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Admin Accountability
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It’s precisely the same as owning a game server, and the accountability of being a game lead and the helplessness (so to speak) of being a player.
You just have to behave like somebody you’d trust, and you have to do it always, and you have to have GOOD FRIENDS who will tell you when you’re going down the wrong road. Our job as users is to see that, and see if you aren’t doing it, and then react accordingly.
I don’t think there’s a fix for the potential of game/site owner going mad with power besides the user base leaving and going to make a new place.
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One thing I’ve been thinking about as someone who runs games is how to be clear both with my players and my staff about what they can expect from me.
I started admining in a very group-oriented way. Like-- 3-4 people all holding equal power and it was very democratic. And I liked that, and still like it in a lot of ways, but these days sometimes I’m working with people who don’t want all the responsibility, but are really great at certain things, so I’ve found myself doing the headwiz thing. And in that shift, I sometimes made assumptions that I never really made explicit to my staff (or did so only belatedly). In this case, ‘staff’ refers to Storytellers and App Staff, which were different, sometimes overlapping, groups of staffers for me.
Things like
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How do I add new staff? Do I have conversations with current staff? Do I require their approval? Is this process different for different types of staff?
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How do bans come about, when there’s only one headwiz? Am I the final call or the only call? Do I discuss with STs, but handle the player management part of it (ie, the hard conversations) myself? I’ve never really made that process clear, and probably I should.
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For that matter, how do hard conversations come about? Who has access to logs of those? Who needs to know they happened?
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How much responsibility do App Staff or STs or player GMs have for dealing with difficult player behavior? At what point do they call me in, and how? What rights do they have in the moment?
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What do we tell the game at large about bans? What degree of detail?
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How confidential are staff conversations? Are all conversations equally confidential? Story vs player vs venting about how a GMed scene is going in the moment are all very different things.
Some of these are game specific, some apply to a forum like this, too.
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@Tat
Lol your post DISAPPEARED from the Bannings thread and I was briefly distraught.Anyway, we were talking a bit about/around this earlier between ourselves, but once upon a time I had substantive issues with some Game Stuff in your space and the way you responded to me on that I think has made both of us value working together more. That umm doesn’t always happen (and I frankly don’t always judge the effort it worth it because hopping off a game space has never felt like more than a minor inconvenience for me).
But overall I agree that you can build all the rules you want but it’s on whoever pays the bills or has control of the ‘off’ switch to follow them, and you have to make your peace with that and decide whether you’re comfortable with those people. But if they act in ways their users don’t like consistently, they’ll cease to have users. So there’s the push and pull that way. It’s scary in RL relationships and jobs when actual livelihood is on the line but thankfully leaving a MU or subreddit or whatever has never cost me actual money.
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@Tez said in Admin Accountability:
I mean right now your only guarantee is that if I go mad with power then Roz will gently smother me in my sleep.
You break the implicit trust we’ve vested in you and I will find you.
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In this particular case, I consider the ‘mad with power’ failure mode to be fairly low stakes. Honestly, the system operated about as well as we could possibly hope: the people ‘in charge’ did something which a large portion of the community didn’t agree with, and so that community found/made another place that better aligned with their desires.
That’s not a bad thing. It’s not even really a failure - it’s about the best you can hope for from a community operating entirely on volunteer time and interest. In fact, there are strong parallels to MU*s themselves - when someone builds a game, they’re in charge of that game. You can’t depose them or ‘vote them out’, generally speaking. But if their behavior is such that you no longer feel welcome or interested in engaging there, it’s not hard to find another game. It’s inconvenient, and there’s a cost to it, but no one is trapped.
And, in the end, that’s the best thing that we can hope for, I think - a community will exist as long as people wish to be associated with it. When they no longer desire that, the community will move, change, or disband.
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I feel like there has to be a better answer than this. I really regret the way things went down for a lot of reasons, but I hate that – we haven’t LOST IT, exactly, but all of the history that is within MSB is now farther removed for some people. And after a lot of effort to try and keep it, too!!
Like, Amazon has to have a better answer to this. No one can just delete Amazon. (But if you can, I support you.) Amazon has backups, and no one can just delete them all, everywhere. (But if you can, I support you.) And OBVIOUSLY this tiny hobby board isn’t really the same as massive commercial force of evil (Again, if you can delete Amazon, I support you.) but there must be some safeguards that they use that we can adapt? Maybe?
she/they
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I mean personally, I’m completely comfortable with the “checks” being no more than ‘Roz smothers in sleep for misbehavior’ to be frank. It’s possible your life could change and you could get so stressed you lose your shit and melt down–it can happen to the best of us, clearly.
If we’re looking to troubleshoot the specific issue that has caused a downfall in recent memory, do a vote of confidence with the userbase on potential hires. The problem was the team got tired, bone deep tired, and couldn’t do it any more. So they brought on people who could without consulting anyone they should have, and one of those choices was somebody a lot of people couldn’t trust. That’s where the breakdown started.
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Loudly promise yourself and us that you will make backups (HERE), and X, Y, and Z have access to them. Do it once a month and use github or something?
I am also of the VERY firm opinion that the HISTORY of this place (and other places) is less important than the COMMUNITY. We’ve lost WORA and Electric Soup and the imagination named one and bad descs – a lot of them, and the loss is nothing, now.
If you’re really super concerned about repeating history…
Make plans NOW as to what you will do when you get too tired to mod. Because THAT is the killer.
the entity previously known as Sunny
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Although administrating a forum and running a game are completely different things there is some commonality in the fact you sometimes have to pick your poison and live with what that means.
The model I liked to use was to not rely on authority at all. Being an admin meant only stepping in when shit really hit the fan (‘a troll is making openly racist comments’) or for general boring tasks like moving or merging threads to their appropriate categories. You can’t overuse power you don’t allow yourself to have.
However there were side effects. Some users felt singled out, for example, targeted by bandwagons, and unless the level of moderation itself was changed - which would alter the dynamic - there really wasn’t much I could do. Stepping in to correct this sort of behavior is inherently subjective; I would be using my judgment on who is going too far, or what remark is too mean or personal.
Now, as it was pointed out in this thread’s original message when it comes down to it, someone has power over the server. That person ultimately controls the forum.
However forums - as you are seeing - are easy to spawn. It’s the community around it, voting with its feet, that’s much harder to control.
In my humble opinion that’s who ultimately holds admins accountable. It’s y’all. Take responsibility, don’t tolerate bullshit, respect the thankless work admins are doing and that’s about all you can expect.
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@IoleRae said in Admin Accountability:
I mean personally, I’m completely comfortable with the “checks” being no more than ‘Roz smothers in sleep for misbehavior’ to be frank. It’s possible your life could change and you could get so stressed you lose your shit and melt down–it can happen to the best of us, clearly.
If we’re looking to troubleshoot the specific issue that has caused a downfall in recent memory, do a vote of confidence with the userbase on potential hires. The problem was the team got tired, bone deep tired, and couldn’t do it any more. So they brought on people who could without consulting anyone they should have, and one of those choices was somebody a lot of people couldn’t trust. That’s where the breakdown started.
Note that the failure mode of THAT is a board being shut down because the community can’t agree on anyone who a) wants to take on the burden and b) wants to put their trustworthiness up to a majority vote of a community where people can and have held grudges for decades. It’s, again, sort of like a game staffing issue - there’s not exactly a large body of people eager to take on that responsibility, and I suspect that saying ‘in order to do this extra work, you also have to be voted in by people’ would winnow that down fairly significantly.
Just to be frank, I agreed to be an admin because Tez said hey, would you? And I said sure. If there was a ‘hey, would you stand for an election to become an admin’ I would say ‘ohhhhhh nope nope nope nope’.
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Oh yeah, I don’t think it’s a GOOD idea. It’s just a solution for the specific trouble spot to start from.
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@IoleRae said in Admin Accountability:
I am also of the VERY firm opinion that the HISTORY of this place (and other places) is less important than the COMMUNITY. We’ve lost WORA and Electric Soup and the imagination named one and bad descs – a lot of them, and the loss is nothing, now.
At one point someone found Electric Soup on the Way Back Machine but LIKE A FOOL I didn’t bookmark it, so when I wanted to show someone a thread from there last night I couldn’t find it again. It does suck, especially as users get older and busier and institutional knowledge drops off.
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I honestly think a lot of this is worrying about edge cases. Yeah, sometimes wild shit will happen out of left field, in which case people will leave and go somewhere else but trying to plan for it isn’t practical or possible tbh. Otherwise, like, have some community agreement of what admin does and does not do, which should include listening to the community, and require a unanimous vote of current admin when it comes to adding a new one. The voting is, again, people staying or leaving.
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@Arkandel said in Admin Accountability:
The model I liked to use was to not rely on authority at all. Being an admin meant only stepping in when shit really hit the fan (‘a troll is making openly racist comments’) or for general boring tasks like moving or merging threads to their appropriate categories. You can’t overuse power you don’t allow yourself to have.
I largely prefer your approach: keeping a very light hand on active moderation. Because everyone who is saying it is absolutely right, that it is the community’s board, more than anyone one person’s or any group of people’s board
That’s part of why I wish there was better continuity plans.
@IoleRae said in Admin Accountability:
Loudly promise yourself and us that you will make backups (HERE), and X, Y, and Z have access to them. Do it once a month and use github or something?
That’s worth investigating. I will look into that.
she/they
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@Tez said in Admin Accountability:
That’s part of why I wish there was better continuity plans.
It’s a forum, not a nuclear arsenal. If it goes down in flames it goes down in flames. Then someone will build a new one. Or they won’t. It doesn’t matter.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel lmao. I have a problem with over-engineering for things.
she/they
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I had like a whole post typed up and then decided: The fact that you’re even concerned about this probably means it won’t be an issue for a long time.
You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.
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@KarmaBum said in Admin Accountability:
I had like a whole post typed up and then decided: The fact that you’re even concerned about this probably means it won’t be an issue for a long time.
You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.
You are in MY courtroom! GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.
