Feedback Open letter to the Admin and Dev team

[jan.antilles]

I'm going to reply to your post specifically, MichiRecRoom, since I'm directly involved in the points of feedback you've left here. If you wish to respond to this post, make a new thread, because you're getting into the territory of "thinly disguised ban appeal." Your ban appeal has been dealt with separately.

Cal, if I may, I think you're misunderstanding those issues.

I believe the point being made here is that the amount of communication that is brought to the table, is far too little. Nobody expects you to publicly justify or announce every single little thing you do. But what is publicly announced is too little to understand.

As an example, when I was permabanned a while ago (by another admin). To be clear, I do think I deserved the ban, considering the situation. However, I also felt that it came with no warning, no attempt to communicate with me and see if there's some miscommunication or something that could be done to help solve the issue.

Still, I attempted to appeal it, but was denied. But the response I was given left me without much understanding of what to do next. Do I wait a few months and try again? Or maybe I'll never be allowed in Goonstation again? Maybe there's more issues I'm simply not aware of, that I need to address with myself? I don't know the answers to any of those. All I know is that the admin who banned me doesn't have confidence at this time for me to be a positive presence in the community, due to how much problematic behavior was exhibited by myself.

This is not a case of unclear communication. You were warned many, many times for your behavior, and I personally sat in multiple conversations with you that lasted for over an hour apiece, attempting to communicate exactly what the behaviors were that were unacceptable on Goonstation. It is patently false for you to state that anything came with "no warning."

If the person who banned you doesn't have confidence that you'll be a positive presence, and doesn't give you specific "next steps," then your answer is to chill. Go do something else. Let both yourself and the community have some time to move on from the point where we decided that you needed to be removed from it.

I also want to speak up about this. To preface this, I have trouble understanding things in the same way as other people do (whether admin or non-admin). Really - even things that seem obvious to you (even "common sense") might not be obvious to me - a point that I've had to deal with many times across many servers and many years.

Anyways, I want to give an example of how I feel there's a lack of standardization among the admins. There was a point when I was rolebanned from Security. However, the matter of whether Brobocop counted as part of that roleban seemed... up in the air. I asked admins about it on two separate occasions, and both times was told that Brobocop should be OK even during my roleban. One admin even justified that "OK" as "Brobocop is a joke module."

So imagine my surprise one day - when I had played Brobocop in the RP server, and talked about it in the Discord after - that I was brought into the admin-to-user chat (I forget the name) by the one who handed me the roleban, and was given a clarification that playing Brobocop was considered an evasion of the roleban. This was in spite of the aforementioned "OK" from the admins (which the clarifying admin even acknowledged), and also in spite of the fact that I had avoided the original issue during that round that had gotten me a security roleban.

Even now, I'm still having trouble understanding how it was considered evading my roleban by one admin, despite having gotten an explicit OK from two others. Can admins just override each other like that? Does the admin who handed out the roleban have the ultimate say on those exact rolebans?

It feels like a lack of standardization - at the very least, if there is a standard for situations like this, it's not very clear and not communicated well to non-admins.

This was also me, and this was the subject of a very extended conversation between the two of us, in which I was very clear about what the misunderstanding had been. The other administrators gave you the okay to play with Brobocop because the intent of the module was silly. You took the module and played it as if you were an actual serious member of Security, and I confronted you about this and said that you should not do this in the future due to your Security role ban. You did not receive any punishment for "evading," I merely explained to you that your use of the module was not acceptable, given the unique circumstances that you were in.

Miscommunication between admins happens. We are human beings who are volunteering our time and effort to make the silly space-toot game and its community better, because we love it. We're not employees with top-down directions about how to handle each and every scenario. Mistakes happen, and we deal with them, and we move on.

As I stated: if you want to reply to this post, make it in another thread, becuase I have no desire to clutter this thread with further argument about your bans.