Feedback Goonstation Admin Team

[ZeWaka]

thank you for writing this up and doing all these interviews, this is good information just to be out there. varied interviews are crucial to getting actually actionable feedback.
i'm sure some other person or admin will write a much better post, but i am writing.

admin feedback snark

yes, this is definitely true and I've done it before. the issue is that in my (an Admin) view, feedback/complaint posts tend to only land in a few categories:

Edit: clarification, this post does not land into one of the usual three categories below. it is rare to see insightful thought into the workings of the administration

• yelling about a justified ban: this should be fairly obvious, these actually tend to not be replied to
  
• positive feedback:  actually nice, or could just be brownnosing the admin team because they got banned. both exist.
  
• a parting shot before leaving the community: these are generally the ones people think of when they're talking about Feedback Posts. generally, we have dealt with said player dozens of times, and we've given them too many shakes. when someone who is permanently banned for being Bad is trying to frame themselves as Just A Good Person, because they're conveniently leaving out everything that made us kick them out in the first place - it can get slightly annoying, as you can see.
  
  this is furthered by the admin guideline: Staff are forbidden to communicate ... to the general public ... notes on ... specific players/groups ...
  this is somewhat of a self-kneecapping, and it is possible this guideline could be changed in the future
  edit: it has been changed as of 24-10-7, see below
  

admin team sometimes make decisions that confuse the community and leave little to no explanation

aside from code stuff, administrative actions like these tend to be due to the admin team having more knowledge about how players act on a server than other players or maybe even their friends do.

like you might know someone as a cool HoS but they're actually extremely Problematic in that they belittle new players and exclude them from roleplaying, which you might not see since you're their friend.
or, perhaps they're actually harassing members of our community on Discord and we really don't want them here, much less in a position of authority.
many such cases. (these are examples from stuff that happened many years ago, do not read into this lol)

This issue is often reinforced by admins being often absent from games

when most admins are observing just to administrate, and not because they were playing and died, they will set their stealth mode on.
this is mainly due to the extreme behavioral differences players will show when adminwho or similar shows zero admins online.


i know i have not addressed all of your post - parts i have skipped are not intentional, these were just easiest to formulate my thoughts around due to having the most experience with