FtX Association posts since he can't post there for some reason

I'll be making responses to points I see in the Association subforum here. If I didn't respond to it I generally think it's fine or either option is fine, for example I don't really care too much about the voting procedure since either main solution seems workable to me.

Point 1: Bans prohibiting contribution

I genuinely have zero clue how this helps anyone or anything. There are current Councillors that have more than the 3 bans that Turin suggested, and the current Councillor in the thread arguing about prohibiting banned players from contributors has been banned before and would be forced to resign under his own principles. For what? Some weird puritanical standard of ethics where if a man was tainted by being punished all his work is now tainted and cannot be an asset to FAF?

First and foremost the Board should NOT be making some overarching ban policy unless you want to have something that Brutus said where a person permanently banned cannot contribute but that really just seems incredibly redundant because FAF almost never gives out permanent bans, the people that get them are people that have never contributed, and there is no real way to contribute to FAF if you're banned on every platform FAF operates on.

However, any sort of arbitrary rule about temporary bans is built for failure just off of the simple fact that each team cares about something like a ban for varying reasons. The moderation team does not want people with a (large) history of breaking the rules simply because that means the individual lives on the border of the rules and is likely to set a poor example as a moderator on what proper behavior is going to be. The balance team could not care any less about where you live in the "ethical plane of FAF" and are more concerned about where you live in the "game competency plane of FAF." You making the balance team care about the "ethical plane of FAF" beyond what they feel makes a person reasonable to work with, which they already account for through their way of recruiting new members, just lowers their potential manpower. With manpower being the most critical bottleneck on FAF, this is just people making lives for every team on FAF harder for nothing other than some personal puritanical belief that is showcased to be false just by the sheer fact we have Councillors with large ban records already.

Askaholic also touched on the example of moderators being saddled with the additional responsibility of holding an executioner's axe on the neck of every contributor which makes Gieb's life significantly harder since now he needs to be ABSOLUTELY certain that nobody is an overzealous moderator or that he needs to personally review/give these reports to highly trusted moderators.

Solution: Don't even talk about it. Set up the logistics for how teams will be created, let teams talk between themselves the tradeoffs in restricting their manpower issue over things like this. Board has zero clue what these tradeoffs are for each subarea of FAF.

Point 2: Applications

"Why do you want people to explain why they think a person should join the Association?"

"If proven"

The current level of proof in the Association is "just trust me bro" and that's the problem. I shouldn't need to explain why this is a problem because:

1. We have a list of objectives that a person must be proven to be sympathetic to, which coincidentally meet the criteria of every type of contribution that had Councillor representation and still has Councillor representation.

2. If a person can simply get into the Association "because he's a nice guy" then these objectives are redundant and there should be a proposal to remove them because they are not serving their intended purpose. It's just a pseudo justification and there is no way a person can actually get any "proof" that the statutes require from the people that accepted an individual. What happens is that the people that accept an applicant simply state that their approval is proof. This is not rational.

I said I didn't need to prove it but I'm going to give a slight explanation of why a robust Association is generally good. For one, there is not enough activity in the Association and not enough meetings within the Association to establish a floor of knowledge that makes random FAF players capable of understanding significant issues. In my eyes, the Association should be actively involved in FAF administration both as a segment of manpower as well as consultation and the less credible the Association is as a source of manpower the less need there is going to be to consult it. People will simply operate in PMs or private groups that consist of "known entities" that they can trust, same reason the developers have a private developer area rather than talking in public channels in the FAF Discord.

Is someone a trainer? a developer? a moderator? a modder? a mapper? a tournament director? a streamer? something new? The people approving people have a social responsibility to the rest of the Association to explain the merits of the person and how they are currently (or very soon to be) helping FAF improve in one of the mentioned objectives. Otherwise, the Association is just another random group of dudes.

Solution: I don't actually think it matters at all who is providing the explanation. The person applying can explain it. The acceptors can explain it. Doesn't matter. Point is that somebody needs to be explaining it, and if people want to argue that the applicant explaining it is against the statutes that only leaves the acceptors to do it.

3. "Should all teams strive to be open or not?"

Every team should strive to be as open or closed as is necessary to accomplish their objectives. Balance team needs standards for player competency. Moderation Team needs standards as well. Trainers need standards. These are all different standards which will be set by the Teams and their Leaders.

That's all for now, I'll make a new post to this topic if I see anything else to bring up.

"Just as a note the use of the word proven is applied to the board member and the regular member who approve. It should not be taken to mean that the there is any public approval process that has to be visible to the entire association.

As written the proof of sympathy only needs to be considered by the approvers. If they approve then that means they have seen satisfactory evidence that the applicant is sympathetic and is all that is needed. So using that specific word as justification is not applicable."

There is nothing in the statutes that makes this the correct interpretation. It is just an interpretation. This makes it just as viable as an interpretation requiring more stringent definitions of proof. The statute is intentionally vague because it is the objective of the Association to define what level of stringency is coherent through itself.

Also, if we take this to absurdity, a Board and non-Board member can simply exclaim their approval for literally all of FAF and make the process entirely opt-in. There is nothing you can do to say they are misusing their authority or that they acted out of turn considering you write that approval is proof of being sympathetic. A system where people create the proof for an outcome they want (proven by the fact they did the approving) is completely broken and circular logic.

This isn't to say you "can't" have it operate like that. But if you are, then the objectives in the statutes are pure security theater because there is zero practical ways to ever hold anyone accountable for "proving" it and instead anybody can approve anybody else for any reason. If this is the system that the Association operates under, then just remove the objectives and say go be friends with two dudes instead.

“I wrote the statutes so it means X”

Death of the author, also just bad statute writing then.

If it is supposed to be circular logic, it should say proven sympathetic by being approved by two people, not proven sympathetic and being approved by two people. If nothing establishes the fact a person is sympathetic except your approval, then the statutes are already broken as they are currently written.

It also doesn’t filter out anybody because anybody can approve anybody else for anything and there is zero you can do to stop it or say they abused their authority. Except holding a gun to the heads of the Board and threatening to nuke everything, I guess!

Does anybody know why we have a proposal about preventing a hostile takeover by artificially restricting the capacity of individuals to accept Association members which in turn induces some weird game theory mechanics into accepting new applicants rather than just increasing the burden of proof required to be proven sympathetic?

I feel like that whole thread is people realizing a problem that comes from the completely lax and irregulated acceptance process and just skipping the obvious solution of, like, regulating it? Why in the world would you stop 9 qualified contributors from deciding to join the Association a month before the GM rather than just increasing application requirements it so a Board and non-Board member can't invite their 145 player clan because they thought it would be pretty cool but would actually need to point to something they do that is an asset for FAF?

Other solutions were presented but Jip's is the only one that I couldn't think of a way to break/abuse so that's why I focused on the issue that comes up with his solution in particular.