Proposal: Updating the game rules & the moderation team

[GreekIdiot]

Hello all!

After quite a few discussions over the last few months and inspired by this thread here to move the ball forward I've completed a scan and review of the current game rules (here) to create a proposal (here).

A few notes:

1. I just scanned the current game rules, removed vague passages and simplified the sentences into a direct do/don't format - nothing changed in content
2. I separated what is not about the game into a code of conduct - made it clear how violations are handled
3. I added a moderation team structure as per our discussions - this is TBD with Wouter, no promises

Shoot.

[jamescfm]

I have expressed this privately to you and the Role-Play Committee already about this proposal but I am going to make the same point here publicly. I am concerned that the significant amount of information presented in this proposal means it will not be subject to the appropriate level of scrutiny. I support the project of reforming the Game Rules but I think rushing the process is problematic. In the past six years, the rules have been rewritten from scratch on two occasions and both times the final document has been deeply inadequate.

For that reason, I believe we should adopt a different approach to updating the rules this time. Changes should be gradual and there should be significant time for community consultation and feedback. Updates should be made in sections to allow each part to be properly considered. If the entire set of rules is changed at the same time, there is a much higher chance that problems are missed.

The poll at the top of this post has been available for only four hours but it already has four "yes" votes. I do not believe that anybody could have given a proper degree of scrutiny and consideration to this proposal in that period of time, even if they had read through the document as soon as the announcement was made. In the coming days, I will review the proposal and offer my own thoughts but in the meantime, I have voted "other" for the reasons above.

[GreekIdiot]

No problem at all. There's no timeline and no rush on this. We can take as much time as we need.

[Wu Han]

I voted "other," because while I think this proposal as it stands would represent a significant improvement over the current rules, I also feel as per what James said that it would be best to take this proposal (or any proposal, for what it's worth) piece by piece. I had begun to write a longer response here, but felt that it was rather scattered considering the breadth of the proposed rules and all which must be considered in relation to them.

I think it would be (more) reasonable to try to move through this proposal section by section before advancing a final, complete draft for community approval. However, I would hope that there could be some sort of timeline put forward (even if loose) so that we can maintain the reformist momentum, rather than allow this to be neglected and forgotten.

I will also just say that, at this point, I think the only way a "vote" can reasonably be held is through people openly declaring their vote, using their profile. This is for the reason which James identifies re: those who may vote without giving the proposal proper scrutiny, as well as the fact that this voting system can easily be manipulated.

[GreekIdiot]

I think it would be (more) reasonable to try to move through this proposal section by section before advancing a final, complete draft for community approval. However, I would hope that there could be some sort of timeline put forward (even if loose) so that we can maintain the reformist momentum, rather than allow this to be neglected and forgotten.

That is essentially the exercise I did in creating the proposal. What do you suggest?
i.e. remove voting and switch to a longer-term review/discussion here?

[Wu Han]

... What do you suggest?
i.e. remove voting and switch to a longer-term review/discussion here?

I'd probably recommend doing exactly that. Discussion could proceed by opening the first section up for feedback/editing for a period of ~2 weeks, then the next section, and so on.

[GreekIdiot]

Voting removed. On the duration, let's see how some first feedback goes.

[Zanz]

I am calling Advisors and Operators together "Mods" because frankly it's shorter and more in line with what the community knows. I am calling everything a "rule" because I do not really understand the distinction between the code of conduct and the game rules.

Moderation Team:

INTRODUCTION

02. Advisors and Operators who violate the Code of Conduct will be permanently banned by Admins.

Is the intent that mods simply skip the 30-day ban for literally any breach of the code of conduct? Is this permanent ban just from serving as a mod, or as a player overall? If the latter, a player who becomes a moderation team member is held to a much more severe standard than the average player - this may be intentional, but it seems to me a disincentive to do the thankless work of modding.

03. Advisors and Operators can suggest updates to the Code of Conduct and Game Rules to the Admins, at any time.

So can anyone, can't they? This feels to me like you're trying to give meaningful interaction with the rules to the mod positions but, at the end of the day, it's the Admin that gets to decide unilaterally on what is/isn't a rule, correct?

04. Advisors and Operators must always consider making relevant announcements, here.

What does it mean that mods "must always consider making relevant announcements"? How do we know what they have considered? I am confused by the intent of this rule.

ADVISORS

Advisors are players who like to enable gameplay/roleplay by guiding, helping and directly assisting players.

Many players like to enable roleplay by guiding and assisting players. Advisors are appointed members of the moderation team, we need to use direct language to describe them and their purpose.

01. Advisors consist of 5 members and need a 2/3 majority to make decisions. If they can't reach a consensus, they delegate to Operators.

In my opinion this is already handled by rule 05 in the introduction to this section: "05. Disputes on the decisions of Advisors are handled by Operators and vice versa."

02. Advisors are led by a Lead Advisor, who is appointed by the Admins. They can be removed by the Advisors with a 2/3 majority.

What does the Lead Advisor do, what are her duties? Do the Admins have any responsibility to share their reasoning for the appointment? What does the community do if 2/3rds of the Advisors continuously remove the Lead Advisor appointed by the Admins?

03. Advisors rotate every year by community voting, here, which lasts a minimum of 14 days. The voting is initiated and the final decision on the appointments is made by the Lead Advisor. Players who wish to be considered can submit their applications, here.

• 1st underline: What does this mean? Are all of the advisors removed in one election? Do some advisors move from one seat to another?
• 2nd underline: What does this mean? If there's a vote, what decision is the Lead Advisor making? It should either just read "the final announcement of Advisors is made [...]" - but why is this the Lead Advisor's job anyway, as presumably they'd then be on the way out of the Advisor group? Why is an announcement necessary at all, since presumably the voting will be public?

04. Advisors can replace their members, at any time, with a 1/2 majority.

Why? The community elected the Advisors, and then the advisors can remove members with a much lower hurdle?

05. b) Appointing and removing Operators - players who wish to be considered can submit their applications, here

What methodology is to be used to appoint and remove Operators? Subsection 2-01 and 2-02 below give a bit of info, but not enough. How and when are they chosen and removed?

05. c) Helping players on gameplay/roleplay and coordinating, organising and generating roleplay (i.e. assuming the role of a King or insurgents in a nation with the permission of players, assuming control of FBCs, managing a supranational organisation in the interim, incl. the World Congress)

The examples here are pretty wordy, which is just some wording feedback you can take or leave - but what does "in the interim" mean here? Who is meant to actually legitimately lead the WC, if the Advisors only do it in the interim?

05. d) Handling requests with the [A] indication, here, specifically:

Why are these done by Advisors and not Operators? Putting all else aside, they're not really "advising" when they're enforcing game rules, they're modding. My broad point here is that I think this distinction is going to confuse people and (most importantly) slow things down. Why not just let operators run all the threads, and keep the advisors largely what they already are, the RP team, with a slightly expanded purview allowing them to directly select Operators?

That said - if we leave this in, there is much to be outlined still. How do the Advisors handle these requests? Do they need to vote on how to act on every post that comes through these threads in their area of responsibility? Do they do that voting in public (so that members of the community can know whether they should support certain advisors in future elections)? If not in public, are there rules against Advisors sharing with the community how votes went?

Frankly the absurdity of what I ask above is sort of my point - a lot happens in relative darkness right now when it comes to the RP team. When CP proposals are posted for instance we hear that the RP team will review and then it goes off into a back room and eventually someone tells us the outcome. Why is that secretive? Those players could just as easily offer their feedback openly and we'd have no real need for the RP team at all. I have said it elsewhere, but I think that the best approach to this would be to make all day-to-day admin the responsibility of the Operators, and have those operators be subject to review by a board of players (the Advisors). Then, if the Operators are not being transparent enough with their rulings, we can just remove them if need be.

06. Advisors can delegate these responsibilities (excl. the appointments of Operators) to other players, with the permission of the Lead Advisor

Why? I suspect this is meant to allow for what we do if Advisors have an outage or go inactive, but frankly those scenarios should be better outlined in general - what do we do if someone is elected and then ghosts us? Does this rule mean that an individual Advisor can delegate his specific Advisor position to someone else, or does it mean that the Advisors as a group can delegate responsibilities? What are the methods by which they can do this / can undo this? If they delegate, and then those responsibilities are abused, what then?

OPERATORS

Operators are players who like to encourage gameplay/roleplay by keeping this community safe, supportive and fun for players.

Similar feedback to the description of Advisors above, firstly: so are many of us, be more direct - Operators are players appointed to undertake the day-to-day administration of the game. Secondly: this isn't even necessarily true. A good operator might not like to encourage roleplay, that's not a necessary requirement given the jobs you have given them below - they just need to keep the trains running. In short, these descriptions are too flowery and not really in line with the duties you are outlining.

01. Operators consist of a minimum of 2 members and require a 2/3 majority to make decisions. If they can't reach a consensus, they delegate to Admins on issues pertaining to players and to Advisors on all other issues.

• 1st underline: If there are 2 operators, a 2/3rds majority means a unanimous decision is necessary. Is this your intent? If it is not, then I argue the minimum number of Operators should be 3.
• 2nd underline: What are "issues pertaining to players"? I'd argue all issues at the end of the day pertain to players.
• 3rd underline: Same as above, this is already implied by 05 in the introduction.

02. Operators should rotate every year.

Should? What does this mean? Are they replaced all at once or staggered?

03. Operators are responsible for:

Same question as for advisors, do operators need a 2/3rds vote to do any of these?

03. d) - Routinely inactivating accounts that have not been logged in for 4 days

Because rules are defined in more than one place (in this case, here for inactivations), when you word rules in this way you end up making us prone to future inconsistency. If the inactivation period were updated to 5 days (for instance), the mods would need to remember to update this in both places instead of just in one. This led to a LOT of problems with the previous rules where something would be updated in one place and not another and then it was never clear which was the actual rule anymore. Instead of doing this, just say "Routinely inactivating accounts following the rules outlined in the [link to inactivation rules here]". This should be done throughout the document.

03. d) - Maintaining a private log of warnings/bans

I'm not married to this one, but why are warnings/bans private now? Back in the old days they were public, and we've had scenarios in past where a player is warned or banned by one moderation team and then another moderation team takes over and doesn't even know it occurred. Why not just put them out there again? I know this is discussed in Section 2 Code of Conduct 01 below but I disagree that it "unnecessarily" puts a target on players if they are warned or banned - they were warned or banned necessarily.

ADMINS

01. Admins are responsible for ensuring that Advisors and Operators do not enforce a Code of Conduct, Game Rules and any kind of gameplay/roleplay based on their own opinions, conflicts of interest, bias, playing styles and personal preferences as players.

How? How can admins know if this is happening, and what are their mechanisms to enforce this if they do know it is happening? I don't like this rule because it reads to me a lot like a veto power for the admin, who is neither elected nor appointed. Right now with Greek as the Admin that may not sound necessarily bad, but we shouldn't assume it will always be Greek.

02. Admins must approve bans of players, updates to the Code of Conduct and Game Rules and any major overhauls to the forums and Discord Server.

Why? In particular why must they approve bans of players, which presumably should be pretty clear cut - there are specific rules written out, and there are specific punishments for rule violations, so why do we need to give one unelected player a veto power over that entire structure? Why also must we give one unelected player veto power over rule updates?

03. Admins can appoint/remove Operators and Advisors at any time.

This throws everything above into meaninglessness. Why go to all the trouble of elections and appointments done by the player apparatus below the Admin if, ultimately, she can simply override anything at a whim? Again I know that right now this is likely never to be abused, but if rules only work under a good benevolent dictator they're not really good rules - we need to anticipate what might happen if Greek were to leave and we ended up with another player who was not so willing to share power.

[GreekIdiot]

Is the intent that mods simply skip the 30-day ban for literally any breach of the code of conduct? Is this permanent ban just from serving as a mod, or as a player overall? If the latter, a player who becomes a moderation team member is held to a much more severe standard than the average player - this may be intentional, but it seems to me a disincentive to do the thankless work of modding.

Intentional. Don't disagree, but a mod violating the code of conduct is not a light thing.

So can anyone, can't they? This feels to me like you're trying to give meaningful interaction with the rules to the mod positions but, at the end of the day, it's the Admin that gets to decide unilaterally on what is/isn't a rule, correct?

Can't argue with that.

What does it mean that mods "must always consider making relevant announcements"? How do we know what they have considered? I am confused by the intent of this rule.

Hm. imo announcements are a very important piece of "logging". best if we make this one direct - any updates/changes must be followed by announcements.

Many players like to enable roleplay by guiding and assisting players. Advisors are appointed members of the moderation team, we need to use direct language to describe them and their purpose.

I realise it's a generic phrase to introduce the term; aren't the bullets under the advisors satisfactory as to what they do, though?

In my opinion this is already handled by rule 05 in the introduction to this section: "05. Disputes on the decisions of Advisors are handled by Operators and vice versa."

Can't argue with that.

What does the Lead Advisor do, what are her duties? Do the Admins have any responsibility to share their reasoning for the appointment? What does the community do if 2/3rds of the Advisors continuously remove the Lead Advisor appointed by the Admins?

Lead the team. There needs to be some flexibility in that outside the voting. Louis is an excellent example of this.
As to the 2nd part, we just keep replacing them.

1st underline: What does this mean? Are all of the advisors removed in one election? Do some advisors move from one seat to another?
2nd underline: What does this mean? If there's a vote, what decision is the Lead Advisor making? It should either just read "the final announcement of Advisors is made [...]" - but why is this the Lead Advisor's job anyway, as presumably they'd then be on the way out of the Advisor group? Why is an announcement necessary at all, since presumably the voting will be public?

"may rotate"? advisors can stick around, it really depends on applicants
Lead Advisor takes the community feedback/voting into account and makes the final decision.

Why? The community elected the Advisors, and then the advisors can remove members with a much lower hurdle?

Hm. sounds reasonable, got nothing to add. we could remove.

What methodology is to be used to appoint and remove Operators? Subsection 2-01 and 2-02 below give a bit of info, but not enough. How and when are they chosen and removed?

2/3rds (since they are appointed by advisors). how/when was intentionally not specified to allow flexibility.

The examples here are pretty wordy, which is just some wording feedback you can take or leave - but what does "in the interim" mean here? Who is meant to actually legitimately lead the WC, if the Advisors only do it in the interim?

Ah, the intention here was to describe a case like MSCO, say Hexaus came around, needed some help and neither you, Zdanov or me where active/around. Advisors could just act as interim SGs to help Hexaus generate roleplay for Badara. I believe this needs some specificity for the interim phrase, any suggestions?

Why are these done by Advisors and not Operators? Putting all else aside, they're not really "advising" when they're enforcing game rules, they're modding. My broad point here is that I think this distinction is going to confuse people and (most importantly) slow things down. Why not just let operators run all the threads, and keep the advisors largely what they already are, the RP team, with a slightly expanded purview allowing them to directly select Operators?

That said - if we leave this in, there is much to be outlined still. How do the Advisors handle these requests? Do they need to vote on how to act on every post that comes through these threads in their area of responsibility? Do they do that voting in public (so that members of the community can know whether they should support certain advisors in future elections)? If not in public, are there rules against Advisors sharing with the community how votes went?

Frankly the absurdity of what I ask above is sort of my point - a lot happens in relative darkness right now when it comes to the RP team. When CP proposals are posted for instance we hear that the RP team will review and then it goes off into a back room and eventually someone tells us the outcome. Why is that secretive? Those players could just as easily offer their feedback openly and we'd have no real need for the RP team at all. I have said it elsewhere, but I think that the best approach to this would be to make all day-to-day admin the responsibility of the Operators, and have those operators be subject to review by a board of players (the Advisors). Then, if the Operators are not being transparent enough with their rulings, we can just remove them if need be.

Well, we could always just hand all requests to mods, provided that they are 3 otherwise we'd risk decision making stalling, or much worse, ample disagreements on strong positions here (lived it briefly and i've been told it was a common problem). On transparency, we could just open up the discord channels to public view.

Why? I suspect this is meant to allow for what we do if Advisors have an outage or go inactive, but frankly those scenarios should be better outlined in general - what do we do if someone is elected and then ghosts us? Does this rule mean that an individual Advisor can delegate his specific Advisor position to someone else, or does it mean that the Advisors as a group can delegate responsibilities? What are the methods by which they can do this / can undo this? If they delegate, and then those responsibilities are abused, what then?

As a group, this is merely a loose tool like Wu taking up ICJ here.
If Advisors go inactive or anything at all, hence the removing and replacing by Advisors with a 1/2.

Similar feedback to the description of Advisors above, firstly: so are many of us, be more direct - Operators are players appointed to undertake the day-to-day administration of the game. Secondly: this isn't even necessarily true. A good operator might not like to encourage roleplay, that's not a necessary requirement given the jobs you have given them below - they just need to keep the trains running. In short, these descriptions are too flowery and not really in line with the duties you are outlining.

Same reply: these one line descriptions an introductory phrase meant to serve as a context on team culture, that's all.

1st underline: If there are 2 operators, a 2/3rds majority means a unanimous decision is necessary. Is this your intent? If it is not, then I argue the minimum number of Operators should be 3.
2nd underline: What are "issues pertaining to players"? I'd argue all issues at the end of the day pertain to players.
3rd underline: Same as above, this is already implied by 05 in the introduction.

Couldn't agree more. Can't argue with that. Yup.

Should? What does this mean? Are they replaced all at once or staggered?

Same reply as advisors. Not necessarily, it allows flexibility on both ends. A bad mod being replaced and a great mod sticking around.

Same question as for advisors, do operators need a 2/3rds vote to do any of these?

2/3, i believe it's outlined on the intro? if not we should definitely add.

I'm not married to this one, but why are warnings/bans private now? Back in the old days they were public, and we've had scenarios in past where a player is warned or banned by one moderation team and then another moderation team takes over and doesn't even know it occurred. Why not just put them out there again? I know this is discussed in Section 2 Code of Conduct 01 below but I disagree that it "unnecessarily" puts a target on players if they are warned or banned - they were warned or banned necessarily.

Can't argue with that. I'm a big fan of transparency myself. I've been grappling like an idiot in the private sections tackling the exact problem you're describing.

How? How can admins know if this is happening, and what are their mechanisms to enforce this if they do know it is happening? I don't like this rule because it reads to me a lot like a veto power for the admin, who is neither elected nor appointed. Right now with Greek as the Admin that may not sound necessarily bad, but we shouldn't assume it will always be Greek.

Well, frankly, the entire concept of admins was introduced just for me.

Why? In particular why must they approve bans of players, which presumably should be pretty clear cut - there are specific rules written out, and there are specific punishments for rule violations, so why do we need to give one unelected player a veto power over that entire structure? Why also must we give one unelected player veto power over rule updates?

Can't argue with the first part (I believe I tiptoed on that with the current state of fussiness).
On second part, again it leads to my nonchalant advisory mode. Perhaps we just rephrase to "review" instead of "approve".

This throws everything above into meaninglessness. Why go to all the trouble of elections and appointments done by the player apparatus below the Admin if, ultimately, she can simply override anything at a whim? Again I know that right now this is likely never to be abused, but if rules only work under a good benevolent dictator they're not really good rules - we need to anticipate what might happen if Greek were to leave and we ended up with another player who was not so willing to share power.

Same context: admins were only crafted for me. Insofar as Wouter is concerned, well, he can pretty much do anything he wants.

[Zanz]

Thanks for the responses Greek. Given there were quite a few places you agreed with my points, do you / how do you intend to make proposed updates that I can review and offer further feedback on?