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On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof
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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.
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@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
@KarmaBum Whatever system I would put in place would only be viewable/usable by myself. It would never change once established.
I take issue with this. Respectfully, I don’t know you from Adam and therefore it’s impossible for me to trust you enough to be the sole arbiter of what is Just and Good in the way you’re asking me to with this paradigm. “Only one admin can see everything that you type into the game, but don’t worry, they’re cool and have perfect judgment.” Yeah, no thanks.
I wish you would.
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@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
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.’
@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
Whatever system I would put in place would only be viewable/usable by myself. It would never change once established.
I guess I misunderstood.
Carry on.
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@Pax Totally fine! There is always going to be a red line and I want someone to see where the lines are drawn up front so that they can spend their time and effort on somewhere else that better fits their ethos. The input is helpful either way.
@KarmaBum Words are hard and I don’t always get them right.
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@Istus It’s cool. I was operating under the assumption you were building some sort of stop-gap measure till you felt like people “trusted staff enough” to bring things to them.
If you’re just gonna log everything forever, have at it.
What’s-her-face did that on PernWorld for years and years. The disclaimer that STAFF LOGS EVERYTHING was on that game forever, and people still played it.
Idk that it ever mattered ever, but you’d have to ask what’s-her-face.
edit: her-face is mynti!!! i remembered
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@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
@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.’
@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
@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.
Logging everything is really not at all a way to establish any sort of trust. You will have people who report things without knowing you first. And you establish trust in the way you talk to players in general, and the way you manage the OOC atmosphere of the game. People will see if you shush certain kinds of jokes or OOC behavior going on in public.
But “I’m watching your every move” doesn’t build trust. It does the opposite.
@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
@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.
Your system won’t catch this either, though. If you want it to be reactive, and people don’t report, you’re not going to know to check in on a certain player. Making a list of keywords your system will flag will not catch this. There isn’t a magic list of harassment keywords. You are, as @bear_necessities said well, building yourself an illusion and a false sense of security.
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Your system won’t catch this either, though. If you want it to be reactive, and people don’t report, you’re not going to know to check in on a certain player. Making a list of keywords your system will flag will not catch this. There isn’t a magic list of harassment keywords. You are, as @bear_necessities said well, building yourself an illusion and a false sense of security.
Is the idea worse than doing nothing? What I am trying to wrap my head around is whether such a thing is intrinsically negative in terms of the behavior it would encourage me to engage in. If I understand its limitations, and do not rely on it to ‘do my job’ what negative consequences could arise from it?
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I guess I’ll just say this: If your concern is purely about catching problem players, the place I’ve found to be the best at fielding and handling problem players is Arx. And they do it by being very open and direct about wanting players to report things even if it’s small or might be nothing, and by proving through their actions (bans but also thematic ways, and how they enforce that theme) that they will take my report seriously. I didn’t know any of them to decide if I could trust them, but it was written either explicitly or implicitly all over the place that they cared and would be safe to report to.
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@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
Is the idea worse than doing nothing? What I am trying to wrap my head around is whether such a thing is intrinsically negative in terms of the behavior it would encourage me to engage in. If I understand its limitations, and do not rely on it to ‘do my job’ what negative consequences could arise from it?
Do you consider reading the logs of people who have not asked you to read them a problematic act?
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@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
Your system won’t catch this either, though. If you want it to be reactive, and people don’t report, you’re not going to know to check in on a certain player. Making a list of keywords your system will flag will not catch this. There isn’t a magic list of harassment keywords. You are, as @bear_necessities said well, building yourself an illusion and a false sense of security.
Is the idea worse than doing nothing? What I am trying to wrap my head around is whether such a thing is intrinsically negative in terms of the behavior it would encourage me to engage in. If I understand its limitations, and do not rely on it to ‘do my job’ what negative consequences could arise from it?
In my opinion? Yes, it could be, if by “nothing” you mean not logging everything. I feel like the reasons why have been outlined a few times at this point. 1) There’s a lot of potential players who have strong feelings about privacy who may be put off. But games can absolutely live with this, as others have also said. 2) If you build tools that don’t actually get you closer to a solution, which what you’ve described doesn’t sound to me like it will, then bad tools will bring you to bad results. You will make bad calls based on a bad tool because that’s the nature of bad tools.
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@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
Is the idea worse than doing nothing?
Yes.
If you want to establish trust, you have to trust too. Trust that your players will report bad behaviour, trust that you don’t need to spy on people to get the results you want.
Trading privacy for security is always a tenuous and complicated idea.
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@shit-piss-love said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
Do you consider reading the logs of people who have not asked you to read them a problematic act?
This just makes all logs problematic forever, then. The creeper who is being reported did not ask staff to read the log, so now the very act of submitting and reviewing events is problematic.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
This just makes all logs problematic forever, then. The creeper who is being reported did not ask staff to read the log, so now the very act of submitting and reviewing events is problematic.
Well yeah. Just scroll back in this thread and you’ll have plenty of people explaining the circumstances under which they would be hesitant to share a log even if they were the victim of abuse.
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@Istus why is it a choice between that idea or doing nothing?
I think honestly some of the discomfort that people are expressing may only be partially related to the logging or systems. I think some of it has to do with the perceived inflexibility and formulaic approach you seem to be taking. Have you personally experienced the kind of predatory harassment on a game that you seem to genuinely want to curtail?
A lot of the times (not always, but a lot) predators work in ways that circumvent formulaic approaches. In fact they /thrive/ in that environment because most of the time they operate on the gray area. Not breaking the letter of the law, but being extremely invasive and gross in the spirit of it. Many times those people use staffers who have a more…distant and formulaic approach to their advantage. And dealing with a staffer like that is often frankly just as demoralizing as having to deal with someone who has been invasive on a game.
Problematic people are rarely afraid of logging. That doesn’t prevent them from doing what they do.
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I think, at least partially, this is an ‘every problem looks like a nail’ issue.
You’re a coder. So you’re going to approach solving the problem in a coderly way. That’s just not how the majority of us think.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@shit-piss-love said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:
Is the idea worse than doing nothing? What I am trying to wrap my head around is whether such a thing is intrinsically negative in terms of the behavior it would encourage me to engage in. If I understand its limitations, and do not rely on it to ‘do my job’ what negative consequences could arise from it?
Do you consider reading the logs of people who have not asked you to read them a problematic act?
If permission to do so was not granted at the outset, absolutely. There is a reason I have been very clear that anything I end up doing will be clearly labelled on the tin - be it logging everything, logging nothing, or something in between.
For all discussion/debate purposes I hope that everyone is considering things from the position that nothing is being done without previous disclosure and acceptance prior to making a character. There may be some subtlety in specific cases such as noting that some words may automatically trigger an investigation but not publishing the specific words.
@mietze I think I should clarify that ‘doing nothing’ in this case is specific to triggering passive investigations based on keywords or not. It does not mean that everything is hands off outside of that one discussion item. Part of the reason why I am so passionate in finding some balance of tooling and culture management is because I have been the victim of this sort of behavior in the past, like many others, and anything I can do to prevent it or slice it off early I will try and do.
@Pavel You’re probably right. These debates are constructive and help to check my personal biases.
There are opinions and perspectives here that I may not have considered. The result will be better for it.
