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Blocking Players
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My vote goes to two options: Channel block and traditional block.
Channel block blanks the ‘offender’ from channels. Used for when somebody hasn’t bothered you per se but you find their communication style / dad jokes / venting sessions / soap opera babble / whatever annoying and don’t want to see it.
Traditional block, well, as always. Block pms.
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As a sysadmin in my day job, I guess my perspective is a bit different than others in this regard. The people at the highest levels of staff on any game will likely have the access to review anything that happens on the game whenever they want. In some games this is easily done because the code base they are using has tools for activity tracking built in. In others, it requires a level of coding on their part to access that information. Heck, in most games that still run solely on telnet, that’s a fully plain text transmission, and anyone with the time and some free software could trap all of the activity coming and going from the game.
If a game has staff that give people ick for having access to this stuff, why are people playing on those games to begin with? If you can’t trust the high level administration of a system to act responsibly with their power, then perhaps its time we start depopulating those staffers games.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:
As a sysadmin in my day job, I guess my perspective is a bit different than others in this regard. The people at the highest levels of staff on any game will likely have the access to review anything that happens on the game whenever they want. In some games this is easily done because the code base they are using has tools for activity tracking built in. In others, it requires a level of coding on their part to access that information. Heck, in most games that still run solely on telnet, that’s a fully plain text transmission, and anyone with the time and some free software could trap all of the activity coming and going from the game.
If a game has staff that give people ick for having access to this stuff, why are people playing on those games to begin with? If you can’t trust the high level administration of a system to act responsibly with their power, then perhaps its time we start depopulating those staffers games.
My ick was not connected to any specific game or staffers. It was generalized.
This is an age-old (or hobby-old) debate. Just because it’s fully possible for someone to code up stuff that lets them watch every command input by every single player in a constant, easy stream, doesn’t mean I think it should be a command baked into the base Ares codebase. The fact that something is possible doesn’t mean that it needs to be easily accessible.
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@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:
If a game has staff that give people ick for having access to this stuff
There is a world of difference between cracking open the database/bytestream and having ready commands at your fingertips to spy on players. Staff are way more likely to use the latter than go out of their way to do the former.
As the designer of Ares, I can’t stop someone from being a jerk and spying on a private conversation between two players, but I certainly don’t have to give them a command to make it easy for them.
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I think it’s irresponsible for the administrator (head staff) of any system (game) to not have access to the full gamut of information being sent to and from that system. I think it’s just as irresponsible for an admin (staffer) to use that information in abusive fashion. I deleted most of my social media accounts in the last year because the administrators of those networks (Facebook and Twitter) began using my (and others) information put into the system in an unethical fashion. At the same time I don’t decry them for having that access. They’re the system administrator, they should have that access.
I’m not saying every staffer everywhere should just be 24/7 monitoring every line typed into their game and prying into every conversation. What I am trying to convey is that staffers should have the ability, in situations where it is warranted, to access any and all information regarding a situation to make their decisions, rather than hoping someone has logs from their perspective (which they could easily edit) and adjudicating based on those logs and whatever information they can pry out of the code. This is why I do feel there should be commands that assist in this information gathering process.
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@MisterBoring said in Blocking Players:
rather than hoping someone has logs from their perspective (which they could easily edit) and adjudicating based on that.
Ares gives players access to the logs, and easy reporting tools to share them (in an automated and verified fashion) with staff when trouble arises.
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@Faraday Very cool. I’m not super familiar with the inner workings of Ares, but that is good to know. Most of my experience comes from the traditional telnet based MUs.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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Apologies if this has been answered, but would this be game-specific ignoring/blocking, or would it also apply to Ares handles?
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@chorus Character-specific.
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@MisterBoring Even on telnet-based games, there’s always been a tension between reporting capability and player expectations for privacy. It’s long been considered inappropriate for staff to enable logging of all commands, or to lurk in rooms watching private RP. Most platforms don’t provide a way to review pages.
With Ares, I’ve just taken a more explicit stance in the privacy statement that there are no core server commands to do these kinds of things. I can’t stop a staff from making their own, but they are not built-in. Instead, players can send the evidence to staff via the reporting features. It really hasn’t hampered staff’s ability to investigate things - it has enhanced it.
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@Faraday
I don’t know if there’s an equivalent on both client and the portal, but to me, the channel mute situation is something I typically handle client-side with a trigger that simply does not trigger an activity alert. This is a “best of both worlds” scenario to me, because I’m not checking the window and finding “oh, it’s just Bigmouth Joe for the 18th time”, but I can follow the conversation if someone I care about is engaging.If people genuinely never want to see a word Bigmouth Joe ever says for the rest of time, I guess that’s fair, but the annoyance to me has always been “oh ACTIVITY- …and it’s Bigmouth Joe.” I can skim over that when I find it, it’s the checking that makes me insane.
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@Trashcan said in Blocking Players:
If people genuinely never want to see a word Bigmouth Joe ever says for the rest of time, I guess that’s fair,
That was the requested feature, yes. I understand that someone may only want to suppress notifications rather than block completely, but I think differentiating those would entail too much complexity on both the player/command side and the code side.
