Username rules updates

[BlissfulNoob]

@lin960 I think we should all change our names to WillowWisp

[Cheerios]

This is such a stupid rule. I hope whoever made this in their dungeon feels better about making it

[FunkOff]

I haven't changed my username is years on FAF. (PSN made me change it because it was offensive though )

[Giebmasse]

Hey everyone,

We’ve spent the last two weeks discussing the feedback we received on our announcement. We thank those few of you who have provided concrete feedback and have done our best to address them with some changes.

The position of the moderation team is that the primary use of usernames is to tell users apart. If people are unable to do so or have to take additional steps (such as checking name history), then usernames are failing at this purpose. It has been made clear that this view is not unanimous among the community. Some consider the ability for frequent username changes an important way of self-expression and for creating a sense of community with FAF friends. We have weighed and discussed these arguments, but believe there are plenty of alternate ways to express yourself, such as the clan system. Therefore, the moderation team believes that user identification should not be compromised for the sake of having a humorous name.

The moderation team does not aim to create rules just to make the game less enjoyable. Our primary role is to address and prevent issues between players, many of which aren't visible to the player base due to the confidential nature of moderation. Examples include players changing usernames to avoid reports, imitating other players, or impersonating moderators to pressure other players to force name changes. Such issues make it very difficult for the moderation team to handle reports effectively and have led us to re-evaluate the current rules.

Additionally, recent reports and feedback, such as from Nuggets’ recent thread, highlighted inconsistencies in the application of rules regarding impersonation and similar usernames. Consequently, one of our ongoing projects is updating the rules page to make our guidelines clearer and less ambiguous. These changes are part of that broader effort.

Making changes in a community requires compromise between different parties, but some players have already indicated that any change to the current situation would be unacceptable. We encourage these players to consider our concerns and help us find a solution acceptable to all parties. Until we find a better way to handle usernames that make such rules unnecessary, we will continue with the proposed changes to the rules on name similarity and readability. One goal of these changes is to manage names that are purposely hard to tell apart. We have taken note of the comments explaining that updated wording of the rules remain unclear, and after internal discussion have reworded them:

• Usernames that impersonate others or are visually identical to other usernames, for example by exploiting visually similar characters, are not allowed.

We do not expect players to know each and every single username and will not issue (even temporary) bans for breaking these rules unless a rename is clearly malicious. Note that such rules have been part of the FAF guidelines for a while, and the relevant changes focus on clarifying them.

Regarding the changes on how often a name can be changed, we are considering a compromise of one change every six months, with a similar protection period for player names. We welcome further feedback on these limits and will keep an eye on this thread to see if anyone brings up any important ideas or suggestions that we haven’t yet discussed. We thank everyone who has constructively participated in the discussion.

Best regards,
The FAF Moderation Team

[arma473]

"We thank those few of you who have provided concrete feedback"

I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who provided downvotes. Mass downvoting is a form of collective action.

The administration wants us fractured, atomized, debating different concrete proposals. It's going to ignore all that and push forward with its plans. That's why we need mass downvoting.

[waffelzNoob]

Sounds like some facebook doomerposting but its true

[boom-]

Hello mods

@giebmasse said in Username rules updates:

The position of the moderation team is that the primary use of usernames is to tell users apart. If people are unable to do so or have to take additional steps (such as checking name history), then usernames are failing at this purpose.

I want to differentiate between two terms: identity and discernibility, both of which have been used as arguments in this thread at various points. The way I see it:

• Identity – being able to tell who a player is just by using their player name.
• Discernibility – being able to tell the difference between two or more players based on their usernames.

Could you clarify if this update to the rules is intended to lock names to make players more identifiable, or to improve discernibility between two players who might share similar names (or past names)?

Identity

The simple solution that's already been proposed is simply to make the unique player ID accessible on player cards or in chats with said player. Basic example pictured, and I'm surprised the mod team has ignored this suggestion as it fixes a lot of problems highlighted.

With this in place, you could simply have reports to require a player ID submitted as well as the username.

Outside of moderation reports, you might still need to check someone's renames to see who they really are, but I see this as outside the moderation team's jurisdiction. For a start, how do you define what each player's identity is? Farms has been TheWheelie for over a year and now TheWeakie, meanwhile pepsi is known by a name he has never used. It's not the mod team's job to make sure player X can recognise player Y, it has too many variables out of the mod team's control.

I understand that it's an issue if a mod can't identify who a report is referring to, but it's not the job of the average player to stay on a name so that I can personally recognise them in-game. I think using the player ID in reports would help solve some of this confusion.

Discernibility

This still leaves us with the problems of impersonation, using characters to create near identical names or otherwise as another player or mod.

Disclaimer: As you can probably tell by my profile, I have a biased view on this. My personal opinion is that I chose this name for a joke, the person I am impersonating doesn't have any issue with it, and I'm not using this name to cause any issues in FAF.

I do understand that mods want to curb impersonation used for nefarious reasons, so I will outline my concerns in what I hope will be an unbiased way.

Mod impersonation

Mod impersonation is obviously a big issue when it happens, and we should not allow this as a community. But to be honest, if any random player can rename to impersonate a mod, I don't even see it as a rename issue. Mods should have clearer signifiers of their role to more easily differentiate them from players.

Additionally, I could still masquerade as a mod without renaming - I could just say "hello I am a mod" and attempt to pressure players to do things.
I've also seen too many new players ping TheSetoner to ask questions, I can't imagine how many DMs it gets. A clearer indicator of mod status seems like it could be useful, whatever the final decision is on this rename rule update.

Player Impersonation

I think it would be good to know how big of a problem this actually is. Do a lot of players actually use similar characters to impersonate others with malicious intent? I can totally understand the issues with mod impersonation, but with player impersonation I would really like some stats on how widespread this is, because as far as I'm aware it's only a few meme renames that haven't offended anyone.

The existing rule of thumb is that the offended party/impersonated player has the option to report the player who renamed. Otherwise, no action will be taken. In my mind this worked fairly well, as it avoided people being banned for joke renames while allowing more malicious impersonation to be punished. The proposed solution of simply reverting a player to an acceptable name could work well in cases of reports like these.

If the mod team would like to share some more info about how much of a problem player on player impersonation actually is, that would really help understand the motivation behind these intended rules updates.

Concluding Thoughts

Understanding the motivation behind this update has been challenging, with such a wide range of differing arguments used - from curbing mod impersonation to making it easier for tournament viewers to recognise players. I didn't post any serious response until the mod team declared they'd be going ahead with the changes anyway, despite the negative backlash, so I hope they make the effort to clarify and focus their intention in a future post.

[FtXCommando]

6 months is still ridiculous, 3 months is barely tolerable, 2 months is acceptable

[Exselsior]

@giebmasse said in Username rules updates:

alternate ways to express yourself, such as the clan system. Therefore, the moderation team believes that user identification should not be compromised for the sake of having a humorous name.

Clan system isn't an alternative to renaming, it's entirely separate. The same people most known for renaming have also been in the same clan(s) for however long, they can't change clan name like they can display name.

Examples include players changing usernames to avoid reports, imitating other players

This issue is only truly fixed with the technical solution of including a static ID in more places in the UI for mod team use + however that helps other FAF dev teams. I think Brutus mentioned somewhere in this thread that this would be a nice to have as well for non-moderation related work.

impersonating moderators to pressure other players to force name changes.

These people should be immediately banned regardless of any other rule changes from this thread, no one disagrees with that. Impersonating a mod is indisputably toxic and should face repercussions. Again, I seriously doubt anyone disagrees with this, and this seems easily achievable as is.

There are two separate problems in this thread, one being impersonation and the other being the rename cadence.

Impersonation without malicious intent and with the person who is being impersonated being fine with it is victimless, why are we wasting time and effort there? If the person being impersonated doesn't like it, then sure, make the other person rename. If someone impersonates someone and then acts like a toxic asshole, then both make them rename and give them a longer ban than just for acting like a toxic asshole. That sounds reasonable since it's malicious impersonation + toxic behavior. If someone joins FAF and finally takes the correct spelling of Excelsior I'd think that's funny and I'd be pretty mad if they were forced to rename, plus that would be a horrible experience for the dude who just joined. Unless of course they are toxic, but again that's a different issue. @TheWheeIieNoob did a much better job talking about this in the post about identity vs discernibility.

I feel that is largely separate from the second issue of changing how frequently people can rename. Here there are technical fixes that resolve the issue that have been repeatedly brought up and seem to even have support from some of the very people who would be involved in the implementation if I'm not mistaken. I am in no way convinced there is a significant amount of mod time wasted due to regular renames unless there are a lot of sub 1.2k players doing this while being toxic that I'm not aware of. Which is possible. I know there's no way the mod team can concretely prove it due to confidentiality, but it would be nice to have some more concrete numbers on how prevalent of an issue it actually is.

[waffelzNoob]

@TheWheeIieNoob did a much better job talking about this in the post about identity vs discernibility.

Appreciate the shoutout!

[IndexLibrorum]

@thewheeiienoob

Thank you for your response. I appreciate the time you put into writing this out, because this is the type of feedback that we can properly work with.

In this response I’ll use the terms as you defined them. Unlike the previous posts by gieb, this post is my own view on the matter and not all elements (if any) may be unanimously supported by the modteam.

Proposed changes

We are proposing two changes:

• A decrease in how frequently a person can change their name: from monthly to once every 6 months.
• A rewording of the original rule on impersonation/similar names

Identity

The first change focuses on addressing identity. Decreasing the frequency with which people can change names will make usernames more stable and make it easier to identify specific players. We’ve seen the feedback on visible userID’s, as well as the alternative static handle approach suggested by ArchSimkat. We have not ignored these suggestions, just as we have not ignored any of the other suggestions in this thread.

We’ve discussed the feasibility of these two options internally. I specifically like the suggestion by Arch over the use of our playerIDs, because strings of numbers are generally more difficult to remember and recognize than words. The modteam as a whole seems to be in favour of an option like this, but we don’t know in what timeframe—if any—this can be implemented: changes like these require dev time, and that is always in short supply.

A quick side node on how name issues affect moderation. We already use unique playerIDs, but that does not solve all issues for our mod team. Screenshots supplied with reports naturally won’t match up, and neither will chat- and gamelogs. That said, I personally think the issues that names cause for my own work as a moderator are not the most relevant argument in this discussion. And if that was all, I would not be in favor of the changes we proposed. Our previous two posts have not focussed much on those arguments either: our arguments are mostly on how the current name system and rules affect other players interacting with other players.

While you are correct in saying that it is not our job as mods to ensure everyone knows who everyone else is at all times, like with the example of Pepsi you mentioned, it is our job to see how game features cause issues in the community. Making name changes less frequent is not going to solve all the issues, but it will improve some of the issues. Such is the nature of finding solutions that work for large groups: they don’t work perfectly for anything. A true ‘solution’ to any and all name issues would be to abolish the rename system altogether, but I do not believe the negative aspects of that change would weigh up to the positives.

Making name changes less frequent will make usernames more stable. I sincerely believe this is very beneficial to the community and significantly more important than being able to joke with usernames. Leave that for chat, discord, and (for all I care) wall templates.

Discernibility

The second change addresses what you call discernibility. Responding to your points roughly in the order that you brought them up:

Impersonating moderators has occurred, but this is not the crux of our argument. I agree with you that we have other tools to handle that. I think the moderator badges we are currently using work well.

General player impersonation occurs somewhat frequently. We’ve previously received reports and acted on them. However, it is a misunderstanding that we require a report before we take action. This is not part of the current FAF rules, and will not be under our rewrite. In fact, the rules explicitly mention that it is up to the mod’s discretion to apply penalties where necessary. When we notice an issue, we may take action without a report. Our only (self-imposed) restriction in this matter is that we generally do not moderate games that we are ourselves a part of, and those games are reviewed by a second moderator.

We’ve taken action on names that broke the original wording of the rules in the past, but have gotten feedback that those rules are unclear and not equally applied. Now, we get the complaint of unequal moderation more often, and in most cases there is little validity behind those complaints. I do my best to handle reports blind to whomever the report is about, and we have some good guidelines to how we handle certain offenses and ban lengths. However, the comments in this thread show that the rules on usernames are not equally enforced. That’s an issue—more so than the scale or frequency of the impersonation issue—and means we either have to stop enforcing them entirely, or make it feasible to enforce them properly.

And we do believe we have to enforce these rules. Say, for example, you have the following game:

One of the TheWheelieNoob’s becomes tilted and becomes verbally abusive, or causes another kind of issue that a moderator should deal with. Can you distinguish between the two to find the player you need to report? I wouldn’t be able to. Now obviously all Wheelie clones are naturally outstanding members of our community who wouldn’t and have never caused offense, but when this happens with other users we need to have a rule to point to when we explain that usernames like that aren’t allowed. Those rules exist, but needed a rewrite for clarity, and as with all rules they need to be applied equally and without bias. This means no exceptions for our 1%’rs.

At the end, this discussion on whether such rules are necessary really boils down to what you believe the core goal of the username is. I understand usernames to be unique identifiers for different players. If usernames are neither unique nor identifiable, then they have failed in their purpose. A second static handle would go a long way to solving most of these issues, and I would love to have that option. Until we have that worked out though, these changes are necessary.

---

Lastly, we had chosen not to directly address it previously, because it would distract from constructive discussion, but some of the hate that has been directed towards modteam over the past weeks—both in this thread on this topic as well as in discord and regarding other topics—has been disturbing and deeply unpleasant. I want to briefly comment on that.

I signed up to the modteam about half a year ago to help clear the massive backlog of reports we had, because I was annoyed by how my reports seemingly had no effect. I am volunteering a not insignificant portion of my time, 30-60 minutes nearly every day, to the moderation team because I want the FAF project to have a healthy community. For the same reasons I’ve spent several hundreds of hours making maps and writing very long tutorials on mapping, because I really like this game, and most of you. We have since cleared the backlog (I alone cleared more than 2100 reports in the past 6 months), something that I am very happy with. But the vitriol I’ve seen some people spew… do you all remember that there’s another person behind the other screen?

Do not forget that while the modteam speaks as moderators, we also speak as individual players. It is easy to point at the Wheelie-group and go “look how many people think it’s fun to play with names”, and accuse us of being tyrannical overlords just out to ruin the fun. But our individual opinions as players count too. I wouldn’t spend this much time drafting replies and joining discussions on these rules if I didn’t feel strongly about this change.

-- Index.

[Brutus5000]

@exselsior said in Username rules updates:

This issue is only truly fixed with the technical solution of including a static ID in more places in the UI for mod team use + however that helps other FAF dev teams. I think Brutus mentioned somewhere in this thread that this would be a nice to have as well for non-moderation related work

That is not what I meant actually. What would help (or rather would have helped) is, if we would split up account names and display names, like Steam or nowadays Discord does.

The reason for this is the complexity in account management and single sign on setup. In FAF we try to not reinvent the wheel if we can use 3rd party tools. However right now when changing your display name also changes your account name. This is something no 3rd party identity provider supports (because it's a bad idea to do so). So we had to work around it and invest a lot of time. The problem continues: if you change your name, we have to update all the 3rd party tools: forum, wiki or whatever you come up with. Again: not every tool even supports that (-> we can't use them) and/or we need to implement additional API/middleware features. This is why this forum is stuck on a 3 year old version and not updated. It causes problems and breaks on updating.

So if we introduced a display name for mostly lobby purpose only, and in all tools that don't support display name change you are bound to your FAF account forever, that would simplify things.

But that requires to show the account name still visible for moderation reports & co.

[TheWreck]

Index cannot read confirmed

[TheWreck]

Also if the moderators refuse to acknowledge what the elite and regular players do for this game and continue to ignore them you will find youv wont have any left.

[FtXCommando]

Index you like singlehandedly caused one of the major communities on the Discord to die off out of some personal vendetta. I feel zero sympathy for you and I have zero problems being negative about this policy when the vast majority of the hate here relates to rename time intervals and it’s barely been made any less ridiculous.

There’s a lot of hate for mods recently because they just keep doing pointless stuff for seemingly no one but themselves and ironically creating more problems while perpetually complaining about how much work they need to do.

I cannot be less tired of reading mods talk about some phantom general will of people they are trying to represent when they can barely manage to get anybody that isn’t a mod themselves to support their policy. Just start being honest and say you make changes because you want them instead of rhetorically spitting in my face about some “community you represent.”

[TheWreck]

Self righteous people should not be moderators

[FtXCommando]

@indexlibrorum said in Username rules updates:

Making name changes less frequent will make usernames more stable. I sincerely believe this is very beneficial to the community and significantly more important than being able to joke with usernames. Leave that for chat, discord, and (for all I care) wall templates.

5 of the 11 are mods btw

[MrBeast]

@ftxcommando I would call it a 7/11 mostly cuz they involved as mod party private dance club. At the same time 2/4 - are just non-competent to vote, as 700 rated guy thats tired of gaps. 2/4 are just Swatoslaw - idk what is his reason there, maybe he doesnt like to read what is that new settons player. Skrat are tournament director thats getting troubles with understanding who is who, when the brackets begin.

[CheeseBerry]

Personally, I don't care much about the rename feature.

I will probably never rename myself and I do get annoyed sometimes when I don't know who I'm playing with or when searching for replays that I now can't find because someone renamed themselves again.

Still though, at least from a player perspective, people renaming themselves to SNFPoopieButtholeWheelieNoob seems like harmless fun that quite a few people have fun with and seemingly feel strongly about keeping.

I think the best solution would be some version of what Archsimkat, BlackYps, Tagada and Brutus already laid out: Distinguish display name from account name/id and use the latter for when you really need to identify someone.

I would be much more hesitant to see this solution as viable, because it's yet more work for the devs, but considering @brutus5000 said in Username rules updates:

This would solve a lot of technical problems in the long run.

it might be useful to do anyway.

If all of this is truly a big problem I think the technical solution is the one to go with.

[Brutus5000]

@ftxcommando said in Username rules updates:

@indexlibrorum said in Username rules updates:

Making name changes less frequent will make usernames more stable. I sincerely believe this is very beneficial to the community and significantly more important than being able to joke with usernames. Leave that for chat, discord, and (for all I care) wall templates.

5 of the 11 are mods btw

Closed bubble. I didn't give it an up-or downvote because I don't give a fuck. and this applies to 90-95% of the community. You cannot interpolate these numbers for the whole community.