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Blocking Players
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@Pavel said in Blocking Players:
From what I recall, there were no built-in channel blocks in older codebases, so it depended on whatever softcode people wrote up. And most games didn’t bother to have any.
Yeah that’s why I’m struggling a bit, because there was no established paradigm on any MU codebase I’ve ever played on. You could gag an entire channel and you could pagelock somebody (which made the command itself fail) but you couldn’t selectively mute a single person from a channel.
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It’s so funny how people’s game experiences vary so much! For me it was a common game softcode feature on the games I came up on, so my brain naturally assumed it was common everywhere.
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Kind of a stream of consciousness reply to @Faraday in her original post:
I think there should be “tiers” of blocking, but I’m not going to propose something consistent here:
No contact blocking.
- Informs the other party that they have Crossed A Line
, and also alerts staff that this player is absolutely not having it. - Would require “ARE YOU SURE?” type confirmation to make sure this is not “for the lols” and is not to be used lightly. Also carries a warning that it cannot be removed without admin intervention.
- Prohibits contact from the no-contact-blocked player in any way (as much as possible).
- Perhaps even an IP or domain block as the filter, to catch some of the (non-VPN) abusers.
- Either party trying to get around this after it’s in place could potentially auto-report to staff. Again, not to be used lightly.
- Unsure how this could work in the case of a roster character, though, since auto-removing it on rostering opens the door wide to obvious forms of deceit and abuse.
Specific player and/or handle blocking.
- Not exactly a no-contact, but “I don’t want to listen to them.”
- Basically suppresses everything from that character/handle (pages, post notifications, emits, mail, etc.), but the initiator of the block can still see if the blocked person created a post (by manually going to the forum/board, such as when the blocked person is the author of the thread).
- Optional addition to notify the blocked party that they have been blocked. To make it really clear.
Muting.
- For lesser or temporary silence, such as a specific person on a specific channel, or when you just don’t want them paging you right now (“not a good time” “but…” “DID I TYPO?”).
- Informs the other party that they have Crossed A Line
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So my actual fuller feelings are this: blocking someone from having direct contact with you is different from wanting to mute them on channel. I think the overall philosophy of the existing pm/ignore is correct in giving the other user some sort of feedback when they attempt to page someone who’s blocked them; I don’t think the message should go into the ether.
I think that a channel/mute or channel/ignore feels like a separate thing. When I block someone, it’s serious. If I make it so that someone can’t page me, that’s a step towards No Contact. When I want to mute someone on channels, it can be a much less serious thing: I just need to not see their chattering for a while. It could very well be just a temporary breather. I don’t think that there needs to be a notification to the other party that someone’s put them on channel/ignore or whatnot.
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The idea of me blocking someone and them receiving any notification other than “X is not receiving OOC pages right now” stresses me out.
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So you can please some of the people some of the time…
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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.
