not manifest themselves in the latter way, and yet it does. Why? Because we all enable it to, and actively participate in it to exacerbate its effects.

The worst that happens under this hypothetical system is that you can only guess what information damned or justified someone. I will gladly take this over the present implications of toxicity in how complaints function. Damn me to hell if you like, as I do believe such.

Edited December 21, 2018 by Scheveningen

[Coalf]

It's a bit weird that in your thread where you try to reinforce the trust in staff and non-public communication you present two examples of staff being biased or making mistakes as main points. Perplexing boast, yet alas.

Now don't get me wrong I get where you're coming from, the issue is this is going to have some serious unintended consequences which Bay has felt when they censored their own complaint threads. Paranoia.

Let's say a thread appears, Character A killed Character B, your Character C saw it happen. You know that Character A did not kill Character B.
An Admin accepts this complaint.
A week later the admin concludes Character A is guilty and closes the complaint.
Do you see what I mean?

While it's admirable you trust us enough, as is demonstrated in this thread plenty of people don't. And I do understand where you're coming from in removal of toxicity, but this cannot be done by throwing a blanket over said toxicity.

People are still going to be toxic, they'll just use every other medium available to express their opinion.
Development is a perfect example, we have feedback threads, we have GitHub feedback threads, we have polls and we have the github log on discord. Yet with EVERY change the discord, private PM's, OOC and LOOC erupts into the discussion about this and that and how it's wrong and I am right.
Imagine this happening with literally every single complaint thread and unlike the forums, discord is MUCH harder to administrate.

In short, while I do admire this attempt I don't believe it's the right thing to do. I think it's the equivalent of putting a rug on the stain rather than cleaning it up.
You are right in that change of character, a true change can only happen through discipline and learning.
This is why the warning system exists if people do not learn, they get banned.

So I'd rather see a person being reported for using history to call someone out, rather than holding my fingers crossed that the admin really did interview literally everyone possible.

[Scheveningen]

1 hour ago, Coalf said:

It's a bit weird that in your thread where you try to reinforce the trust in staff and non-public communication you present two examples of staff being biased or making mistakes as main points. Perplexing boast, yet alas.

The intention was to put the blame on certain members of the community blowing something out of proportion that it makes it difficult for staff to deal with something in a rational and critical way.

Irrationality, ironically, cannot be challenged rationally, because the former individuals do not care about rational conventions or rules at all. I apologize if I made it seem like I said two different things at once, it wasn't the intention and I'll edit the sentiments to fit what I actually think.
 

1 hour ago, Coalf said:

Now don't get me wrong I get where you're coming from, the issue is this is going to have some serious unintended consequences which Bay has felt when they censored their own complaint threads. Paranoia.

Let's say a thread appears, Character A killed Character B, your Character C saw it happen. You know that Character A did not kill Character B.
An Admin accepts this complaint.
A week later the admin concludes Character A is guilty and closes the complaint.
Do you see what I mean?

Honestly, I'd rather have the naysayers about this community not be given a platform to speak about their paranoia at all. As it stands we're already doing so by essentially allowing anyone to comment on a complaint "either if they were involved or they have something helpful to say", the latter case not having a very specific definition of 'helpful.' Not unlike how there's no definition for gank right now because of a rule oversight.

Likewise, I'm adamant in believing this server's staff is different and the virtues/standards the staff are held to here are a far cry away from what X server is decried as. With good intentions and a record for better behavior than the 'mins on the other servers I know for sure this is an accomplish-able task. We all just need to be willing to try to make this a better community, but we can't do that by allowing the ones who actively attempt to make this environment more and more toxic to continue having a platform.
 

1 hour ago, Coalf said:

People are still going to be toxic, they'll just use every other medium available to express their opinion.
Development is a perfect example, we have feedback threads, we have GitHub feedback threads, we have polls and we have the github log on discord. Yet with EVERY change the discord, private PM's, OOC and LOOC erupts into the discussion about this and that and how it's wrong and I am right.
Imagine this happening with literally every single complaint thread and unlike the forums, discord is MUCH harder to administrate.

Then we re-instill zero tolerance for bullshit as we always have. Being okay with being suddenly complacent with shittier and more toxic attitudes taking over the community is not the fate we should resign ourselves to. I hate being an activist for this sort of thing as much as anyone else likely would in my position because it's a headache to have to stand up when no one else will. I believe the change I'm calling for here would be meaningful and with net positives in the long term. Such as it always is, it's always an awkward hurdle short-term but it would definitely be worth it. If it ends up not being worth it then we revert to the previous system and you get to make fun of me for being wrong, I'd be fine with that.

I just want an actual attempt to be made to correct the toxic attitudes. Not enough is being done right now aside from reacting to only the best possible opportunity.
 

1 hour ago, Coalf said:

In short, while I do admire this attempt I don't believe it's the right thing to do. I think it's the equivalent of putting a rug on the stain rather than cleaning it up.
You are right in that change of character, a true change can only happen through discipline and learning.
This is why the warning system exists if people do not learn, they get banned.

So I'd rather see a person being reported for using history to call someone out, rather than holding my fingers crossed that the admin really did interview literally everyone possible.

Heck no, the present isn't good at all! It's terrible to check the forums only to see the next 10 page complaint full of vitriol with the admin/mod staff being unable to do anything given how much crap is in it.

It's better that we make an attempt to change the state of the complaint forums now rather than repeat it for the next year before it gets addressed again.

The warning system doesn't really work either because it doesn't hold as much of a sting for performing deliberate bad behavior IC/OOCly as an actual ban does. I would know, and it definitely works to correct negative attitude.

Edited December 21, 2018 by Scheveningen

[Kaed]

I think the bigger problem with the toxicity is that people coming forward to testify should just be that - a testimony.  What happens instead is huge argument starts between several people and the thread fills with angry posts.  As an example, in a normal, organized legal process of a courtroom, the persecution says it's piece and sits down, and then the defense talks.  The defense doesn't interrupt the persecution with an objection leading to a huge shouting match while the judge (the admins in this case) just sort of blinks and watches the screaming match in helpless silence until they start saying things they can act on.

These things should be a single, as descriptive as possible testimony, and then it stops there, except as directed by the admin(s) running the thread.  No 10 page argument between the OP and the accused, or random mcwitness and the accused.

Edited December 21, 2018 by Kaed

[Scheveningen]

The issue, however, is that the courtroom setting cannot be emulated within current policy at the moment because the complaint boards all behave more like a Roman Curia (or an American congress with its associated filibustering) than it behaves like an American courtroom as it should in your example.

It's much more difficult to replicate the example you've given to function for the sake of between-screens handling of cases regarding things that happened over an internet game platform, which also begs the question if said effort is also worth the trouble investing all that effort into.

In the case I gave in my OP, it's a much more streamlined and simplified manner of procedure. While it may provide concerns of abuse later down the line (a rare occasion to look forward to, at worst), it's a whole lot easier to enforce the rules on one staffmember getting caught abusing their power than it is to hand out forum warnings/bans out to 10 individual people who successfully derailed a thread with intense amounts of flamewarring.

[ShameOnTurtles]

After thinking about this one thing I've settled on is that I would like to keep complaints centered around the forums, as they are currently. All the information relevant to the complaint can be found in a single thread. It makes life easier, and in the case of justifying a ruling it definitely makes life easier. This is something I would like to keep.

One immediate thing that can be done with this is carry over, with a slight modification possibly, of the staff complaints rule about only posting if involved. This would give staff more of a platform to control discussion in these threads.

I don't think an overhauling of the complaints process such as this should be implemented before other measures.

What are your thoughts?

[Scheveningen]

I suppose that's fair. As long as these suggestions are considered later down the line if the smaller changes implemented prove not as effective as controlling discussion for complaint threads.

[Alberyk]

I guess this has been already solved between the OP and shame back in the day. Moving to archive.