Blocking Players
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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.
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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.
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@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:
If a game has staff that give people ick for having access to this stuff
There is a world of difference between cracking open the database/bytestream and having ready commands at your fingertips to spy on players. Staff are way more likely to use the latter than go out of their way to do the former.
As the designer of Ares, I can’t stop someone from being a jerk and spying on a private conversation between two players, but I certainly don’t have to give them a command to make it easy for them.
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I think it’s irresponsible for the administrator (head staff) of any system (game) to not have access to the full gamut of information being sent to and from that system. I think it’s just as irresponsible for an admin (staffer) to use that information in abusive fashion. I deleted most of my social media accounts in the last year because the administrators of those networks (Facebook and Twitter) began using my (and others) information put into the system in an unethical fashion. At the same time I don’t decry them for having that access. They’re the system administrator, they should have that access.
I’m not saying every staffer everywhere should just be 24/7 monitoring every line typed into their game and prying into every conversation. What I am trying to convey is that staffers should have the ability, in situations where it is warranted, to access any and all information regarding a situation to make their decisions, rather than hoping someone has logs from their perspective (which they could easily edit) and adjudicating based on those logs and whatever information they can pry out of the code. This is why I do feel there should be commands that assist in this information gathering process.
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@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:
rather than hoping someone has logs from their perspective (which they could easily edit) and adjudicating based on that.
Ares gives players access to the logs, and easy reporting tools to share them (in an automated and verified fashion) with staff when trouble arises.
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@Faraday Very cool. I’m not super familiar with the inner workings of Ares, but that is good to know. Most of my experience comes from the traditional telnet based MUs.
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Apologies if this has been answered, but would this be game-specific ignoring/blocking, or would it also apply to Ares handles?
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@chorus Character-specific.
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@MisterBoring Even on telnet-based games, there’s always been a tension between reporting capability and player expectations for privacy. It’s long been considered inappropriate for staff to enable logging of all commands, or to lurk in rooms watching private RP. Most platforms don’t provide a way to review pages.
With Ares, I’ve just taken a more explicit stance in the privacy statement that there are no core server commands to do these kinds of things. I can’t stop a staff from making their own, but they are not built-in. Instead, players can send the evidence to staff via the reporting features. It really hasn’t hampered staff’s ability to investigate things - it has enhanced it.