Admin Meeting 2025-04-06

Agenda

• Current Ruleset and Over-enforcement
• Admin Recruitment
• The Trialmin Process
• What is a Headmin
• Review Minutes

Topic Details

Current Ruleset and Over-enforcement

Summary

Under Admin Policy 2.6, admins are only supposed to intervene in a round when needed. This is because one of the core admin goals are to improve a player’s experience in a game where emergent gameplay can often lead to more fun that stingent rules enforcement. Concerns have been raised that our current ruleset is overly strict, and polices behavior that should idealy be resolved IC. At the same time players have reported that there has been a rise of shitter behavior, with departments like Security and Command being common victims.

This leads to be believe that we are currently allocating our time and energy on the wrong issues. We have had some limited discussions on this topic in the past such as in the [LINK REMOVED] and in this more recent [LINK REMOVED]. These discussions have had somewhat mixed reactions from admins, although a loose consensus exists that we are being overly harsh. An almost unanimous dislike for certain parts of our rules such as the Metashield also exists. Other admins have also raised issues with our current banning policy, which is rather convoluted and often allows for punishments to be multiplied by extreme amounts with the ban length needing to be just over 7 days for the admin to be allowed to upgrade it to an indefinite ban. Rolebans are also underutilized.

• nikthechampiongr

Meeting Goals

1. Reach a consensus on which parts of the rules are problematic and propose initial amendments.
2. Identify instances of over-enforcement and see how we can avoid them in the future.
3. Discuss possible improvements to the Banning Policy.
   • It may be a tad premature to do this now as Reisama is currently working on a specialized tool for this exact purpose. General observations however may still be useful.

Admin Recruitment

Our recruitment process has stayed constant before and throughout my entire adminship. It has mostly served as well, and along with the trialmin process has produced generally good admins. However it has several flaws.

The most noticeable of those flaws is our current application backlog. Admin Applications often sit for months without any kind of feedback. Admin candidates throughout this time may lose interest in the game and quit alltogether, others may feel ignore and withdraw their candidacy. This specific issues has been discussed before with little results on this [LINK REMOVED].

Another issue which is less obvious is that many ideal admin candidates who may be happy to become admins never apply. This may be due to several reasons such as not being aware of the application times, or bulking at the wait times for an application to be processed.

There are some potential solutions to these issues which I would like further discussion and consensus from the admin team.

On the first issue. I propose that we admit candidates into the admin team as observers. In this state they will not have any formal responsibilities or in-game permissions but they will be allowed to observe admin business. This will not only allow them to get a feeling for admining before committing to it, but also lower the amount of mentor time required later on. As they will only be observing, the limited amount of mentoring resources will not be strained.

On the second solution, I propose introducing an alternative recruitment measure. Admins who observe a player in good standing who they believe would be a good fit for adminship may be sponsored by that admin. After discussion and vote by the admin team that player may be offered adminship.

• nikthechampiongr

Meeting Goals

1. Discuss and expand the above proposals,
2. Discuss any other potential proposals for improval of the recruitment process.

The Trialmin process

This is an often recurring but important meeting topic. Our last wave of trialmins were trained almost exclusively by mentors brand new to the team. In fact most of the admin team now is made up of admins recruited post Exodus. As such it is a good idea to hear their thoughts, as well as the thoughts of new trialmins on the current process and how we can improve it.

• nikthechampiongr

Meeting Goals

1. Discuss the current state of the trialmin process and potential improvements.

What is a Headmin

My bonus topic. The role of the Headmin, throughout its entire existence, has had rather vague responsibilities and powers inside the admin team. This has often resulted in confusion by newly promoted headmins, as well as reluctance to exercise their responsibilities. Obviously Headmins have some inherent powers and responsibilities. As an example they are responsible for steering the admin team, and are responsible for carrying out promotions, demotions, and overseeing complaints. While not urgent(headmins have existed for like 2 years now without this being cleared up) but we should clear up this ambiguity.

• nikthechampiongr

Meeting Goals

1. Nail down the basic responsibilities of headmins.
2. Discuss whether headmins should have certain powers.(E.g. Vetos over admin decisions)

Standing Topic Details

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

Current Ruleset and Over-enforcement

• The banning policy is outdated, overly harsh in certain places, and in general needs a redo.
  • For this we have rei’s research tool which should let us iron out places in the policy where the suggested punishments are excessive.
  • Please use it. It’s easier for your life as well.
  • Our enforcement of metacomms may be inconsistent with policy.
  • Rolebans are extremely underused, and can be effective at punishing misbehaving players while still allowing them to play the game.
  • The banning policy requires warnings be applied liberally but often any kind of subsequent offense, no matter how severe, will likely lead to a ban,
• There is an issue with mindsets of admins who will often zealously enforce the policy with bans where a warning would have sufficed.
• Offenses such as self antag are extremely vague and leads to different enforcement.
  • This includes naming rules and self antag.

Admin Recruitment

• The proposal to recruit people directly is rejected.
  • We already a lot of applications with good candidates.
• The proposal to have observers is rejected.
  • Would give us a lot of trouble without making much different for the trial
• We will allow mentors to pick up applications with applicants they want to mentor on their own. Admins will still get a confirmation vote.
• We may close the submission of new admin apps.
• Any admin should be able to explain tooling to new trialmins instead of just mentors.
• Ask people if they are still interested before processing old applications.

The Trialmin Process

• Trialmin processes need quicker conclusions. Trials should be promoted and demoted in a shorter timeframe.
• Weekly reviews are extremely tiring and time consuming for mentors.
  • Nuke reviews?
• We need better tooling for reviewing ahelps
  • We cannot do anything until admin logs are properly logged.
• We are adopting Rei’s proposal

First week, Full Review Second Week, Touch Base Third Week, Full Review, Eligible for vote Pattern Repeats

• Mentors need to interact more with their trials. They need to talk with them on more regular intervals instead of just weekly reviews.
• Encourage trials to contact their mentors for opinions more.

What is a Headmin

• Topic dropped.

Discussion outside Agenda Items

• Discord sucks and constantly cuts us out.

Overall Conclusion

We will be redoing our Banning policy to be less severe, actually up to date, and with it recommending underused punishments like warnings and role bans more. Trials will be taken up by mentors independently instead of simply relying on periodic batches. Admins can now do the initial parts of trial periods. The trialmin process needs to have more interactions with the trials, drop underperforming trials faster, and use the new review system.