Admin Accountability

[Narson]

Going to go with ‘This is engineering a solution for an outlier situation’. If you totally go nutso bananas, the control is Roz yells at you to tell you this? Idek. Like, if the admin here separately or jointly I guess we build a new board again. Rather proven it can be done!

[kalakh]

Sounding like a broken record, but I think it all rolls back around to trust, a precious resource not to be ignored or squandered. Unpopular decisions and actions are going to happen, and in some cases will absolutely need to, but if the community you’ve fostered trusts your judgment - and can trust that questioning that judgment, so long as they’re not rolling off the rage deep end without cause, is both allowed and heard - then they can trust you’re doing your best and that you are willing to shift course if the situation requires, whether or not you actually do so in that particular situation.

Ultimately, this is what happened on MSB. An extremely questionable decision was made that a large number of posters didn’t agree with, it was doubled down on, and then another action was taken that a large number of posters not only didn’t agree with, but felt was incredibly unfair. Response to this resulted in greater and greater breaches of trust as folks were first told to shut up about it (temporarily or not), and then bans started coming down, often solely because someone posted at all.

The decisions themselves were bad calls, but the ultimate cause was that a majority of the board very abruptly lost all trust in the administration to 1. make wise decisions, 2. listen to feedback, and 3. not start banning anyone giving said feedback unless they were being very egregious about it. It’s worse when there was a whole lot of prior trust invested, because then it feels like a betrayal.

In my view, any organization or attempts at checks and balances should serve that end, so what shape they take (on an internet message board, anyway), is pretty secondary if they’re effective at doing so.

[Apos]

So it’s an interesting question and I’d probably echo everyone else mostly, but I like the question because it reminds me of things we run into an awful lot in running MUs, and not just in punishing problematic behavior but guiding or incentivizing behavior in general.

We’re a hobby all about making games so I mean of course people are going to make really overengineered solutions, like coming up with like a 30 step approach to remove incentives of having someone help their character with their own alts rather than… just saying it’s against the rules and banning someone for doing it.

Pretty much any behavior you can think of you can create a structure around it that makes a behavior impossible or conversely necessary, but usually they are some cumbersome and massive that it completely strangles out what you wanna foster in the first place. My experience has led me to believe that futureproofing something, whether a board or code on a MU, to be generally a bad idea.

[Jennkryst]

@Evilgrayson Without delving into the actual politics, more and more people are being shown what others have known for ages ages: plenty of things work if you do not actively undermine them. If you take a fire department and instead of giving them water truck, you give them a fuel tank, and they spray that on a fire… you cannot say firefighters are the problem.

Like… I had another better analogy at one point, but words hard and I don’t remember.

But back to your point, for sure, people found out ‘huh… the only reason people followed the rules was because they agreed to… what if we stopped?’ is incredibly easy, especially given stuff you can get from Renegade Cut on the YouTubes, since we’re trying to keep PoliticTalk to a minimum.

[Mourne]

@Apos I am of the opinion that it is better to squash people who break the reasonable rules than to try and write rules so convoluted that it blocks people from doing reasonable things because of the mere /potential/ for something bad to happen if someone abuses it.

Something like: Abuse won’t be tolerated.

Clear cut ‘Don’t do this’ rather than a bunch of nebulous coded things that are put in place because someone ‘might’ be a trouble maker. Let people have fun as long as it’s within theme and setting and rules rather than remove something for everyone just cuz someone might try and abuse it.

Rule that abuse won’t be tolerated.

Ah well.

This is why I don’t run a game I suspect.

[kalakh]

Thinking about it, a rule such as “don’t be a fucking asshole” is broad and clearly up to the judgment of the person enforcing the rule, but it generally works fine enough because most folks have a pretty good idea of what ‘fucking asshole’ entails, their lines are just drawn in different places. A firm nudge is generally enough to course correct provided the person isn’t actually intending to be in ‘fucking asshole’ territory, and for people egregiously over the line, everyone can basically look and go ‘yep, they were being a fucking asshole’.

But, this again goes back to trust, otherwise it doesn’t work at all. If the people in the community trust that, even if you draw your lines somewhere differently than they do, you will be reasonable and open about where they are and what you do when someone crosses them, and - very importantly - that this standard will be applied evenly to everyone, it works. Even for people who start out distrustful because they don’t know you or your community well enough to know how fairly the rules are applied, their concerns are often settled with time and seeing the rules in action.

If you’ve broken everyone’s trust, especially if you did it via uneven, unfair, and heavy-handed application of punishment, especially especially if you then insist that your rulings were justified, then suddenly that rule doesn’t work at all. People want to know, really want to know, exactly where your lines are. They don’t trust your judgment and they certainly don’t trust that you’ll be fair about it, so they want to make absolutely sure that they don’t accidentally cross said line. It’s no longer seen as a boundary, but a cliff, and the result is fear, defensiveness, and resentment. At that point, though, writing a novel about all the ins and outs of exactly what ‘being a fucking asshole’ means isn’t likely to work either.

[Pavel]

@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.

I’m a librarian. I make sure that stuff is in the right spot, there’s no running in the building, and I’m woefully underpaid for my job.

[eye8urcake]

@Pavel

[Pavel]

@eye8urcake Oh man, now I have to watch those films again.

[tsar]

@KarmaBum said in Admin Accountability:

You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.

I’m a federal agent.

And an assassin.

And a history professor.

[Testament]

@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.

[Pavel]

@tsar said in Admin Accountability:

@KarmaBum said in Admin Accountability:

You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.

I’m a federal agent.

And an assassin.

And a history professor.

And you’re 19 with three PhDs, right?

[tsar]

@Pavel said in Admin Accountability:

@tsar said in Admin Accountability:

@KarmaBum said in Admin Accountability:

You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.

I’m a federal agent.

And an assassin.

And a history professor.

And you’re 19 with three PhDs, right?

Yes

[eye8urcake]

@tsar said in Admin Accountability:

@Pavel said in Admin Accountability:

@tsar said in Admin Accountability:

@KarmaBum said in Admin Accountability:

You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.

I’m a federal agent.

And an assassin.

And a history professor.

And you’re 19 with three PhDs, right?

Yes

And a model.

[Juniper]

Clearly the solution is to store the board on the blockchain.

[Testament]

@eye8urcake said in Admin Accountability:

@tsar said in Admin Accountability:

@Pavel said in Admin Accountability:

@tsar said in Admin Accountability:

@KarmaBum said in Admin Accountability:

You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.

I’m a federal agent.

And an assassin.

And a history professor.

And you’re 19 with three PhDs, right?

Yes

And a model.

With a tragic backstory.

[Pavel]

@Testament said in Admin Accountability:

@eye8urcake said in Admin Accountability:

@tsar said in Admin Accountability:

@Pavel said in Admin Accountability:

@tsar said in Admin Accountability:

@KarmaBum said in Admin Accountability:

You guys seem to get it: You’re traffic cops, not federal agents.

I’m a federal agent.

And an assassin.

And a history professor.

And you’re 19 with three PhDs, right?

Yes

And a model.

With a tragic backstory.

All backstories usually start with “I was born” which is enough of a tragedy in itself.

[Mourne]

@Pavel said in Admin Accountability:

All backstories usually start with “I was born” which is enough of a tragedy in itself.

For me it’s rare that I would write a background in the first person. I don’t write first person in game, why would I write first person in a background?

I also typically start with a characters environment rather than their birth, because the actual birth or creation is a given… as the character does exist.

[mietze]

I think having a team (and taking as much care as possible to keep retaining/adding on folks so that it is a team) that works well together and can collaborate together helps a lot in in the long run. That requires some community buy in as well. If you have a team that works well enough/is comfortable to speak up when there’s a decision made that should be revisited, when respect can be there even when there isn’t always a face of 100 percent unity (because there will come a time when that is not possible or doesn’t happen in a given moment), and most importantly when there’s enough people on deck that when a break is needed it can be taken–I think that is often even more important than any policy or procedure for long term health. It’s hard, though. And I think keeping the admin team numbers up is often something that is neglected first; it’s so easy to do when burnout isn’t present, but so hard to rectify once that burnout starts to happen full force.

And while it’s fine to have disagreement and different approaches, I think it works best if the people involved do have respect for everyone else on the team. The first crack at accountability almost always comes not from the membership but from the admin team itself. Once it falls to the community to hold the admin accountable because there’s evidence that they are slipping from that and not holding each other accountable, it’s just really hard to recover from.

[eye8urcake]

@Pavel said in Admin Accountability:

All backstories usually start with “I was born” which is enough of a tragedy in itself.