Admin Meeting 2024-03-30

Agenda

• Brief updates from last meeting
• Reduction votes without reduction times
• Trialmin improvements
• When do players playing as antags cause rule issues?
• Review minutes

Topic Details

Brief updates from last meeting

The last meeting’s minutes are available at [link]

Summary

Headmin magic has caused async trial promotions to happen. I didn’t have time to write out this summary early so I’m not sure what other things should be included here. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

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

Reduction votes without reduction times

Summary

Can we put what time you want if you vote for reduction, Currently if not one mentions a time it defaults to 1 week. But if someone votes for something like 2 months and there are another 6 admins that did not define something that is a huge difference in reduction. Adding a time would be useful here. Another thing to keep in mind is the ban time. Reductions are a reduction from a indef ban to a set time, not altering the start date of said ban. If they have already been banned for 2 weeks and we reduce to 1 week it was the same as if we had just removed. -Repo

I think if people don’t care enough to write out what they want the reduction to, then there’s no issue with however many do care enough from determining the reduction time on their own.

For reductions, I don’t think it makes sense to reduce from the start of the ban because it makes two of the vote options actually mean the same thing sometimes instead of actually being different options. I think every time I’ve been asked, I’ve told people to reduce from the time that the vote was put up. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Determine if admins should be required to specify a reduction time if voting to reduce a ban.
2. Determine if the time since the ban was placed is something admins are suggested to add to appeal votes.

Trialmin improvements

Summary

Is there anything we can do that will improve how the next batch goes?

Ideally specific actions that we know can be accomplished. Everyone knows it’d be better if mentors were able to get reviews in on time but no one is intentionally not doing them on time so we’d need ideas for how to make it more likely if that’s something we wanted to focus on. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Determine a list of specific actions that can be taken to improve how the next batch of trialmins goes, including things related to selection.
2. Optionally, determine any issues which may be plausible to be addressed before or considered during the next trial batch.

When do players playing as antags cause rule issues?

Summary

There was a thread for this at [link removed] and there is a doc at [link removed]. The goal of this topic is to just ensure that the contents of the document are complete and accurate so that it can be forwarded to maintainers. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Ensure that the contents of the document are complete and accurate so that it can be forwarded to maintainers.

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.

Minutes

Brief updates from last meeting

• Headmin decision has led to asynchronous trialmin promotions being adopted.

Reduction votes without reduction times

• Admins will be required to provide a reduction time with their reduction vote and be able to justify it.
  • This could be expanded to require admins justify their votes in general, not just reduce.
  • Since many times the reason may have already been stated by another admin, it will be possible to simply react/reply to a reason and time you agree with.
• Reduction times will be applied from the time a vote was made.
  • Reductions from the time the vote was placed may sometime “add” onto a ban should admins vote for how much time the ban is worth, but this should solveably by just making this standard clear.
  • Reductions from the time the ban was made may cause confusion, and will often lead to the options for reduce/accept to mean the same thing if the proposed reduction time is shorter than the time the appeallant has been banned for.
• On deciding which reduction to apply, an average or a mean can be used for different admin suggestions.
• Alternatively, we could require consensus in the appeal thread and call upon headmins to break a stalemate or have a vote.
• Appeals will display the recommended ban duration as set out by the admin policy.
• SS14.Admin issues can be made to add QOL features to ban appeal votes, like copying relative time of the ban in discord format

Trialmin improvements

• A clear schedule must be made for Mentors to provide reviews.
• It should be clearer for regular admins how they can pass along feedback, and how to interract with trialmins.
• The propermin wide thread for trialmin reviews will be brought back to allow for feedback to be more easily given from propermins to mentors to trialmins.
  • Admins derailing that thread will be 1984’d. We will also have a slowmode to ensure this.
• Trialmins will be prohibited from taking part in events in general until the last part of the trial where they are proficient with the admin tools and aware of what’s appropriate.
  • This will likely just be the last 2 weeks of their trial as decided by the Mentors.
• A gantt chart - jeanluc - CE
• Relax requirements on when reviews will be put out. If there has not been sufficient activity to make a review then one will not be made.
• Make it clear to new trialmins that a trial will on average last 2 months. This will be done on the application. They should not feel pressured to make excessives notes/bans, or spend long periods of time in game “to get good reviews”.
• Trialmins should know that they are able to reach out to any and all admins at any time for assistance.

When do players playing as antags cause rule issues?

• The contents of the doc were discussed, and expanded upon.

Discussion outside Agenda Items

• Murderboning is currently in a very large gray area and requires clarification. Will be brought up in a future meeting.

Overall Conclusion

Reduce votes will now require justification and a provided time from admins with the reduction being applied from the time the vote started. Trialmins will now only be allowed to take part in events, and host them with supervision near the end of their trial. The propermin thread for trialmins will be brought back with a slowmode to prevent derailing. Trialmins still need to be made more aware of what’s expected of them so they stop living inside the computer to admin. They should also know that they should reach out to the entire admin team for assistance. The review process will be improved to be less stringent on requiring a review every week, and to make guidelines clearer.