Feedback a thread of my own

[Peenut]

k, here's my own thread and feedback (rude to ask me to make a new thread then ban me!!!) - in summary i believe the admin team hasn't become any more transparent despite your promises in the various community chats (and in fact, have become more secretive over the past year or so!), don't hold each other up to any sort of public scrutiny, and all of this is to the overall negative of the station/servers.

you've made the ban appeal forum private to "protect those appealing from shame", despite (or probably, because,) the real benefit of a public forum being to hold you admins to account in case you start banning people arbitrarily.

coupled with this you've said that discord "is not a space to brood about bans" and that "if an admin asks you to stop talking about your ban, do so!", making sure that you've got the tools to "legally" shut down anyone who wishes to complain publicly about an unfair ban, relegating them to a secret thread they're not allowed to talk about.

despite even some of your admin team agreeing over a year ago that there is no good way to currently hold admins accountable for their actions to the player base, that it would be a good idea, and suggesting admin-notes or something similar (march 2020 town hall), you haven't made any such changes.

you've banned people for their posts in the apparently sacred and unpunishable admin feedback forum.

you seem to selectively enforce rules and treat different players differently, though the opaqueness of the whole ahelp/note/ban/ban appeal system makes it impossible for anyone outside of the admin team to see what's going on.

you let admins investigate themselves for admitted rule breaking and slap themselves on the wrist without any public input.

you seem to put enforcing decorum rules of precisely where, when, and how feedback can be provided, above actually taking on feedback and improving the server.

to address these issues i recommend the admin team take a position of "radical" transparency; every admin note, ban, or talking to should be made public. keeping them private serves only to protect the admin team from scrutiny.

i put "radical" in quotes, because this is isn't actually a particularly radical suggestion, and is the approach taken by all non-authoritarian organisations that actually care about being accountable to the people they're supposedly representing.
'crimes' on a ss13 server don't need to be kept more secret than actual real life court hearings.

as far as i am able to do so, i throw this thread open to all who wish to comment.

[Leeanei]

The hiding of ban appeals was partially my doing and it was done for a very specific reason on my end:

The practice of public ban appeals hurt members who would be concerned about their public image. There are lots of things we will accept appeals for but people do not want to appeal because they are worried about how others will view them. You might argue these people did not deserve a ban in the first case if they can appeal but we can only warn people for the same thing so many times before we have to push harder to let the rules sink in.

The opposite end of the appealers is the absolute shameless people. The sort that would attract a lot of eyes and peanuts and people would talk about. Maybe admins would appear to dunk on them. It wasn't ever valuable that anyone saw it.

People are permitted to discuss their ban on Discord until an admin asks them to stop. There's a reason for that: It makes people uncomfortable to see bans hashed out in public. Personally, I don't mind people declaring they've been banned. I just ask them to stop after their declaration turns into the sort of whining that cuts into the enjoyment of people using our discord to talk about the game.

A system of public notes or public admin discourse or public talking tos would only be effective at pushing admin discourse elsewhere. There's no good reason people should see the sausage getting made. Sometimes we have to make tough calls or debate. The fact we can do so in privacy means that admins can be far more honest. Public stuff would turn everything into a miserable PR exercise. We are not a paid team, our patreon couldn't pay for a part timer, please understand there is value in letting us act quickly and smoothly rather than spend all day long in PR mode.

For transparency, this account was banned because it's being used to evade a previous ban and that previous ban was applied because they used it to peanut post on another feedback thread. We do not ban people for feedback threads, but we also do not have to sit around while anonymous alts pick fights. It just is not worth our volunteer time.

And no, this is not a public thread I have already spent far too much of my life discussing the reasoning I pushed for public ban appeals. I did it as a service to people who rightfully did not want to be judged by their peers. There's no conspiracy to it.