Blocking Players
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Appreciate all the feedback from everyone. Like @Pavel mentioned, there’s no system that will please everybody, but I think the consistent theme is that people view channel blocks very differently from page blocks, so there needs to be a way to differentiate.
The current prototype defines a generic “blocks” system, managed via a single settings page/command. This lets systems define different block types. It’s extensible, so plugin designers could potentially hook into the blocks as well.
PM blocks will give a failure message if they try to PM you, but it’s indistinguishable from the “do not disturb” feature (to @helvetica’s point about not broadcasting the fact that you’re ignoring them.)
Channel blocks will just silence the messages. No one will know.
Forum blocks could work the same way as channels and Mail blocks could work the same way as PMs, though I haven’t decided if it’s worth implementing those yet.
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Here’s a question to add to the discussion:
Should staff be able to see information related to blocking, such as a list of blocks?
I can both see arguments for and against it, but I’m curious as to what others think.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:
Should staff be able to see information related to blocking, such as a list of blocks?
That… is a damn good question. Yesterday, I was thinking about it as part of this conversation, but I couldn’t settle my mind on the idea one way or the other. I’m usually in favour of providing staff more information rather than less, but Ares definitely seems to lean more towards ‘no more information than is strictly necessary.’ So while I might prefer that staff have said information, I think it goes against the overall design philosophy.
Perhaps it should be a configurable option? I don’t know, I’ve not tried setting up Ares to fiddle with it, even though I keep meaning to. I can’t make my Victorian vampire game if I don’t fiddle.
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@Pavel I feel like the arguments against it are mainly just privacy related and also those situations where a bad actor might be on friendly terms with staff and staff could go “Oh, you just got blocked by Player X. Do you want me to tell them not to do that?” or something.
The argument for it that I can see is it gives staff the opportunity to spot problem players and remove them faster. If suddenly 17 people have blocked the same player, maybe that needs investigation and remediation or that player needs to be shown the door.
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@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:
Should staff be able to see information related to blocking, such as a list of blocks?
“Should” is always going to be a subjective opinion. I have no intention of adding that to Ares, though, because I don’t think it’s relevant. People can use blocks for all kinds of reasons. Maybe you just find me annoying, or had a bad experience with me back in 2006, or my politics differs from yours, or whatever. That doesn’t mean staff needs to (or even should) act on it. Ares has other robust reporting mechanisms for problematic behavior already.
But the info is there in the database if some staff really really wanted to make a custom command to see stats. It’s just not baked in.
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@Faraday Doesn’t ares have a report feature of sorts, that would allow a person to send relevant things like pages or the scene itself to staff if they feel it should go that far too?
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@Faraday said in Blocking Players:
or had a bad experience with me back in 2006
It’s true, i still curse you for doing thing at place with people.
The only real purpose I can see for staff needing block information is in those situations where a complainant is weird and does the unblock-final retort-block thing. So perhaps it could be included in the report staff get sent when someone reports pages?
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@SirKay said in Blocking Players:
@Faraday Doesn’t ares have a report feature of sorts, that would allow a person to send relevant things like pages or the scene itself to staff if they feel it should go that far too?
Yes, Ares has built-in commands for reporting PMs/pages, channel chat, and scene RP that automatically include relevant logs.
@Pavel said in Blocking Players:
Ares definitely seems to lean more towards ‘no more information than is strictly necessary.’ So while I might prefer that staff have said information, I think it goes against the overall design philosophy.
I wouldn’t say that’s the overall design philosophy. For the most part, Ares is built around OOC transparency. Sheets are public, scenes are designed to be shared, command logs record traffic (with reasonable limits to safeguard things like private messages and passwords), etc. I just don’t like the idea of staff snooping on private interactions between players, so Ares doesn’t let you do that with the built-in commands. If there’s a problem, Ares makes it super easy for the players involved to report it with verified logs. Otherwise, I think staff has no business poking into peoples’ private scenes and PMs.
@Pavel said in Blocking Players:
It’s true, i still curse you for doing thing at place with people.
@Pavel said in Blocking Players:
The only real purpose I can see for staff needing block information is in those situations where a complainant is weird and does the unblock-final retort-block thing. So perhaps it could be included in the report staff get sent when someone reports pages?
I don’t quite follow this example.
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@Faraday said in Blocking Players:
I don’t quite follow this example.
[Conversation Happens]
Pavel blocks Faraday.
Pavel unblocks Faraday.
Pavel: AND ANOTHER THING…
Pavel blocks Faraday. -
@Pavel That’s childish, sure, but I don’t really see the need for staff intervention? Not letting someone get a word in edgewise is not generally a bannable offense or anything. Just block them back and move on.
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@Faraday said in Blocking Players:
Not letting someone get a word in edgewise is not generally a bannable offense or anything
Well maybe it should be!
But still, I’m only suggesting that it could add context/further information to a complaint situation.
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I agree, and that’s where having staff be able to see who’s banning / unbanning who with timestamps might shed some light on someone doing something that staff needs to intervene on.
I know if I were staff on a game and could see definite logs of someone blocking someone, only to repeatedly unblock them, page them, and reblock them in rapid succession, I’d probably talk to the person doing it to see why they’ve chosen such a terrible way to get through the situation.
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@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:
I agree, and that’s where having staff be able to see who’s banning / unbanning who with timestamps might shed some light on someone doing something that staff needs to intervene on.
Digging through logs hunting for evidence of misconduct when none has been reported or suspected just feels icky to me. YMMV.
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@Faraday I think that sounded better in my head than when I typed it out.
I was suggesting that if a player reports another player for being an issue, that confirming foul behavior via some form of logging is always ideal. So in the case of a player abusing the blocking features to harass someone, being able to see that in the logs is a form of evidence that can be used by staff to better decide on what needs to be done.
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@MisterBoring This feels like such a niche scenario compared to the overall ick of staff being able to see everyone’s block and mute lists IMO.
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It sounds like that information will be in the database somewhere anyway, so if one really wants to use it, one can presumably whip up some code to do so.
That said, I can entirely understand someone coming from the perspective of “how will these bastards break/abuse this feature?”
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I am genuinely unconcerned about the scenario where someone is blocking and unblocking you. Just stop talking to them, then it won’t matter if they’ve blocked you. Or block them back. If the content of the conversation itself is troublesome, report it. I do not feel this problem requires additional code. But the code is open source. If you care enough and it’s your game, you can do as you please.
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My vote goes to two options: Channel block and traditional block.
Channel block blanks the ‘offender’ from channels. Used for when somebody hasn’t bothered you per se but you find their communication style / dad jokes / venting sessions / soap opera babble / whatever annoying and don’t want to see it.
Traditional block, well, as always. Block pms.
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As a sysadmin in my day job, I guess my perspective is a bit different than others in this regard. The people at the highest levels of staff on any game will likely have the access to review anything that happens on the game whenever they want. In some games this is easily done because the code base they are using has tools for activity tracking built in. In others, it requires a level of coding on their part to access that information. Heck, in most games that still run solely on telnet, that’s a fully plain text transmission, and anyone with the time and some free software could trap all of the activity coming and going from the game.
If a game has staff that give people ick for having access to this stuff, why are people playing on those games to begin with? If you can’t trust the high level administration of a system to act responsibly with their power, then perhaps its time we start depopulating those staffers games.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:
As a sysadmin in my day job, I guess my perspective is a bit different than others in this regard. The people at the highest levels of staff on any game will likely have the access to review anything that happens on the game whenever they want. In some games this is easily done because the code base they are using has tools for activity tracking built in. In others, it requires a level of coding on their part to access that information. Heck, in most games that still run solely on telnet, that’s a fully plain text transmission, and anyone with the time and some free software could trap all of the activity coming and going from the game.
If a game has staff that give people ick for having access to this stuff, why are people playing on those games to begin with? If you can’t trust the high level administration of a system to act responsibly with their power, then perhaps its time we start depopulating those staffers games.
My ick was not connected to any specific game or staffers. It was generalized.
This is an age-old (or hobby-old) debate. Just because it’s fully possible for someone to code up stuff that lets them watch every command input by every single player in a constant, easy stream, doesn’t mean I think it should be a command baked into the base Ares codebase. The fact that something is possible doesn’t mean that it needs to be easily accessible.
