Admin Meeting 2024-02-17

Agenda

• Brief updates from last meeting
• Post-unban evasion bans
• Trialmin review changes
• MRP SOP
• LRP Space Law
• Diona nymphs
• Review minutes
• Admin tasks are backlogged

Topic Details

Brief updates from last meeting

The last meeting’s minutes are available here

Summary

Mirror ban discussion points were forwarded to the thread.

I don’t know if we managed to keep trialmins from adminning all day during the start of their trial, the mentors probably do though. We did mandate shadowing this time, so at the very least, if they did spend too much time adminning at the start it would have been with a better idea of what to do.

I think every single mentor review missed the 1 week mark, but they did all get done before the 2 week mark.

There are currently 4 small group mentoring VCs that the trialmins used at the start of their trials, and still use occasionally.

The “dangerous buttons will warn you” thing from the last meeting is a lie.

I completed some documentation on admin tasks.

Not a lot of people have been doing feedback votes, even less have been doing the standardized one. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Communicate updates related to items from the last meeting to admins attending the meeting.

Post-unban evasion bans

Summary

Possibly due to the ever increasing rate of ban appeals, it has been becoming more frequent that people who have attempted to evade their bans have been unbanned. In probably every case, this is from the admin not noticing the evasion attempt.

In the past, we have just let this go because it was very rare and it’s a bad experience for a player to be unbanned then banned again. However, it is no longer as rare as it once was.

Counterpoints to the bad experience argument are:

1. these players are breaking rules, rules which we have for a reason,
2. we may not care about the experience of players who we would otherwise voucher ban,
3. these players are not appealing a ban for ban evasion, so principals like double jeopardy don’t come into play, and
4. not banning people in these cases is the only exception to the zero tolerance rule which we enforce most strictly. While it makes sense to throw things out in certain cases, “fruit of the poisonous tree” or double jeopardy situations, why would we be so much more lenient in cases where an admin simply fails to notice a violation.

This often plays out in one of two ways:

1. A player is unbanned and the evasion is noticed later as part of some unrelated process, or
2. A player is unbanned, but their alternate account was already banned, and they make an admin message or another appeal saying that their ban hasn’t been lifted.

This is not the topic, but another thing to consider: if we accepted an appeal but later learned that the player made a material lie, would we reverse the result or consider it? I suspect that if we banned someone for spamming slurs, they denied it in an appeal, we accepted the appeal, and then discovered that they were definitely spamming slurs, that we might not want to say “that’s on us for not catching the lie earlier”.
-Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Determine a suggestion for what should be done if a player who attempted to evade a ban had that ban lifted without it being noticed. This is not limited in scope to actions to be taken to the ban evading player.
2. If the suggestion includes any actions against a person, determine a suggestion for if those actions should have some sort of statute of limitations. If someone’s missed evasion attempt is noticed 1 year later, should we still do the same thing?

Trialmin review changes

Summary

We didn’t get to it in the last meeting so I 1984ed it into reality.

Up to now, there would be a thread with all game admins in it for the purpose of reviewing trialmins. Admins would share concerns about trialmins in this thread, and then those concerns would be discussed and eventually forwarded to the trialmin. This was a massive pain because Discord is not designed for these types of discussions, and it isn’t good for it when there are too many people. Discussions would frequently go off topic, and a few people complained to me that they felt minor issues were being focused on or nitpicked too much.

As we’ve been transitioning into a mentor system, this batch the structure is that each trialmin has a review thread, as they have for the last 6ish months, but there hasn’t been an admin team wide thread. Instead there’s been a thread for just trial mentors. Additionally, each trialmin has a hedgedoc so that trial mentors can collaborate on reviews, and keep a record of things that can be presented to the admin team when promotion votes happen.

Mentors should share their opinions, particularly if they were involved in the earlier admin team wide threads, but overall I feel this has been a lot more manageable with Discord being what it is.

The plan is to still make a team wide thread for the votes, changing this would require a vote.
-Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Determine if an admin team wide trialmin review thread should be made, or should we stick with a mentor only one.
2. Determine some possible options for things that can be done that would increase the ability of admins who aren’t trial mentors to be able to be involved in the trialmin process, and would also be a net benefit to trialmins?

MRP SOP

Summary

This topic is for attempting to expedite discussion by having it occur in a place more suited for it than a Discord thread. Feedback from this discussion will likely be used in helping make changes to drafts and proposals. Changes to server rules will need to be made with a vote.

Current MRP SOP is at https://wiki.spacestation14.io/wiki/Standard_Operating_Procedure -Chief_Engineer

I don’t really have any comments for SOP. I never really played command on MRP and don’t wanna make changes to something I’m not fully aware of. -Liltenhead

Meeting Goals

1. Determine the admin team’s rough feeling about MRP’s current SOP

LRP Space Law

Summary

This topic is for attempting to expedite discussion by having it occur in a place more suited for it than a Discord thread. Feedback from this discussion will likely be used in helping make changes to drafts and proposals. Changes to server rules will need to be made with a vote.

Current draft is at https://wiki.spacestation14.io/wiki/User:Liltenhead/Sandbox -Chief_Engineer

I think LRP space law needs to avoid anything that isn’t on one page. Space law should be largely ignorable by anyone that isn’t the captain, hos, or warden. Sec should probably know it to a certain degree, but someone higher up should be checking in on sentences regardless. -Liltenhead

Meeting Goals

1. Determine some ways which may be acceptable to the admin team that can simplify the current LRP space law draft without making it substantially different than MRP.
2. Determine some possible changes to MRP space law which may be acceptable to the admin team that would be acceptable to MRP players, but that would allow LRP space law to be simplified more.

Diona nymphs

Summary

Diona nyphs were added to the game except I’m pretty sure they don’t work right now. There are more details about what they are from lank below, but apparently we’ve been getting rule questions related to them that we need to nail down answers to. This topic is for speeding things up so a proposal can be voted on in #rule-clarifications. -Chief_Engineer

Nymphs are basically what make up a diona. Their 3 key organs (brain, lung, stomach) are each held within one nymph and those 3 nymphs are held in the diona. When the diona split via gibbing, those 3 nymphs split out, and the player’s mind is transferred into the brain-holding nymph. From there after 10 minutes any player controlled nymphs (typically the brain, but with cognizine any nymph) can reform into a full diona again, with a random appearance and name. As the mind transfers, things like antag status & objectives stay on the player, but nymphs and reformed dionas are considered dead for the purpose of objectives. -lanklite

Meeting Goals

1. Identify possible rule issues and questions related to diona nymphs
2. Determine a proposal for handling each rule issue on LRP
3. Determine a proposal for handling each rule issue on MRP

Review minutes

Summary

The meeting minutes provide a record of the meeting for those who could not attend, and they are used to action decisions made in the meeting. For these reasons, it is important that they accurately represent what actually happened in the meeting. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Ensure that nothing important is missing or misrepresented in the minutes.
2. Attempt to ensure that all topics have met their meeting goals. This can be done by ensuring that each meeting goal is directly addressed by the conclusion of the topic’s minutes.
3. Attempt to ensure that all conclusions fit into one of the following categories:
   1. Indicate that a meeting goal was completed.
   2. Are something actionable, meaning that they not only call for an action, but that action is specific enough that it does not require answering questions like “what exactly needs to be done?” or “how can this be done?”
   3. Clearly indicate that the meeting goals for the topic were not met. Examples: the discussion was tabled, the admin team did not reach a conclusion, the admin team was not able to make the conclusion actionable.

Admin tasks are backlogged

Summary

A lot of admin tasks are backlogged right now. If you have time, please work on tasks listed on the admin TODO list. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Have CE motivate the entire admin team to clear every backlog instantly.

Minutes

Post-unban Evasion Bans

• Some players have been given ban evasion bans after previously being unbanned for something else.
• Six months max since the unban to act on an evasion attempt.
• Leniency for ban evasions if not noticed within a month of unban.

Trialmin Review Changes

• There are things mentors may not notice that other admins have, which would have no place for the noticing admin to tell them other than dming a mentor.
• Discussion on a team-wide thread for trial feedback like before alongside the current mentor system, which was agreed upon that it would not help due to the frequent derailment.

MRP SOP

• MRP Space Law/SOP hasn’t been looked into for a long time and is often used for edge cases. Cases such as bolting doors on blue could be considered powergaming despite being allowed on SOP.

LRP Space Law

• Stress test it for a week on LRP and ask for feedback from the playerbase after.
• Feedback on these changes might be as a post on the forums, as people who bother going on the forums typically care more about it.

Diona Nymphs

• Diona nymph discussion on rule changes, such as NLR and whether or not killing them is considered a person or animal.
• “Should crew see them as crew?”

Discussion outside Agenda Items

Read the to-do list.