Staff Complaint - Skull132

[BurgerBB]

BYOND Key: BurgerBB
Staff BYOND Key: Skull132
Game ID: None
Reason for complaint: Poor Conduct
Evidence/logs/etc:

Right. Instead of posting this on Reddit or just going to another discord channel and whining about it I'm going to be genuine and simply just post it here in attempt to fix things.

If I knew that some of the things that happened during my time here as a player and a staff member I would not have applied for dev, or for that matter, join Aurorastation at all. But first things first, lets get some things out of the way. I'm not a good person. Me saying this by no means excuses my behavior or implies that I should be excused for any wrongdoing. This is no means a defense of my behavior, and should not be seen as one. This, for all intents and purposes, is to prove a point and show some actual maturity for once.

I've been awfully rude to people giving feedback, regardless of the value or worth of the feedback. When I'm interacting with people behind a screen, I do not see people for who they are but as a group. I do not make things personal in order to not lose my sanity, so I attack ideas and things said rather than the people who said them. Never in my time here have I personally attacked anyone directly, only the ideas that they said however a lot of people interpret them as personal attacks, and that's completely understandable.

I've been awfully rude to people while being on the receiving end of jokes, memes, and other things. I do not know people's intent, but I can only guess them. Most of the time I am usually right with someone's intent, however the issue is with me dealing with the problem of someone being spiteful. I will be touching more on this later.

I've been awfully rude to people while being on the giving end of jokes, memes, and other things. If you see me making a meme about something it means I'm annoyed and I fear that I will lash out at others if I don't remove this annoyance. Memes and jokes are quite therapeutic to me because not only does it let me express myself when before it was impossible, but it brings enjoyment to others. It is a good feeling when something you put effort on is seen in a positive light.

I've been awfully rude to people while giving feedback, regardless of the value or worth of the feedback. At the time I have said these things, I absolutely cared strongly for the state of Aurorastation. I've put in hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work into Aurora and I don't want it to see it wasted. I've seen a lot of my friends come and go because of problems that I feel strongly about. When I tell people that people were not a good antag, I mean for them to improve and not just because I'm upset or angry or spiteful or just doing it to piss you off. When friends leave because they're tired of there not being enough proper RP and more depressing sec vs raiders crap, it really depresses me. When I'm talking about issues on Aurora, I'm not doing it for the sake of venting, I'm actually attempting to gather feedback on a idea to see if people support it, and if not, implement things that would make them support it. I've done this with a majority of my PRs and most turned out fine and without trouble, however I can absolutely understand why people can find this annoying or, at most, see it as me attempting to start shit.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about my behavior recently as I now have more free time with my free time. I've been told twice in the past few days that I should take note about my behavior, and I have. I'm very disappointed in myself for fucking up in a community. While thinking about this, I realised something kind of fucked up. I've received only one automatic forum ban for 1 day and only one manual forum ban for 1 week. I've received 0 bans on the server. I've received 0 bans or kicks on Discord. Despite my behavior and my attitude, I somehow became a staff member. As a staff member, I have received 0 staff complaints. Given the things I said and done, I should have not lasted more than 2 years, but I did.

But this isn't a player complaint about myself. All of this was brought up because I feel obligated to bring it up. At risk of sounding manipulative, I brought all this up because I feel genuinely depressed about it, and the fact that If I don't bring it up, someone else will and most of the conversation will be about me when it shouldn't be just about me.

This is about the people who I feel have done wrong, and it just so happens to be the two people running Aurorastation. This staff complaint features one, which is Skull132.

There was a discussion several months ago about an issue that occured in OOC. I brought up about how I think prescriptions should be reworked/removed and people jumped on me, stating things like how people don't like interacting with me and other things irrelevant to the issue. Even looking up on it back now, not feeling any emotion towards it, I could say that some of the things said towards me was unneeded. In my anger, I ended up using the word "autistic" to describe the words and this upset someone. Bringing up an earlier point, notice that even at my absolute lowest, I do my very best not to directly insult someone but the words and the points that they said. I believe skull had somewhat of a valid point to say that I called someone autistic however the rest of what they said, I feel, is evidence of some really messed up ways to deal with a situation. The reason why I messaged Skull is because I had an issue with how the mod in question handled it as they did not find issue with people actually for-realsies textbook definition personal attacks when I'm attempting to gather feedback for a potential PR. What I got instead was "mock surprise" and a lecture that had little to do with the subject.

When I attempted to talk to Skull about how what I do feels like a burden towards administration staff, he proceeds to talk about how the negativity I receive was deserving. I'm not sure if he is referring to the actual harassment that I reported to the administration team (not just offhand remarks) but I think it exposes a serious issue with how staff deal with things: not at all. That is not what I sent out to talk about and that's not what I was wanting to talk about. I wanted to talk about himself not doing anything to actively solve this issue. I attempted several times to bring the conversation back to how the administration team is not actively dealing with hostility but then they they were talking about how I called everyone autistic when that is not what I said nor implied nor what was even received. I ended up giving in, because I'll be entirely honest, I was feeling a bit emotional when Skull was starting to say "Nothing you did means anything." which honestly just fucked me up. I think at that point I realised that becoming a dev was a bad idea.

Proof 1 Proof 2 Proof 3 Proof 4 Proof 5

I ended up talking to Arrow about what Skull said. I'm not going to post the conversation out of respect for his privacy and the fact that I find it absolutely embarrassing to post. He ended up talking me out of withdrawing my dev application and made me realise, for a short time, that Skull's opinion doesn't matter as much as I think it does when there are two head developers. Effectively, my full viewpoint on the situation was the following: I think what I have done for the server matters and I think my voice should be heard when I say that I do not feel sane when I'm interacting with the community. While my messages to skull could be interpreted as "I'm a dev, I deserve respect because I can code.", that is not the case. Never in the history of me being on here have I downplayed anyone because they couldn't code as skull suggested. While I said I feel entitled to respect because I worked on the server, that's not all I was going to say. The direction my point was going was "I am entitled to being treated nicely and so is everyone else.", as somewhat showcased by me saying "I don't think I'm better than the average community member." but then Skull told me that nothing I did mattered which turned the entire conversation into something else.

There are plenty of conversations I had with skull that usually were like this or worse. When I go to talk to him about issues that I feel that need to be discussed, it almost always devolves into "Burger, you are a terrible person, that is all that needs to be said with you. I am done arguing with you." and this is apparently just how it is. I've received unsolicited messages about "The Rules and Guidelines of Arguing with Skull" in which some of those come to light. One of those rules is to admit mistakes as fast as you can because they can and will stick to it, which they have done. In a particular instance as seen in Proof 1 and 2, they were discussing that my Burrito Meme PR was inappropriate, which I already agreed with and fixed before they spoke to me about it. It didn't stop them from giving me shit about how I'm being a hypocrite because I was "doing the same thing that I was complaining about for months." Referring to the fact that I spoke to Skull earlier about how Shev's previous (now resolved) hatred towards me in the form of memes, criticisms, and shitposts as well as me talking to other admins about how there were one or two people who constantly brought up "ORGAN DAMAGE" on a daily basis despite no appropriate context or setup, in both cases were determined to be acting maliciously by the mods who were dealing with them. And on that subject, Skull's advice for me to deal with these people is to "Stop caring." which I feel is quite important, as seen in Proof 3. While a lot of the things he said were quite reasonable in that "stop caring" post, those things unfortunately were never put into action.

Proof 1 Proof 2 Proof 3

I decided to resign after about 3 or so months of being a dev. Arguably I did it on peaceful terms given how there were very few incidents, people admitting that I have improved, and being voted best dev on a meaningless internet poll. What got me to resign, which is the theme of this entire post, is caring.

There was a point that I realised "You should care, but about the right things."

I was an unpaid volunteer spending 4-6 hours a day coding for a server where 3 out of 4 of its current head staff heavily disliked me and a vocal minority of players despised me. Any reasonable person would go "You should not be putting yourself in your position." and after about a month of inactivity, arrow floated the idea around about resignation so I said yes after thinking on it. Upon leaving the dev team, willingly and without issue, the first thing Skull said to me is that I shouldn't talk about Burgerstation. Perhaps this is reaching but I did not receive a single thank you during or after the departure from Skull, Arrow, or really anyone else in dev staff for that matter. Garnacus said a casual "ok" after I said I'm resigning during a conversation where he suggested that I should implement some things, quite rudely. Bygone who upon hearing this fact, took it upon himself to make the announcement as he enjoyed my work. I do not think I am a unique case however, because being a dev on Aurora is a thankless job. No one compliments each others work. No one says they did a good job on something. No one is anything more than "Did you get x done?". Positivity does not exist in this environment. Regardless, his attitude and jokes have been quite odd after my departure considering the context of the rest of this post. In once instance, a user said 

Proof 1 Proof 2 (On the topic of releasing Burgerstation)

So what is the point? So why would I make a complaint if I stopped caring about Aurorastation? Well the problem is that I still do care a little about Aurora Station, as a player. I still occasionally play, very rarely, and I still talk a lot in the discord. My complaint on Skull is the following: I don't think he cares. Whether or not he cares about the server, or just me, is an entirely different argument. I have not went up to people and started a conversation on Skull, the only time anything of such occured is when people went up to me and said "Just be careful what you argue around Skull." I think I finally realised this when the following occurred.

Someone, who has been having issues with me for the past week, said "If you killed yourself tonight, literally nothing would change."

Proof 1

Skull saw this. Proceeded to comment with edge.

Bystanders saw this. Proceeded to react with "What the fuck" and ask if this is strikeable.

Skull said yes.

Then nothing happened. Because Skull does not care.

Edited February 11, 2019 by BurgerBB

[Arrow768]

I have to address a few things mentioned here:

On 10/02/2019 at 13:16, BurgerBB said:

Someone, who has been having issues with me for the past week, said "If you killed yourself tonight, literally nothing would change."
Proof 1
Skull saw this. Proceeded to comment with edge.
Bystanders saw this. Proceeded to react with "What the fuck" and ask if this is strikeable.
Skull said yes.
Then nothing happened. Because Skull does not care.

From what I saw in the logs it has been handled, however we generally do not inform anyone except the offender about the punishment.

On 10/02/2019 at 13:16, BurgerBB said:

Perhaps this is reaching but I did not receive a single thank you during or after the departure from Skull, Arrow, or really anyone else in dev staff for that matter.
[...]
Bygone who upon hearing this fact, took it upon himself to make the announcement as he enjoyed my work.

The reason because I didn't immediately post an announcement about your retirement was because when I saw your PM about your retirement I didn't have the time to write a proper one.
By the time I got home @Bygonehero already made that announcement. (Which is highly irregular)

[Bygonehero]

I was not aware there was a procedure for announcing things, but it seemed at the time that no one had planned to announce it or it just occurred? I was told by skull later that he planned to announce it once he got home, similar to arrow. 

Edited February 10, 2019 by Bygonehero

[Skull132]

I will respond to the simple things first.

The announcement was stalled because I elected to wait until Drago's application was complete and I could announce both her being hired and you retiring. Bygone elected to step out of line and announce your dismissal without coordinating with anyone else fooor whatever reason, but I assure you, I was planning on announcing it. I even told Bygone as such right after he committed this faux pas:

I apologize if this made you feel like left out, but there was no greater motive behind that one.

And re: the Ziy incident. I kinda forget the nuances of timing here, but:

• The matter was handled by Shame (eventually). My general point of view is to not bother myself getting involved in administrating the Discord if I am certain that there are active mods/mins around who have seen the incident, purely because administrative work like that is draining.
• I was not fully aware of the context of the chat, having come in right about the end there; so to be frank, edgy jokes happen with some regularity, and it is hard to discern between legitimate attacks and generic shit posting. Unless the target actually reports the issue. Which you did not, at least not to me. Further, over the next few minutes the chat appeared to simmer and my attention was brought elsewhere (if I recall, it happened at late/very early American times, which means I was nominally at school or at work, and my ability to actually do shit is limited. Again, unless you report it and I can look at it once I am free.)
• All that considered, I might have still fucked up on this incident.

And a quick addendum here: Paradox's question was, "is it possible to strike here?" to which my answer was yes, because strikes do work in the general channel. Again, I was preoccupied with other stuff to actually read into the question in any way other than the superfluous one.

As for the rest, I will do a little of consultation with my peers before I address it.

[BurgerBB]

4 hours ago, Skull132 said:

-response-

I understand the lack of an announcement part. Thank you for clarifying on that. However I do have a bit of an issue with you pointing out that I did not report the issue. I want to write up upon this, I was going to do it in another staff complaint, but I'm doing it here because I feel that it is also relevant. In many cases, the following happens:

1. User A insults or berates user B, from a rule standpoint whether or not they broke the rules can be debatable.

2. A mod or an administrator sees this behavior. They either participate in the behavior involved or acknowledges its existence in one form or another. In my experience, it's usually the former.

3. User B berates User A in return. A mod does not step in until very late and usually says something along the lines of "just drop it." or they give the user who was in the first place shit.

4. You report the behavior to staff officially because you find it odd that nothing has been done about it.

5. Staff member tells you that the other person was in the wrong, but says you were too and lectures you on how you should've reported the behavior in the first place.

This has happened plenty of times, including an instance of which I linked in my original post. I understand the need for reporting conversations that happened in private or an instance where a mod might've been busy, but say for example when a player starts throwing shit in OOC where a mod or an admin clearly knows that they're throwing shit, you begin to think "this is fair game" so you give up and just tell them they're an idiot because that's fair game too. I've pointed this problem out in the past several times. The response I usually get is "Oh, mod X is just feisty." if a mod participates. "Mods aren't a hivemind and have differing standards." if they know the conversation took place and did nothing to fix it.

I can tell you that with absolute certainty, if I reported that user, the mod in question would go "They didn't break any rules." because this has happened plenty of times. I recall when I did the april fools joke involving how cats got paincrit when sprayed with water, I was ironically called a "fucking retard" by someone who was very unhappy with the update and thought it was a shot at Tajara players. I reported this to a mod because they have a history of this behavior and it was dismissed as "just banter". Another person called me a fucking idiot over it about 2 days later and it turned into an argument, in which upon being contacted by the mod in question told me that I should've reported the person in the first place about it.

I understand that this is the internet and you shouldn't take anything people say seriously, and I don't, but what really annoys me is the inconsistency that happens and how some people go through great lengths to explain why they didn't do anything or why they gave special treatment to someone else. I recall an instance involving a admin who, upon being question as to why someone who was berating me didn't get so much as a warning while I got a lecture about how I'm a terrible person, said that I was being held to a higher standard because "You were a trial dev once."

So yeah. When a situation occurs, I have four options:

1. Report the person to an admin instantly and be told that nothing can really be done about it because they didn't break any rules. Bonus: Be told I complain too much and that I should deal with problems on my own.

2. Keep my sanity and call them out on it instead of just taking it like a punching bag. A mod or admin gets annoyed at the length of the conversation and attempts to shut it down.

3. Do nothing and """ignore""" them while they continue to berate me daily whilst I lose my sanity.

4. Leave.

 

I've performed all 4. 4 being recently. Mostly number 3 but despite that I have armchair psychologists tell me that "They're only making fun of you because you react." which is just a huge kick in the dick for several reasons. I've went with option 3 several times but you don't hear about it because there is nothing to hear because it involves no one complaining. The only time you ever hear about an incident is option 1 or 2 because those involve some degree of sound.

Edited February 10, 2019 by BurgerBB

[Scheveningen]

6 hours ago, Arrow768 said:

From what I saw in the logs it has been handled, however we generally do not inform anyone except the offender about the punishment.

Isn't it ironic we have directive 11 in-game but staff and player-issue transparency is kept as minimally as possible? What's the point of the former existing if the arguably more important side of the coin isn't applicable? I'm not asking you declare openly in OOC who was banned recently as soon as it happens, but rather to tell the people involved how a situation was dealt with. It's weird to get a lackadaisical "It was dealt with" in an adminhelp but in any staff complaint you'll see here, staff members handling the matter will give very detailed explanations as to how discipline is doled out when fault is found in a player or other staff member. Granted, you guys on the admin and dev staff have not been doing this as well recently, making me wonder if this is because dealing with the winter season was tiring and the quality of upholding that standard waned gradually because of the drama we've had this winter, or if policy actually changed in this respect.

I'd ask merely as a single member of the community that if I do something wrong and you deal with me in any such manner, that you tell the person who directly witnessed it or was an affected person of the situation how exactly you dealt with it and what I did wrong. And if the situations were switched and I were the affected person, I'd want communication in detail too, because it is only fair. You need to tell people why things are wrong and why you discipline people for it, and you need to let people other than the rule-breaker know that it was dealt with in the fashion that it was. With-holding information and refusing to educate people on what you guys consider right and wrong can only hurt dealing with situations later down the line. Don't with-hold information because you're worried about someone pulling a Xander and getting smug. Because you can bean someone super hard for getting obnoxious and harassing people anyway.

On the subject of 'memes': Are they really so harmless sources of humor when the moment that someone who's a subject of a meme hops onto the server and gets chatty, and then several people choose to deride and mock them with the meme subject matter in response to that person's existence? That sounds more like blatant harassment and jeering from the crowd in almost any context, not 'light-hearted humor.' There's a reason why making fun of people only works when it's between good friends who get their humor from that, or if the meme itself is rarely mentioned and thus shouldn't be taken seriously. It's also another thing to mock someone once and remind them of a failure or mistake they made, it's yet another to constantly drill someone in an attempt to bury them. That is harassment and shouldn't be tolerated within that context.

Lemme also point out there that the accusations towards Burger from Skull that "he deserves the harassment" and "nothing you did meant anything in the end", that in at least addressing the latter there's plenty of gameplay features throughout the Aurorastation codebase that were both positively and sometimes negatively affected. But overall he made a good impact on the codebase. He's made a lot of PRs. 199 to be exact, not all merged. Did he have attitude problems? Yeah, sure, I'd be lying if I said he didn't deserve the title of coder for some time though. It's an extremely scummy thing to say that someone 'deserves harassment', regardless of the context. Unless you were Hitler. I don't think Burger murdered 11 million people as part of his time as a coder though.

Goebbels has said a few things on the subject of repeating certain things to people to give them the impression that something is true. This subject often only relates to propaganda, but we can learn from it that if people repeat something very often, and give no indication they're just joking when challenged on saying what they say, then odds are they're saying it repeatedly just to give the impression that something is true. Aurorastation is not immune to propagandizing. Nor is it immune to inadvertently taking value from people who are trolling for a response.

When we have certain people i.e., Ziy who literally told Burger that if he '...killed himself nothing would change...' as a conversation-sealer to an already heated topic, it stops being 'just funny' (I'd argue Ziy is and was never funny, however) and it started becoming a scary resemblance of what the community staff outright promotes through choosing not to hammer down on it and admonish it, and letting everyone know how wrong it is/was. We should not be tolerating suggestions to suicide/a pre-mature death as if they were mere jokes. They are not, and should not be viewed such, because the subject of death is already a complex and very emotionally-charged subject, and it can be easy to influence someone who has troubles in their life if you bring up death as a resolution to someone's problems. For anyone who should treasure life, it should not be something that should be said.

We're back around at the subject matter of not knowing whether or not staff even deals with things as appropriate for the offense again, however. Because nobody even knows whether appropriate action was taken short of a view people with exclusive access to staff chat who have invariable takes on that issue.

Only posting this here because all this mindset stuff is what I had hammered into me when I was a mod. It's only fair you guys get reminded this is the case, not take it as a personal insult and simply unpack value of criticism that makes sense and improve from here-on. Any issue with staff often rolls uphill, not just downhill. A failure with an auxiliary member of staff can be attributed to a failure to their overseeing staff member for not having oversight over them during their failure, and rinse and repeat for anyone who oversees the guy responsible for oversight. And then it rolls back downhill because there's immense confusion on responsibilities.

Edited February 10, 2019 by Scheveningen
Removed rule breaking content

[Skull132]

In the present case, the situation was handled and warnings issued by @ShameOnTurtles, and I already explained my inaction in the given situation. I was not invested enough in the situation, did not see what I would consider immediate alarm, with the act itself was quite absurd, and there appeared to be a lack of violent debate after that, so I thought everything was settled. And, again, I did not have time to investigate past that; nor any motive to, due to the lack of an outright report.

Ultimately, 

As for the more generalized issue. Staff complaints are necessary to actually confirm the validity of the issue, for one. Writing one mammoth post does not assist, since we need actual specifics to handle (beyond this present case, since this case was: solved, and is now logged). Thus far this is the only staff complaint you've submitted against staff inaction, and if your claim was to be valid, then we would expect quite a few more. I cannot emphasize the following point enough: cases of failure to handle reports must be report explicitly and once they occur. Because they often boil down to talking with individual mods and admins, as opposed to handling a systematic issue. In fact, it cannot be handled as a systematic issue, since you still need to individually make sure all mods and mins are handling issues properly.

For two, and this is going to seem like a cop-out but I will explain shortly, attempting to write this larger issue into a staff complaint against me will most likely have little practical worth, unless Garn or Shame wish to accept it in this manner. This is due to the fact that I do not handle administrative policy nor enforcement of said policy. I cannot discipline mods and admins on how they enforce or do not enforce the rules. It is outside of my lane. And even if I wanted to do something about it, I do not have the energy to.

So to double back. The current situation has been:

• handled, with warnings issued by Shame;
• I have elaborated upon my failure to take action, acknowledged my error, and will attempt to do better in the future;
• I have elaborated upon why in the present case, reporting the matter clearly would have seen better handling of the situation.

------

To also point out a few things Delta highlighted, yes there is administrative policy to inform the reporter of punishment issued. However, a lot of Discord shit ends with no reports to staff and being resolved on the spot or in another manner where there is no clear "reporter". Which is the reason why we do not inform people of punishments issued there. And this is not that said policy was even ignored at this point. Again, the issue was handled by Shame, so he has the information on how he was alerted to it and how he handled it.

The policy is to only inform the creator of the report and affected parties if immediate action is required from them. If this event passed without a clear report, then shucks, but policy was followed. This is, again, up to Shame to clarify, since he was the one who actually addressed the situation. My involvement was simply to not handle it, as per my explanation.

There might well be issues with policy enforcement and rule violations on our public Discord. However, some other platform might be worth for discussing this. Since this matter is literally a foot note on this complaint that I expected to address relatively quickly.

[ShameOnTurtles]

The issue with Ziy was handled by me. I received messages from two people, including Ziy, that people were getting heated and starting to deliver personal attacks in a discussion about furries. I spoke with everyone involved where past offences, such as the messages that Ziy sent about suicide, were brought up. I instructed them to report this stuff at the time so we don't have to go digging down a 'rabbit hole.' As for punishment, that was communicated both reporters and all involved people, as is standard.

Staff do not support or tolerate toxicity or harassment. I want people to stop jumping to that conclusion, and go through the proper channels to report something, instead of waiting to bring it up as justification when a different wrong is committed.

Reminder that any posts by people not involved or without something vital to contribute will be removed and the authors warned. This includes back and forth without meaningful development.

[BurgerBB]

39 minutes ago, ShameOnTurtles said:

The issue with Ziy was handled by me. I received messages from two people, including Ziy, that people were getting heated and starting to deliver personal attacks in a discussion about furries. I spoke with everyone involved where past offences, such as the messages that Ziy sent about suicide, were brought up. I instructed them to report this stuff at the time so we don't have to go digging down a 'rabbit hole.' As for punishment, that was communicated both reporters and all involved people, as is standard.

Staff do not support or tolerate toxicity or harassment. I want people to stop jumping to that conclusion, and go through the proper channels to report something, instead of waiting to bring it up as justification when a different wrong is committed.

Reminder that any posts by people not involved or without something vital to contribute will be removed and the authors warned. This includes back and forth without meaningful development.

I feel like this thread should've been titled "Staff Complaint - The entirety of the administration team" because it seems that this issue is not local to just Skull.

I admit that shitposting and calling all furries pedophiles (despite "being" a furry myself) was out of line, however I genuinely believe that it is not comparable to someone bringing up me committing suicide twice. I was given the same "thin ice" status as everyone else involved and threatened with a ban if it continued. Every single instance where a conflict happens between two people, for some reason staff are obligated to spend equal time and effort telling both sides that they're both to blame. It makes absolute sense to tell me that I shouldn't respond to this sort of thing, however it does not make sense to me to grant me the same punishment or paint me in the same light as the others.

This sort of thing seems to happen a lot. I do not mean to shit on Shev but I believe that whole situation was a prime example of this sort of thing where I strongly feel that staff just do not give a shit and rather make the issue go away as soon as possible. I really do not mean to shit on Shev as the situation is resolved and I understood where he was coming from at the time, but good lord there have been many instances where the administration team has grouped me with Shev and unironically said things like "I don't understand why you're not both permabanned." or "I have no patience for either of you." Garnacus even went as far as to implement a custom ban condition where if there is a feud between me or shev, he'll ban either of us for a week regardless of who started it, regardless of the severity, and regardless of what was said. I'm not saying that Shev is the type of person who would do this, but Shev could've told me to kill myself, and I could've told him to fuck off, and we'd both be banned for a week.

[Skull132]

I fail to understand your issue. If both parties in a complaint have violated the rules, then yes, we will apply disciplinary action against both parties. You are not an exception to this. In the present case, take into consideration that you may have been instigating the response with your acclaimed shit posting. Further take into consideration that charges of pedophilia can carry real consequences, similarly to jokes over suicide. They are both quite serious matters.

Though, if you wish to claim that the issue was mishandled, then it might be wise to open a complaint specifically about that, since we are, again, discussing an incident which appears to be a mere footnote in this complaint.

[BurgerBB]

12 hours ago, Skull132 said:

I fail to understand your issue. If both parties in a complaint have violated the rules, then yes, we will apply disciplinary action against both parties. You are not an exception to this. In the present case, take into consideration that you may have been instigating the response with your acclaimed shit posting. Further take into consideration that charges of pedophilia can carry real consequences, similarly to jokes over suicide. They are both quite serious matters.

Though, if you wish to claim that the issue was mishandled, then it might be wise to open a complaint specifically about that, since we are, again, discussing an incident which appears to be a mere footnote in this complaint.

Actually, no. The record the comment about suicide came before when I started shitposting about furries. 

 

Also there is a serious difference between "Burger, if you killed yourself, no one would care" and "Furries are pedophiles." I will make it more equivalent for the sake of argument. If I said "All furries should die." then that would be a dick thing to say, but it wouldn't be on par with singling out a single person and saying "<insert name here>, you should die."

Also I find it a little depressing that you consider that a mere footnote. How you view the conflict itself says a lot about how you view situations. You should care more about not whether or not someone got offended, but how much it has impacted them. You've done this before; you compared like actual legitimate harassment to me making a meme pr about burritos as a joke. While I'm not saying that I was not rude to Jackboot with that PR, I don't think he is as angry or annoyed as I was when the same people would continue to try their best to provoke me.

[Skull132]

I am a practical man, and energy is a finite resource. That's all there is to it.

A complaint is a list of issues to sort out. The last two were the clearest matters to sort out, and make up roughly 20% of the complaint's length. Ergo, they are a "footnote". Not the primary meat of the complaint. If you wish to dance around them, then so be it, but I have now twice outlined my response to them and I really do not have anything to add on that count.

Of further note is this whole caring business. First, yadda, rules do not require me to care. Rules require me to act in a certain way, to enforce certain things within my purview, etcetera. They require me to address and to deal with certain issues. With this put out there for consideration, allow me to elaborate a bit on the meat of the complaint: the private chat we had over memes and getting angry at them. Allow me to represent my thesis, in perhaps less charged language: we cannot protect you from community interaction. We cannot do that specially if you go out of your way to interact back in a manner which a considerable amount of the community considers underhanded, stupid, assholeish. This refers to your memes over Reddit, and your general quickness to dismiss feedback if you did not find it fitting a certain mold. Despite your claims that you've had nary a player complaint about it, trust me, there is a decently sized list of people who felt relatively touched by your shenanigans over Reddit and over feedback that they submitted. And yes, said list was longer than the list of extremely loud people with opinions.

The community will make memes of you. Specially if you make memes back. Specially as you transcend the ranks and become a figure of perceived authority. Most of them are unable to understand the compounding effect of a million little voices gnawing away at you, I will grant you; but it is equally expected that you are able to deal with it to a reasonable degree. Specially if you conduct yourself as you have, and shit post back. Shit posting back is usually a communication that you're attempting to roll with the joke, ergo, no one thinks twice about continuing.

Staff MO on this count is to usually try to educate the victim, perhaps I failed at that a bit; and to pick off those who take it too far. Though, the latter is done by the actual mods/administrators and is beyond my purview. Specially considering the time zone differences between you and I.

To tie all of this back to the PMs:

I asked you to stop caring about the memes and jokes people had. As I stated, there's literally hundreds of them as staff come and stay and go. You need to be able to recognize them and simply assign them no worth.

I asked you to listen to and take into consideration feedback. To stop wielding your status as a contributor as a cudgel. Even if the feedback of certain individuals is less than intelligible, the sheer mass of it can be taken into account at times.

I never said that your work is worthless, that is a misinterpretation on your part.

[BurgerBB]

3 hours ago, Skull132 said:

I am a practical man, and energy is a finite resource. That's all there is to it.

A complaint is a list of issues to sort out. The last two were the clearest matters to sort out, and make up roughly 20% of the complaint's length. Ergo, they are a "footnote". Not the primary meat of the complaint. If you wish to dance around them, then so be it, but I have now twice outlined my response to them and I really do not have anything to add on that count.

Of further note is this whole caring business. First, yadda, rules do not require me to care. Rules require me to act in a certain way, to enforce certain things within my purview, etcetera. They require me to address and to deal with certain issues. With this put out there for consideration, allow me to elaborate a bit on the meat of the complaint: the private chat we had over memes and getting angry at them. Allow me to represent my thesis, in perhaps less charged language: we cannot protect you from community interaction. We cannot do that specially if you go out of your way to interact back in a manner which a considerable amount of the community considers underhanded, stupid, assholeish. This refers to your memes over Reddit, and your general quickness to dismiss feedback if you did not find it fitting a certain mold. Despite your claims that you've had nary a player complaint about it, trust me, there is a decently sized list of people who felt relatively touched by your shenanigans over Reddit and over feedback that they submitted. And yes, said list was longer than the list of extremely loud people with opinions.

The community will make memes of you. Specially if you make memes back. Specially as you transcend the ranks and become a figure of perceived authority. Most of them are unable to understand the compounding effect of a million little voices gnawing away at you, I will grant you; but it is equally expected that you are able to deal with it to a reasonable degree. Specially if you conduct yourself as you have, and shit post back. Shit posting back is usually a communication that you're attempting to roll with the joke, ergo, no one thinks twice about continuing.

Staff MO on this count is to usually try to educate the victim, perhaps I failed at that a bit; and to pick off those who take it too far. Though, the latter is done by the actual mods/administrators and is beyond my purview. Specially considering the time zone differences between you and I.

To tie all of this back to the PMs:

I asked you to stop caring about the memes and jokes people had. As I stated, there's literally hundreds of them as staff come and stay and go. You need to be able to recognize them and simply assign them no worth.

I asked you to listen to and take into consideration feedback. To stop wielding your status as a contributor as a cudgel. Even if the feedback of certain individuals is less than intelligible, the sheer mass of it can be taken into account at times.

I never said that your work is worthless, that is a misinterpretation on your part.

The meat of the complaint isn't that you aren't protecting me from petty harassment, but you general attitude towards absolutely everything. I have been very clear in the past, present, or future that the fact that people are making memes about me is irrelevant and I do not care that they are doing so. The problem I have is when the usage those memes start to get incredibly out of line and use them as an excuse to berate me while I'm playing or inside the suggestion/project forums. I'm fine with organ damage memes, I have made several jokes about them myself in the past, I have encouraged it, I have even made some myself yet for some reason you ignore all this and claim that I'm upset over memes.

When someone posts organ damage memes in ooc at an infrequent rate I have very little problem with it. When the same person attempts to just bring it up constantly whilst also showing toxic behavior I start to have a problem with it. When someone makes junkfood memes on discord, I have no problem with it. When someone (including staff members) post it in the project subforms or suggestion threads when I'm asking for feedback and derailing the thread, I have a problem with it. When I point out these problems and explain my position, you ignore absolutely everything I said and claim it's just about memes.

The conversation wasn't about protecting me from community interaction but doing two things to make it better: Setting standards for bug reporting. Setting standards for feedback. Perhaps setting standards for how developers act towards community.

 

 

 

 

[Skull132]

1 hour ago, BurgerBB said:

Setting standards for bug reporting. Setting standards for feedback.

There are standards for both.

The former can be observed by going here.

The latter can be found by reading the forum rules here.

[zyymurgy]

In the interest of clearing the air, you guys are talking *about* me without talking *to* me which is something I resent.

Here we see me immediately apologizing for the words which were said.

I tried to make it clear publicly, both by editing out what I said and by apologizing, that I did not mean to get weirdly personal, and that I regret what I had said, and in fact regretted saying it immediately after hitting enter.

I even tried to apologize via DM to Burger.

This is what was said between Shame and I on the subject.

I am not proud of what I said. I regret it, and I regretted it instantly. It is not something I would typically say.

I would like to publicly apologize since the issue is still being discussed as though I hadn't already done so.

Burger, I am sorry for saying that to you. I lashed out in a moment of anger and said something you didn't deserve to hear. It was way, way out of line and I'm going to make sure that I watch my tongue from now on. It's not something I plan to say again, to you or to anybody.

Do not blame Skull for "not handling" this issue. I tried to apologize to you immediately. I understand that you don't want to accept it, but it is not Skull's fault here.

 

[BurgerBB]

On 16/02/2019 at 12:05, zyymurgy said:

In the interest of clearing the air, you guys are talking *about* me without talking *to* me which is something I resent.

Here we see me immediately apologizing for the words which were said.

I tried to make it clear publicly, both by editing out what I said and by apologizing, that I did not mean to get weirdly personal, and that I regret what I had said, and in fact regretted saying it immediately after hitting enter.

I even tried to apologize via DM to Burger.

This is what was said between Shame and I on the subject.

I am not proud of what I said. I regret it, and I regretted it instantly. It is not something I would typically say.

I would like to publicly apologize since the issue is still being discussed as though I hadn't already done so.

Burger, I am sorry for saying that to you. I lashed out in a moment of anger and said something you didn't deserve to hear. It was way, way out of line and I'm going to make sure that I watch my tongue from now on. It's not something I plan to say again, to you or to anybody.

Do not blame Skull for "not handling" this issue. I tried to apologize to you immediately. I understand that you don't want to accept it, but it is not Skull's fault here.

 

I still feel you're only apologizing because you were caught for several reasons.

You did not apologize immediately after, but you apologized after everyone said their take, and their take roughly being "What the fuck lmao."

You did not improve your behavior after you said it. While I should've acknowledged your apology, at the time I did not think you were genuine in the first place and this was proven with time considering you still continued to berate me unsolicitedly, including the very awful crime of attempting to shitpost me by posting nothing but "LMAO" and "HAHAHA" after I type something in discord. I went to go collect the evidence myself but I legitimately fell into a bout of depression while reading all your posts so I had to make it a meme so it depressed me less.

Here.

Idk I think Skull probably should've done more to resolve it. I'm not asking him to personally deal with the situation, but when I see a staff member react to something and say that it's against the rules, I assume that they're acting on it by just telling another admin. But he said he was busy with something else and not paying attention, so I can't really argue anything further.

Edited February 18, 2019 by BurgerBB

[Skull132]

Beyond this subject, is there anything more for us to discuss here?

[BurgerBB]

1 hour ago, Skull132 said:

Beyond this subject, is there anything more for us to discuss here?

As for your setting standards for feedback response, you do have standards however they are not enforced.

The other day when the new sprites were introduced, there were absolute shitters who could not stop talking shit about the sprites to the point where a whitelisted head of staff sent a fax to central saying that the new pens and office supplies look like shit. Despite the absolute hatred in ooc, only a few went to express their concerns in the feedback thread. Bug reporting is barely done in github. 90% of the time I find out bugs when someone casually mentions it in ooc and discord despite knowing about it for a week.

I don't know how personally someone could enforce this. I mean it would be dumb if you banned someone for reporting a bug in ooc, but in the cases where it's repeat offenders I genuinely believe that they at least need to be talked to about it and how their behavior is annoying.

[Skull132]

Just now, BurgerBB said:

As for your setting standards for feedback response, you do have standards however they are not enforced.

False. Most reports on the feedback forum get addressed and tend to result in post removal and or warning if valid. The key point is, you need to report that shit. We will not actively read every post on the forums because that is an obscene amount of work.

3 minutes ago, BurgerBB said:

The other day when the new sprites were introduced, there were absolute shitters who could not stop talking shit about the sprites to the point where a whitelisted head of staff sent a fax to central saying that the new pens and office supplies look like shit. Despite the absolute hatred in ooc, only a few went to express their concerns in the feedback thread.

Administrative issue first and foremost. Vitriol is vitriol is vitriol. Adminhelp it and move on with your day.

As for people not posting on the forums, this is the norm which has existed for years and pretty much everywhere. It is easy to complain. It is hard to complain in a manner that's constructive. Humans tend to pick the easy way out. The solutions are simple, we ban those who cross the line, and listen to those who actually choose to format their thoughts. There could perhaps be more propaganda done about linking relevant feedback topics, but at the present, I am at a loss as to how to automate that process without it being a pain for those involved.

And for bugs, registering on Github is a major hurdle. However, automating bug reporting by presenting an ingame interface for it might result in a flood of duplicates. These options were weighed with the dev team at large, and it was decided that how it works now is good enough. Not ideal, but good enough. So again, unless you have specific suggestions.

 

And ye, you're free to say that I am too dismissive about these issues and that this somehow shows that I do not care, but consider. I have had five years to test and work on these issues. And trust me, I have. What you see today as the status quo is the natural evolution of this community and its active contributor base. Whether you enjoy it or not is up to you to decide, but I assure you, things are not this way due to a lack of trying. Further. All of these issues I have discussed with the dev team before. We have tried other solutions, we have reviewed other options. The other solutions have not survived due to, for example, being too draining on the developers, or being too complex for the player base. So you cannot in good heart land this all at my door step and say, "Hah, he doesn't care."

[Skull132]

Addendum. And excuse me for being too on the nose with this. But the status quo is comfortable enough for most people here, both players and staff that I have spoken to. At least as far as the development processes are concerned. And again, I say this with full confidence because all of these issues have been thoroughly discussed and reviewed in dev staff meetings, and some discussed with the community.

 

Perhaps you're expecting something we are unable to provide for you?

[BurgerBB]

4 hours ago, Skull132 said:

False. Most reports on the feedback forum get addressed and tend to result in post removal and or warning if valid. The key point is, you need to report that shit. We will not actively read every post on the forums because that is an obscene amount of work.

Administrative issue first and foremost. Vitriol is vitriol is vitriol. Adminhelp it and move on with your day.

As for people not posting on the forums, this is the norm which has existed for years and pretty much everywhere. It is easy to complain. It is hard to complain in a manner that's constructive. Humans tend to pick the easy way out. The solutions are simple, we ban those who cross the line, and listen to those who actually choose to format their thoughts. There could perhaps be more propaganda done about linking relevant feedback topics, but at the present, I am at a loss as to how to automate that process without it being a pain for those involved.

And for bugs, registering on Github is a major hurdle. However, automating bug reporting by presenting an ingame interface for it might result in a flood of duplicates. These options were weighed with the dev team at large, and it was decided that how it works now is good enough. Not ideal, but good enough. So again, unless you have specific suggestions.

 

And ye, you're free to say that I am too dismissive about these issues and that this somehow shows that I do not care, but consider. I have had five years to test and work on these issues. And trust me, I have. What you see today as the status quo is the natural evolution of this community and its active contributor base. Whether you enjoy it or not is up to you to decide, but I assure you, things are not this way due to a lack of trying. Further. All of these issues I have discussed with the dev team before. We have tried other solutions, we have reviewed other options. The other solutions have not survived due to, for example, being too draining on the developers, or being too complex for the player base. So you cannot in good heart land this all at my door step and say, "Hah, he doesn't care."

I have been reporting bad behavior in OOC and discord and I'm usually being told it does not break the rules. I've reported people in OOC going above and beyond just giving criticism and the most I usually get is "They were talked to." yet it still continues, and I ahelp again when it happens and I get "Oh they didn't break the rules in this case."

I talk to you and you tell me to just deal with the criticism and without a sense of irony, admitting that I'm an easy target and you can't "protect" me because of it.

I've reported Shev to you at it took a lot of days of checking in to see if anything was done. In the end, a week ban was given but it only lasted 4 days because it was appealed.

Admins and mods even participated in some of it. Coalf was pretty outspoken and straight up insulted me in front of abo despite abo telling coalf to chill multiple times. I think I mentioned here or in the other complaint that his behavior was excused because "Coalf is just feisty." It's very difficult to ahelp an issue when the people who are supposed to be moderating for terrible behavior participate in it.

Arrow in the past has expressed remorse over staff behavior multiple times yet that's all I think was done; just expressions of remorse.

It took forever to deal with Lord Fowl and he still has attitude issues towards staff and other users.

I reported that one person who told me nothing would matter if I offed myself and I got a lecture from ShameOnTurtles who said that I'm on the same thin ice status on the assumption that what provoked them to tell me to kill myself despite that not being true.

I've been giving the same enlightened centrisms viewpoint over and over again where if two people spar, they're both at fault and that's all that's important.

So I kinda die a little inside every time you tell me to report something because in the past when I have, it has made the situation worse or it has done absolutely nothing as outlined above. Garnacus admits he hates dealing with us when the only time he's ever dealt with us is when I make complaint threads. I've gotten in trouble for telling people to properly fuck off after they insult me because of the "both sides" mindset. I've had mods tell me to just deal with it and take a break. People have even made memes of the "They were talked to." response in the Aurora discord so I know it isn't just me. Hell, despite all the issues I've had with other people, there were 0 staff complaints made, 1 phony ban request that was dealt with, and 1 phony minor warning that I didn't have the time nor patience to appeal at the time. The only REAL time that people have ever expressed complaints was on my dev application in the last week of trial I believe. This should be evidence enough that users just don't like dealing with the current report system.

Solution 1: Transparency. Let people know who's been warned or banned on discord, on the forums, and in game. Multiple successful communities have done this. It works miracles because it lets the community know what behavior is expected and lets the community know that administrative action has taken place. I believe that this was a hot topic on discord several times but never really got past any staff for anyone to do anything about it.

Solution 2: Consistency. Admins have severely differing opinions on what's considered rule breaking. I absolutely encourage you that if you have free time to make a google doc poll giving a list of situations that the admins have to act on to prove that this is an issue. If you want, I could make one for you. To solve this, I highly suggest elaborating on behavior rules and giving clear outlines on bad behavior. You have several paragraphs of rules on IC behavior yet there is really only 3 sentences on OOC behavior for in game and one short sentence for discord. The forum rules is just a copy-paste of the server rules with a few minor tweaks as seen here: https://forums.aurorastation.org/guidelines/ Heck, it even mentions "Don't ruin the game."

• Don't be a dick. We're all here to have fun, not fight and argue with assholes. Don't ruin the game for everyone else, and use common sense. This includes anything from attacking other people, starting arguments over nothing, etcetera. Note that this rule applies primarily to OOC, LOOC, AHELP, and DEADSAY.

Rule 2: Don't be a dick.

"Don't be a dick" is usually a placeholder rule for people who installed ULX for the first time. What a dick is and isn't is incredibly up to interpretation and is highly dependent on who started it. Other servers usually have more elaborate descriptions.

I don't know if I'm asking too much. It feels like I am considering the amount of pushback I've gotten in the past trying to bring up these points. Regardless if anyone asks me if it's worth becoming developer on Aurora I would answer it with a hard no. It feels like a detriment and I strongly feel that it's not a determinant just because of how a few people have an issue with me.

[zyymurgy]

9 hours ago, BurgerBB said:

[not accepting my apology]

You are within your rights to not accept an apology and doubt its veracity. All I can do is say that I blocked you because I didn't want to say anything further to you to make you feel bad, as I can't seem to help myself from responding when I see you posting inflammatory or goading comments in general chat. I mean my apology and I'm doing my best to leave you the hell alone. If you want to hang on to the fact that I said something I regret, fine, but please do not outright say I'm lying about being sincere. I 100% do feel bad about saying that to you. I still am sorry, and I will continue to be sorry, even after you stop being mad, because it was a shitty thing for me to say to anyone. I don't feel bad because people said "WTF LMAO". I feel bad because it's a horrible thing to say, and I felt bad the instant I said it. Trust me; if it was something I wanted to double down on, I would have, whether people "WTF"ed me or not. Instead it was something I wanted to take back, and I have tried to.

This isn't a failure of administration to deal with, in my opinion here. It's an interpersonal difficulty issue. Shame slapped me right in the mouth for saying that kind of thing. Why do you want to pretend that didn't happen?

I'm going to see myself out of this issue as there is little else left to discuss with regard to my apologizing to Burger. I'd like for it to be known in the future if this issue is discussed again, however, that I have apologized and I am pretty fuckin' sincere about it.

[ShameOnTurtles]

Quote

I reported that one person who told me nothing would matter if I offed myself and I got a lecture from ShameOnTurtles who said that I'm on the same thin ice status on the assumption that what provoked them to tell me to kill myself despite that not being true.

Please do not reference this stuff and strawman it. I contacted you about calling another user, and furries in general, retarded paedophiles. It was only after I contacted you said it was justified because they'd made remarks about suicide towards you. I reiterate, you did not report this until I was already talking to you. The 'lecture' was telling you to stop the toxicity, and I have already described the result of that. There was no assumption that what you said provoked them to say what they said, even if that was the case both your conduct would still be unacceptable.

 

Secondly,

Quote

• Don't be a dick. We're all here to have fun, not fight and argue with assholes. Don't ruin the game for everyone else, and use common sense. This includes anything from attacking other people, starting arguments over nothing, etcetera. Note that this rule applies primarily to OOC, LOOC, AHELP, and DEADSAY.

Rule 2: Don't be a dick.

"Don't be a dick" is usually a placeholder rule for people who installed ULX for the first time. What a dick is and isn't is incredibly up to interpretation and is highly dependent on who started it. Other servers usually have more elaborate descriptions.

It is pretty vague, it is intentionally this way. This rule is a sort of 'catch-all' for bad behavior. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make a set of rules that covered every situation, and additionally it would be too bloated to be easily understood.

In regards to solution 1, our policy is to disclose details of punishment to the reporter(s), and those otherwise directly involved. I may not have understood but are you suggesting adding a public punishment list on discord?

As for solution 2, this is naturally going to happen regardless of what we do. We can't account for every situation and the 'Don't be a dick' and other OOC rules are our standards. In cases where you report something and it's deemed as breaking rules, or you get punished for something you don't believe is breaking rules, we have a chain to go up, whether that be through complaints or for smaller stuff private conversations.

[Skull132]

6 hours ago, BurgerBB said:

Other servers usually have more elaborate descriptions.

I don't have too much time at the moment, but in order to help you gain some perspective, let me say that no, they absolutely do not. This has been a discussion over at the host chat and most admin teams choose to keep this rule lax. And occasionally pair it with a rule 0 of, "We can ban you for whatever". The most notable exception is CM, where Apophis chose to go the way of writing every encountered clause into the rules. Which is absurd, in my opinion, since it makes moderators somewhat powerless in the case of an event outside of the numerated items.

For reference:

• tg rules, see rules 0 and 1
• Baystation rules, see rules 0 and 1
• Paradise rules, see rule 0
• Goon rules, note that despite a clear rule against bigotry, other forms of ass-hatery are described as they are elsewhere.

So really, our rules match what is common for other well aged servers.

[BurgerBB]

9 hours ago, ShameOnTurtles said:

Please do not reference this stuff and strawman it. I contacted you about calling another user, and furries in general, retarded paedophiles. It was only after I contacted you said it was justified because they'd made remarks about suicide towards you. I reiterate, you did not report this until I was already talking to you. The 'lecture' was telling you to stop the toxicity, and I have already described the result of that. There was no assumption that what you said provoked them to say what they said, even if that was the case both your conduct would still be unacceptable.

 

Secondly,

It is pretty vague, it is intentionally this way. This rule is a sort of 'catch-all' for bad behavior. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make a set of rules that covered every situation, and additionally it would be too bloated to be easily understood.

In regards to solution 1, our policy is to disclose details of punishment to the reporter(s), and those otherwise directly involved. I may not have understood but are you suggesting adding a public punishment list on discord?

As for solution 2, this is naturally going to happen regardless of what we do. We can't account for every situation and the 'Don't be a dick' and other OOC rules are our standards. In cases where you report something and it's deemed as breaking rules, or you get punished for something you don't believe is breaking rules, we have a chain to go up, whether that be through complaints or for smaller stuff private conversations.

I never said calling furries pedophiles was justified, I even said it was a bad move multiple times in this thread and in discord PMs. The only reason why I brought up the kill yourself remarks because "Oh if me calling furries pedophiles in jest offended people just wait until you see this." Also I retract my statement about you thinking that they told me to kill myself because of the pedophile remarks. I could've sworn a moderator or staff said something like that and I took note of it as evidence that no one bothers to look into situations but it seems I was wrong.

Vagueness of rules causes situations where Skull can say "Oh I thought they were just shitposting." which he quite literally did in this situation, as seen here. 

An admin can choose to bring up the don't be a dick rule at a whim as "Don't be a dick" is a catch-all for bad behavior when the mod or admin in question looking at the situation wants it to be. If the "don't be a dick" was actually enforced as it is on me, then several members of this chat, including admins and mods, wouldn't be here. I believe the point where shitposting or criticism becomes enforceable under the "Don't be a dick." rule is if someone complains hard enough.

Vague rules waste time and cause issues. Making a clear outline on what is considered unacceptable behavior by Aurora standards prevents issues from happening and gives fair and equal treatment to all. Giving examples of unacceptable behavior will set precedents that members and staff can refer to when dealing with situations. Currently, this isn't the case because usually only the victim is informed that someone was punished, and sometimes that isn't even satisfactory because it's usually the meme response of "They were talked to." Just spending at most an hour of your day to think up of examples of bad behavior to post with the rules would go a long way. I also encourage you to do it within your staff chat to also prove the point that admins have differing opinions on what is considered breaking the "Don't be a dick" rule.

I'm asking for a public record list on the forums. A log of every ban or warning on the server and the forums so that users know which behavior is actually unacceptable. If people knew what was actually against the rules, then actual troublemakers would be reported more. This would also help with establishing consistency so that in a case where someone is warned for using homophobic slurs, people can refer to this when someone else is using homophobic slurs in the case where the admin or mod says "homophobic slurs are not really against the rules."