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On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof
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@shit-piss-love Sponge basically wiresharked all traffic in and out of City of Hope. I don’t know if that functionality was preserved after the game was moved.
That sounds HORRIBLE, and will make players feel bad, but in practice that sort of thing is completely, absolutely impractical for a person to read unless there’s some urgent need involved.
The more you’re logging, the more impersonal it is.
The worst spying is the personal kind: sitting DARK and following you is far more of an intrusion.
Which is why I said the players would FEEL bad about mass logging: it’s much less of an intrusion than it sounds like.
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If you’ve got it written in a public, easily accessible and understood form, that you’re logging everything all the time always? That’s fine, go for gold.
If you do it surreptitiously, that’s where the violation is. It’s not the action itself, it’s the lack of transparency that loses the trust. And without trust it doesn’t matter how much data you have logged, nobody’s going to believe you.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
If you’ve got it written in a public, easily accessible and understood form, that you’re logging everything all the time always? That’s fine, go for gold.
If you do it surreptitiously, that’s where the violation is. It’s not the action itself, it’s the lack of transparency that loses the trust. And without trust it doesn’t matter how much data you have logged, nobody’s going to believe you.
This I will grant you, 100%.
If you log, you need to be upfront that you are doing it. Doing it on the sly helps no one.
If privacy is not guarenteed on the game and that you may log when situations warrent it, you need to be visible about it.
We were on Labyrinth from the start, and to be frank it’s the only thing that stopped my wife and I being considered as accessories from what amounted to statuary rape charges that the abuser was doing on our mush.
It’s an extreme case, but here’s the thing I learned
I would rather invade privacy one million times I would rather annoy and piss off every single person on here. If it would save the innocence of one. single. child.
I hope none of you are ever put into a situation like that. It scars you. For life.
It twists your perceptions of what is truly important. It twists your morals on what you think you knew and what s reality.
It corrupts your beliefs on what is truly evil in the world.
I wish and hope and pray none of you ever go through that.
But it’s partly why I stand so hard nosed on why logs are necessary.
It’s not always about privacy. Sometimes it’s necessary to protect people who don’t even know they need protecting.
Where the line is? That’s up to you to discover.
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@Ashen-Shugar See, you’re talking from a presumption of good faith.
Half the people here, are thinking about the worst bad actors.
But the problem with the bad actors is they’re bad actors. Not the tools they use.
System administrators have many tools. They are morally neutral.
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@Polk said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
Half the people here, are thinking about the worst bad actors.
I’d say that people here think badly about the casual use of a pretty invasive tool, without prior warning, rather than necessarily focusing on ill intent. Not bad actors, just stupid nosy actors.
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@MisterBoring said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
This makes me feel like all players view all staff as bad actors by default.
By the same reasoning, wanting to log everything would imply that staff view all players as bad actors by default.
I did not believe that the members of the SAR team who used my yard for training would steal things or trash my house, but I still made them make their own toilet arrangements for when I wasn’t home, rather than let them all have keys.
Also, my experience leads me to be deeply suspicious of anyone who says, “I would never use this thing for ill, but I must have unlimited access to it so that it’d be really easy to do so.”
And what sao says. MU staff will not concretely harm me if they’re reading my private pages about my venereal warts, but I still don’t want them to.
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Referenced by
Roz
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I’m moving this to here so I don’t completely derail the Witcher game conversation but this whole idea of privacy and logging player behavior is sticking in my craw. I couldn’t define why until @Roz said:
@Roz said in Witcher MUSH Design:
I’m half-stealing someone else’s thought here that was brewing in my mind, but. What your responses have made me worry about is the sense that you think you can kind of – code fixes to player disputes, and you just can’t. And you may be building yourself a false sense of security by adding these tools that aren’t at all going to catch the sort of harassment that goes on. Like, if you build tools that don’t solve a problem, but you feel like they’re solving some of the problem, then I think you’re actually less likely to actually catch and fix things.
I think that’s it - that the idea we can log and “catch” bad actors by flagging problematic words or something is the illusion of safety. I think it’s so important for game runners to instead create an environment where complaints are taken seriously, no matter who is involved or the genders of the characters/players. I’ll never forget the time I finally complained about a player - who, for months, would ‘accidentally’ show up in my room, or page me randomly asking me who I was RPing with and then talk shit about that person, and tried to use my lack of knowledge about the game mechanics to try and get me to have a relationship with her character - and was told that she was “kinda frisky but harmless.” It didn’t make me feel safe, and I never felt comfortable complaining again, and no amount of log reading or word flagging would’ve ever popped her as the creeper that she was. Turns out I wasn’t the only person she did this to. She never got banned.
Anyway the point is, there’s no sure-fire way to catch a creeper and it’s really most important for gamerunners to show themselves to be “safe”. Once you have that, people WILL come to you about stuff, and you WILL catch the creepers, but it takes time to establish that.
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@bear_necessities The tricky part is establishing that trust. Until that trust exists, and a community is comfortable enough bringing stuff up, there needs to be a mechanism to increase the chance of an issue surfacing ‘on its own.’
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@bear_necessities said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
…and was told that she was “kinda frisky but harmless.”
I said ‘jesus christ’ out loud to myself. I’m sorry that went through that.
I think with the privacy, logs, receipts, proof, etc. With all of that, I accept that many games have logs, or logging capabilities. I am aware of Ares’ capabilities on this in particular. But those capabilities don’t exist because Faraday thought that she could catch creepers that way. (I mean, maybe I’m wrong. She can correct me.) They are largely a side effect of implementation of other features, with the added ability to report.
I think if you start out thinking you are going to catch creeps this way, you are setting yourself up for failure.
she/they
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@Tez Thanks, it’s been years now and it’s okay but it’s one of those things you just don’t forget.
Anyway I think the problem with ‘requiring’ logs or receipts is that it is truly impossible sometimes. I maybe could’ve logged some of the pages but at the time I very dumbly believed she was trying to be helpful (even though she was truly trying to isolate me). I could’ve logged the times she accidentally came into my room, but is that a bannable offense? Probably not.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think the creepers that bring down games are very overt - it is a process over time, it is based on manipulation of many people. And usually it just takes one person brave enough to say “hey this person is bothering me” to reveal the true intent of a person, but you don’t get that brave person without trust, and you don’t build trust without responding to complaints.
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@bear_necessities It’s taking off your shoes at the airport.
as previously stated, good day.
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@farfalla The worst thing about taking off my shoes at the airport is that it forces me to wear socks.
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@bear_necessities But you don’t get complaints without trust? I am trying to come up with a way to establish the circle or at least deal with things until trust is organically established.
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@Istus I don’t know about how others feel, but if you’re definitely going to log everything, I think you should have a written policy available about how they will be used and under what circumstances they will be accessed.
as previously stated, good day.
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@farfalla Of course. The plan is to ensure that it is a big unskippable wall of text that must be acknowledged before the player is able to do more beyond making an account.
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@Istus With plans to…? Gradually ramp down the nanny-state?
I’m not sure I see how this works in practice.
Game opens with a big disclaimer that STAFF LOGS EVERYTHING. Let’s assume no one just bounces 'cause lol this is clearly being run by crazy people…
Staff combs through these logs, looking for problems and what? Posts about them publicly? Privately removes people? How does the game find out that the logs are being used to their advantage?
How do you measure when players “trust staff enough” to take the guard-rails off? And then what do you do when someone comes to you with a complaint and no logs?
I guess trying to shoehorn in “trust” by spying on people seems kinda bass-ackward to me.
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Talk openly about the atmosphere you want to create, give examples of behavior you don’t want to see. When people are acting shitty casually, don’t let it slide in the moment - call it out. “We don’t do that here” is a good phrase. Don’t wait for people to report things to remove someone, if you’re seeing red flags. As a game runner you’re insulated from some of the shitty behavior, but it can still come out - in high stakes GM’d scenes, for example, or in how people try to play your systems to get an advantage over others. Use those moments to demonstrate your own patterns of behavior to your players.
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@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
there needs to be a mechanism to increase the chance of an issue surfacing ‘on its own.’
I got the impression that you wanted to have full logging so in the event of an issue brought to your attention you’d have the data. This statement seems to imply you actually want to have some kind of early warning system flagging naughty words or something and that’s a whole different animal. Like just to pick one problem with this out of a very over-full hat… the venn diagram of the words I am comfortable with a trusted intimate partner using and the words I am uncomfortable with a nontrusted person using are a perfect circle. I definitely don’t want some staffer snooping on content I’m comfortable with because a pose or page showed up in the Naughty Word Log.
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@KarmaBum Whatever system I would put in place would only be viewable/usable by myself. It would never change once established.
@shit-piss-love I am still trying to figure out where the line will be drawn. I have no desire to make a full time job out of looking through logs - I want it to be purely reactive - and I do not have any specific desire to read what consenting adults are up to behind closed doors. But I also have people talking about trust loops and how predators get away with stuff for far too long because people do not report predatory behavior.
It is very easy to point out the many problems - and doing so is still a super useful exercise for me and appreciated - but a perfect solution for everyone can not exist. I know that whatever decision I make in the end is going to conflict with another’s desires and that is perfectly fine in my mind as long as it is not delivered in the form of some rug pull where all of a sudden I pull something on someone after they have made a time and emotional investment under misunderstood or false pretenses.
It is our passion for the hobby, and the nuance of interpersonal relationships, that makes this subject so complicated.
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To add to what @KarmaBum is saying, speaking personally, what creates an atmosphere of trust is how people communicate at all times. Some people might not like it, but I prefer it when staff (or players I’m contacting for the first time) are friendly but polite with everyone publically.
