1 dismissal Enforce a character limit on the Complaints Board

[niennab]

Lately there have been a number of exceedingly lengthy posts within the complaints section, bordering on outright filibustering. What it ultimately results in is wasting the time of the admin team - a volunteer position - and in the worst cases, is a tool for bad faith actors with hope of exhausting the team and locking up the administrative process with additional bureaucracy.

A complaint should be able to stand on its own with concise language; not long winded essays and rambling. I don’t think we have to be too severe on a character limit, but a measure should be introduced that promotes brevity, where someone can reasonably explain their issue, extrapolate on logs, and provide their perspective. Nothing more. A discussion beyond the first post can be dealt with via the replies.

A character limit does not need to be mechanically enforced, so as to not affect the remainder of the forums. Instead, I think we only need to amend it to the rules section on every complaint board.

The admins would know better what a suitable word count is, so I won’t try to play any guesswork at what might work best for them and the community.

[ReadThisNamePlz]

Sometimes a character limit is a good idea, until there are complex issues or multiple issues being recognized in a singular complaint. 
I am not against this persay, but I think this has been a topic before and it's always arrived to - It'd be unfair to limit people when they feel wronged - or something along those lines. 

[Sycmos]

I'm in total agreement with this suggestion.

If a hard character limit cannot be enforced there needs to be some guideline on writing a public complaint or other official communication. Complaints and other discussions should not draw the reader or the staff member handling the matter into an exhaustive reply chain that spends more time being disseminated than actually resolving the issue.

[Garnascus]

I have made exactly TWO contributions to the complaints forum to attempt to resolve this issue. One of them is a guide and one of them is an actual rule. You can view the rules at the top of the page of the complaints board. 

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Keep your posts short and concise. Ideally below the two paragraph count. The more you adhere to this the easier a time we will have handling your complaint.

The second is a guide i made a while ago and it is viewable as a stickied thread in the staff complaints forum. 

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Rules as written we are technically completely within our right to lock and archive a thread due to it being larger than two paragraphs. In pactice it is just bad optics. If you're already annoyed enough to go and make a complaint you're just going to get more annoyed if someone locks your thread and tells you to "lower the word count". Sure, we can do that and we can say "its the players responsibility to be concise" all we want but it just adds more time to the overall process and then we still have a complaint to look into either way so.... we just read through it despite the length and move forward. 

[goolie]

37 minutes ago, ReadThisNamePlz said:

It'd be unfair to limit people when they feel wronged - or something along those lines. 

I think the suggestion is a good idea after having to read book lengths of complaints but maybe shouldn't be a rule set in stone so when stuff like this happens we can be more flexible. More just a recommendation of word length?

 

[ReadThisNamePlz]

Just now, goolie said:

I think the suggestion is a good idea after having to read book lengths of complaints but maybe shouldn't be a rule set in stone so when stuff like this happens we can be more flexible. More just a recommendation of word length?

 

Would a recommendation do much? What's the point if it isn't enforceable? 

[goolie]

Take it as a complaint to complaint basis! If someone writes ten thousand words, complaining about an antag? Probably too much.

[ReadThisNamePlz]

13 minutes ago, goolie said:

Take it as a complaint to complaint basis! If someone writes ten thousand words, complaining about an antag? Probably too much.

I think we do this already. I certainly have seen people be told to slim down their complaint in the past because of how much was being written. 

[Arrow768]

The person handling the complaint already has the capability to ask people to keep their posts shower and to the point.

Voting for dismissal