Feedback: Player Conduct

[GreekIdiot]

Hey all.

After this announcement, I had added a Section 0 on the Game Rules, here.

Basically I want to replace Section 0 and Section 1 with this (aka separate thread).

[Doc]

Three questions:

1. It’s been a while since I read these rules. Were the rules in the first part new or there before. If there before has anything changed?

2. In reference to PMs. Is it still legal to make reference to PMs as in “that’s not what you said in PM. You told me x, y, z.” But not directly sharing a screen shot? Or is it illegal to even make an indirect reference to them w/o permission?

3. In terms of harassing. What constitutes “swearing”? Is it using cuss words in general or specifically calling someone a “x,y,z”? Or anything the target considers a slur? Of anything a bystander might consider a slur? That one might be too vague/ unenforceable in this context, especially on the discord where people talk all kinds of mad sh— all the time, but it also feels like there has to be another feature to it beyond simply “swearing”.

[Mbites]

tl;dr

[GreekIdiot]

Three questions:

1. It’s been a while since I read these rules. Were the rules in the first part new or there before. If there before has anything changed?

2. In reference to PMs. Is it still legal to make reference to PMs as in “that’s not what you said in PM. You told me x, y, z.” But not directly sharing a screen shot? Or is it illegal to even make an indirect reference to them w/o permission?

3. In terms of harassing. What constitutes “swearing”? Is it using cuss words in general or specifically calling someone a “x,y,z”? Or anything the target considers a slur? Of anything a bystander might consider a slur? That one might be too vague/ unenforceable in this context, especially on the discord where people talk all kinds of mad sh— all the time, but it also feels like there has to be another feature to it beyond simply “swearing”.

1. Section was new, the points were collected from the rest of the sections. Nope, just the wording.
2. Would you be okay with me sharing publicly, anything you've said to me privately? No matter how I do it. You don't get to pick what.
3. Sure, but you can tell when swearing is meant to insult vs meant to banter, no? So I guess I'd say intent.

[jamescfm]

01 - Don't discuss warnings and bans on players publicly as it unnecessarily puts a target on them.

I have never agreed with this rule. The original version was introduced by Auditorii because he wanted to eliminate scrutiny of his actions as a moderator. As you know, he sanctioned players for dubious or self-serving reasons at times. By banning discussion of sanctions, he prevented other players from drawing attention to this. Over time, I have come to believe it might be beneficial to move in the opposite direction: a publicly available list of sanctions. Introducing this would increase transparency and eliminate speculation or gossip when players are sanctioned.

02 - Don't search for, circulate, publicly identify, publish or otherwise share personal information on players (doxxing).

I think the current version of this rule is better because it recognises that doxxing is a much more serious offence than almost anything else covered in the rules. Doxxing somebody should result in a permanent ban from the game.

03 - Don't impersonate anyone.

I'm not sure what this means in practice, it might benefit from being expanded upon.

04 - Don't share private messages without permission.

In my time in the game, I have only ever seen this rule enforced maliciously. In my opinion, we need to adopt a different approach. I don't think we should expect in-game messages to be treated confidentially unless a player explicitly states they will be.

05 - Don't discriminate against anyone on their use of English, understanding of other languages and use of Latin-script transliterations.

I don't think this rule makes any sense. The game is played in English and we require that players are able to communicate to a good level. Although it is unfortunate, we do therefore discriminate against people who cannot communicate in English.

06 - Don't harass anyone.
07 - Don't spam.
- Harassing means swearing, insulting, attacking and discriminating against others on any basis, including but not limited to religion, political affiliation, sexual orientation, creed, colour, nationality and even preference on how to play the game.
- Spamming means sending unsolicited messages to a large number of recipients, posting in a large number of places and posting in a high level of frequency.

I would suggest including the explanation of these rules within the rules, rather than in a separate section at the end. Personally though, I'm not sure I agree with either of the definitions provided. In my first period as a moderator, there was a long and difficult consultation over how we should handle hate speech in the game. Though I think the wording that we settled upon was clumsy, I would like to see some variation of this rule reinstated. Whether or not that happens, I think it is wrong to say that insulting or attacking somebody based on their political affiliation is harassment.

01 - On the game itself, this forum, the game's wiki and the game's Discord server
02 - By the game's creator (Wouter Lievens) and players directly appointed by him
03 - Players can reach out to the game's creator and his direct appointees on violations of these rules by other players, at any time
04 - Players violating them will receive a 30-day ban and then a permanent ban if they violate them again

I find the structure and phrasing of this section confusing. Sections 01 and 02 don't read as proper sentences.

As I have said in the past, it is ridiculous to expect that Wouter will do anything above the bare minimum in relation to Particracy Classic. In the past few months, even the bare minimum has often been more than he is willing to do. To suggest that players can reach out to him when there are breaches of the rules is absurd and will only give a false impression about his involvement in the game.

I strongly disagree with the prescriptive approach to sanctions implied by this section. For some offences (e.g. doxxing), players should receive an immediate and permanent ban. For other offences (e.g. breaching cultural protocols), a ban might never be appropriate. I agree with the principle of greater consistency and transparency in relation to sanctions but I think we need to retain flexibility too.

In more general terms, I think the way these new rules are phrased leads to ambiguity and a lack of clarity (specifically the "don't x" phrasing). On top of that, it is not clear to me how these new rules fit within the existing game rules. In your original post, you said this would replace sections 0 and 1 of the current Game Rules but the sections are numbered 1 and 2. Would this mean renumbering the rest of the document?

[Zanz]

@Greek - some feedback for you:

• The wording of the poll on this thread was confusing. Asking "are you against" something is a strange choice that can easily lead to people mixing up their answer and incorrectly flipping to the inverse of what they intend. Please consider phrasing polls in the affirmative consistently ("Do you support this change?") as opposed to the negative.
• Setting a poll to expire makes no sense. I was on vacation and could not vote here, and it also means that anyone who did vote can now no longer change their vote if they should be swayed by conversation. Please consider leaving polls open in future (frankly, I don't like polls for this sort of thing at all - people should have to name themselves in voting if they want me to care about their opinion - if they don't take part in the conversation, why should I be swayed by their vote?)
• [more important than the previous two by far] I did not understand this announcement to be an announcement about an actual rule change when you posted it on 2 March. It was only after you clarified here in this thread's opening post on 30 March that I realized you had added Section 0 to the game rules. In truth, I read "To properly express the introduction of James and Louis as interim moderators, we have also updated the first post of the Game Rules, here." at face value and assumed that you had just added their names to the Team section - which you had indeed done. I did not keep reading beyond that, and so was never aware that we had an entire new enforceable section of the rules added.
  
  I am concerned by how this went down. Section 0 was presented here as "Section 2" of your proposed rules for discussion but it was done so as part of a total rule overhaul proposal that, frankly, was just too big to consider all at once. I responded to Section 1 of your initial rules proposal and there was significant debate there, but nobody had yet mentioned Section 2 at all. For this to then make its way into the rules without any sort of clear announcement and without any actual substantive debate (and then to be added as "Section 0" without even being added to the rules index) - all of this is very similar to the way rule changes were haphazardly made under Farsun and I'd really like for us to avoid that. I do not mean to attribute any ill intent to you here by naming someone who did do this with ill intent, for what it's worth - I simply mean to say that I think we need to be kept aware of the rules as they change.
  
  I myself considered your overall proposal to be no longer in consideration as a whole because I was under the impression (based on point 4 in your announcement) that we were now having a longer, more considered discussion of rule updates driven by James (which has begun with the Section 10 update discussion). If that is not the case, and we need to pay attention to multiple places again for rule changes, please can that be made more clear?

Now, for the actual content.

In the first set of numbers presented, I agree with James on 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6/7. On 3, I think there likely should still be a rule (because unfortunately on 1 April we saw people impersonating Farsun in the Discord, for instance), though for James' benefit I note this is a long holdover from when IRC was the chat we used as a community and stealing usernames was much simpler. Now it requires registering a username which is a lot of bureaucratic overhead to go through but it's still possible and still potentially very damaging to the community.

In the second set of numbers presented I agree with James. Wouter is an unreliable source of authority for our community. He obviously does pose a problem that we cannot entirely ignore in that he has the ability to impose himself at any point, but I do not think that we should build in any sort of expectation for players that an appeal to wouter is ultimately going to be a useful endeavor. It took us literal years to convince him that a person who had hijacked the game had hijacked the game, and even then he only acted reluctantly. Ultimately, whether you want it or not, so long as you remain here, you are the last resort at this point.

I *still* feel very strongly that what you have proposed for how the moderation team should look in general needs significant simplification and downsizing - proposal 2.1 is better than 2.0, but a 9 person moderation team in a community of (generously) 30 active members is just too big. I had not commented on 2.1 version again because, as I said above, I was under the impression that a more specific proposal conversation was likely coming from james in future given your announcement about the rules rewrite.

I agree with James that a prescriptive 30 day / permaban setup is not well suited to the nuances of the sorts of various infractions we see in PT. Not everything deserves a 30 day, or a permaban, and there should be latitude left to moderation, imo, to better apply reason in their work. This would BEST be done by allowing their decisions to be reviewed, as I have said elsewhere, but again, I think that's perhaps diverting us from this specific convo.

[Doc]

Three questions:

1. It’s been a while since I read these rules. Were the rules in the first part new or there before. If there before has anything changed?

2. In reference to PMs. Is it still legal to make reference to PMs as in “that’s not what you said in PM. You told me x, y, z.” But not directly sharing a screen shot? Or is it illegal to even make an indirect reference to them w/o permission?

3. In terms of harassing. What constitutes “swearing”? Is it using cuss words in general or specifically calling someone a “x,y,z”? Or anything the target considers a slur? Of anything a bystander might consider a slur? That one might be too vague/ unenforceable in this context, especially on the discord where people talk all kinds of mad sh— all the time, but it also feels like there has to be another feature to it beyond simply “swearing”.

1. Section was new, the points were collected from the rest of the sections. Nope, just the wording.
2. Would you be okay with me sharing publicly, anything you've said to me privately? No matter how I do it. You don't get to pick what.
3. Sure, but you can tell when swearing is meant to insult vs meant to banter, no? So I guess I'd say intent.

1. Understood.
2. The reason I asked is I can think of scenarios, or my own actual history, when conversations in PM spill out into public and without the context, a player can be made to look a certain way. At this point one would say "Well, in PM you said this or that, or I didn't say that at all." And that would, by my reading, be a violation of the rules, because, while not sharing the screenshot the attacks made in PM, a person can characterize a private conversation however they want to gain the sympathy of the moderators or the jury of public opinion, and you wouldn't have any way to defend yourself against malicious falsehood if you can't even make any reference to the private conversations. This has happened in PT. We all can probably think of similar instances. I can think of disagreements with the former guy which went one way in PM, and then an oblique reference was made to those discussions in public, where, without being allowed to share even paraphrases from PM, you have no defense in public. The "share nothing said in PM" rule seems to have gaps which can be abused by someone who is set on being combative. I can think of at least one person where that was the case in my own particular experience, and I am sure that others can be too. And if I was that asshole, I sure wouldn't want them to even be able to make any reference whatsoever to what I said behind the scenes, let alone directly posting visual evidence of how I am the asshole.
3. Not always. Sometimes people take words different than they are intended or used. If someone calls me a bitch, I don't care if they are joking, I really don't care how they intended it, I consider that a slur-sometimes its generational, sometimes its cultural. My daughter calls her friends bitches all the time, and while they are fine with that, I am not, because for me, that word in any context is a slur. I'm not saying that there should be more specificity. I am saying this rule is pretty unenforceable.