Ban less and more

In faf we have 4 public discussion channels:

• Ingame
• Aeolus
• Discord
• Forums

I think they should all be treated differently.

Ingame barely anyone should ever be banned, since this heavily affects search times / player population. Only clear cut cases should be banned and the bans should be relatively short. I would avoid permabans entirely. Ie. I would not ban people for anything verbal unless it's super egregious. If we had a feature to global mute people ingame (faf lobby tells the game to automatically mute people), that would be a really good solution for verbal harassment.

[Here's an example of what should grant you a few days cool down time ingame.]

(Edit: example/link removed by Moderator magge

In contrast that should be a permaban on aeolus/discord/forums.

In basically all other communication channels I would be way more trigger happy than ingame. If people enjoy dark humor, being edgy etc. that's fine, they can do it on their private discord servers (or twitch streams or whatever else). Not our global communication channels. And I don't just mean 'bad people' using 'bad words' or whatever, but simply ban anyone who is knowingly being difficult/annoying/malicious. Also, don't wait for a report. Just insta warn/ban. The ban is not for whoever is the 'victim' btw. It's for anyone who has to lose a few braincells scrolling past that stuff.

That being said I would have varying levels of strictness on the rest as well in the order that I listed them (aeolus, discord, forums) from least to most strict.

To be more concrete:

• Aeolus, Discord
  • Ban people who are obviously trolling
  • Ban for insults
  • Ban for malicious intent
  • Oh yea, actually ban for breaking the code of conduct (I'm serious btw, but coc jokes are welcome too)
  • Use brain. If it would get you banned from twitter, twitch, other forums etc. it should get you banned here too
• Forums
  • Ban people who are argumentative for no reason

I'm not gonna give any crazy conclusive argumentation for why this needs to happen, but I will say that faf forum & discord moderation is outlandishly lax. The shit that people "get away with" here would get them instabanned on any other public discord/forum. Arch tried, btw (and got banned for a rename).

Btw this post is not triggered by anything specific. I was just talking the other day about potential reasons for why people aren't motivated to work on faf related stuff. It'd be way more motivating to work on stuff for aoe2 or hell even aoe4 for example, simply because all the crap is hidden on some private discord servers (I assume, haven't seen any though, which is the point) instead of public facing channels.

@blodir said in Ban less and more:

Ban people who are argumentative for no reason

what do you mean?
Ban people who are arguing, but you can't understand their reasons??

@blodir said in Ban less and more:

Ban people who are obviously trolling (a la adju)

Shouldn't giving a warning first be better?
I mean the line between "funny" or stupid and trolling is not exactly clear and differs by person, so telling someone he overstepped, before a ban would be nice.

I have removed the "insult example", unless you can show me the permission from those players, that their private discussion is shown public. I hope it was just a random fake text, but for the trigger-words it would be already a reason to remove it anyway.

Foes probably can by synced = ignored in game, by client + mod + game.prefs

RTS Discord Don't Be Racist Challenge (X Rank Mission: Impossible [Ukraine War Edition])

Ban adjux - yes

Ban anyone for talking about politics or anything in a negative connotation (actually enforcing coc guidelines) - no

Btw, the code of conduct has been renamed to contributor guidelines and is now only applicable to contributors, not regular players. We have the normal rules that apply to everyone that should regulate foul language etc.

I'd say moderation priority is already quite similar as to how you list it.

We don't actively watch games for people breaking the rules or being "more edgy". For instance in a team game if the players are being a bit edgy but nobody minds and it isn't anything extreme, then so be it. If someone in the game took offense or some behavior was too extreme the players in the game can report it and we take action accordingly.

Public discussions that flow on are watched a bit more closely by moderators, if a moderator sees something against the rules, they intervene more proactively than for in-game things. If you've seen users "get away with things" or think moderation is "outlandishly lax", even with multiple moderators we can't monitor every single word and conversation in all the FAF platforms, so a report/ping/mention by other users to alert moderators is appreciated.

Forums are by nature a bit more formal, so when it comes to moderation, something that could pass in a flowing discussion might not belong as a post.

In regards to what should be moderated/how strict moderation should be, that is heavily tied to manpower resources and what kind of policy overall suits the community. Let's say you wish for really strict moderation, if we don't have the manpower for enforcing it, you'll effectively get moderators logging in/processing reports, "sniping" a few users they see breaking rules, meanwhile several other users can get away with similar level of "infringements". This causes easily uproar and potentially even more problems overall in the community if moderation consistency cannot be upheld. A bigger cliff between what is the largely observed "policy level" by the majority of the users vs. what a fraction of the users get punished for, can quickly degrade overall trust in the rules, moderation, cause "in spite" behavior and in consequence further degrade the experience users have in the community even if the opposite was the intended goal.

Damn magnum even got people making forum posts about him right now

Do we not have the ability/technology to pull chat logs from all games automatically and compare all text against a list of offensive words and then generate a report of offensive comments made when and by who. I'd think it should be fairly easy to setup and then find toxic players. I'm thinking of racial slurs etc - truly nasty stuff that has no place in FAF
And what about saving the lobby chat too, loads of weird stuff goes on in lobbies..

@laconic You can

The messages of the lobby are not included in the replay format. Unlikely that you can retrieve those

How exactly did you remove toxicity by banning people when nobody personally involved cared to report? It’s the word equivalent of surfing through the replay vault to report people that quit games early or start dicking around and reclaiming their teammate’s stuff even though nobody in the game cared.

@ftxcommando said in Ban less and more:

How exactly did you remove toxicity by banning people when nobody personally involved cared to report? It’s the word equivalent of surfing through the replay vault to report people that quit games early or start dicking around and reclaiming their teammate’s stuff even though nobody in the game cared.

How often do you, as a viewer, report a bot on twitch stream spamming ads for adult dating site x or viewbotting service y?

But yea I agree with you I wouldn't go scanning games either. Games are a private venue. Aeolus, discord and forums (twitch too) are public venues. In a public venue mods should be actively enforcing rules regardless of if anyone reports it or not (such as in the twitch example), but in a private venue there needs to be a confirmation that there is a problem.

What’s the rationale for how a game is private but a Discord convo is public?

The games are recorded for eternity, Discord convo is recorded for eternity.

You can access any game, you actually can’t access every Discord convo but you can in generic, public channels.

The only real difference I see is that it’s incredibly easy to ctrl+f and sort thru Discord while FAF has no real such tools for games. I guess it has Kazbek’s analysis tools but that isn’t really the same thing.

Speak for yourself bud i report all my bots

I guess the big difference is that a FAF game is an enclosed experience. It has a start and an end and you are either part of it or you aren’t. You can in theory respond to a Discord convo at any point or get personally involved whenever.

However, Discord also has threads which can be archived in a few days. If you read those in a public channel and it made you sad, I don’t really see how that’s any different than getting sad because a person was mean in a FAF game where you weren’t involved.

@ftxcommando said in Ban less and more:

How exactly did you remove toxicity by banning people when nobody personally involved cared to report?

Why would they report it, if they can just stop playing the game?
and there are probably a lot of people feeling offended, but don't want to put in any effort, to report people otherwise change their situation aside from being pissed about it.
So if you let things go, because everyone currently involved is either fine with it or doesn't report it (due to being lazy or just because "no one else reports it either") is not the greatest idea. Because once you meet someone ready to report such behavior it might already be to late.
I mean you wouldn't get a ban for something like that right away and explicitly private games should probably also be excluded, but in all welcome or TMM games, repeated offenses should be punishable regardless if they get reported or not.
And since replays are available for a long time, maybe deleting offensive messages from the replays would be good (if that's possible), as is done with messages on Discord or the forums.

Great, problem is as Gieb said the moderation manpower is two sticks and a rock.

So what does your good intention policy intended to guess whether people are actually upset lead to? Dudes combing through replays to find something to ban people they already have a problem with due to other circumstances. Is that more or less toxic than the current situation?

@ftxcommando said in Ban less and more:

What’s the rationale for how a game is private but a Discord convo is public?

The only real difference I see is that it’s incredibly easy to ctrl+f and sort thru Discord while FAF has no real such tools for games.

You must be playing odd games if that is the only difference you can see.

A game has at most 16 players and that group is fixed once the game launches. The discord server has thousands of users and people can join any time. Moderators are already present in discord while most games don't have a moderator in it.

If you want to argue that the faf discord server is private, then you are stretching the meaning of the word private so far out that it basically loses all meaning.