search

prophile / glory

VM setup for a certain Minecraft server
Other
2 stars 0 forks source link

Add a dispute resolution and ban appeal procedure #102

Open prophile opened 10 years ago

prophile commented 10 years ago

This is only fair, better to decide upon before it's needed and is a condition for using McBouncer.

nfreader commented 10 years ago

Are bans fed into a readily-accessible database/API?

prophile commented 10 years ago

Yes, the bans.txt file. In future they will also go into McBouncer.

nfreader commented 10 years ago

And MCBouncer does have an API that is available once you’re registered and logged in.

Nick Farley Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)

On Friday, November 1, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Alastair Lynn wrote:

Yes, the bans.txt file. In future they will also go into McBouncer.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub (https://github.com/prophile/glory/issues/102#issuecomment-27579645).

prophile commented 10 years ago

Yes.

prophile commented 10 years ago

So I've had a few thoughts about this protocol. My suggestion would be this:

Stage 1: Summary Action

A member of staff makes an immediate decision about the resolution and implements it. This is the normal mode of operation. Explicitly disallowed in appeal of previous resolutions, denial of ban appeals (but not acceptance), and cases of alleged moderator abuse.

Stage 2: Admin Decision

The admins privately meet, discuss the issue (perhaps consulting others) and take a decision. This probably only usually happens in cases of denying ban appeals. If the admins cannot come to a unified consensus, or decide to escalate the issue, it goes to arbitration. It also goes to arbitration if the dispute is an appeal against a previous admin decision.

Stage 3: Arbitration

In a channel (on HipChat) one admin presides over a meeting of staff. All staff are invited to any of these meetings. Both sides of a dispute are entitled to a member of staff acting as their advocate in this meeting, and are also entitled to appear at the meeting themselves. In cases of a dispute between a player and the staff of the server, the staff are advocated, again by one member. Once all the relevant information has been given to those present, all present members of staff including the presiding officer but excluding the advocates are asked to submit a vote, in private, to the presiding officer, who then establishes this as the final resolution. The presiding officer is given the deciding vote in case of a tie.

Going to full arbitration will hopefully never (or incredibly rarely) happen, but this would be the procedure if it does.

Stage 4: Executive Decree

This should essentially never, ever happen. The server owner (nfreader), being the one who actually pays for the thing, can overrule any previous decisions.

prophile commented 10 years ago

So I chatted briefly to @nfreader about this, and there was a suggestion of greatly simplifying this, down to (unchanged) summary staff decision or a direct ruling by him.

prophile commented 10 years ago

So some immediate pros & cons thoughts. Caveat emptor: not every pro is equal, not every con is equal.

Arbitration Protocol

Direct Protocol

nfreader commented 10 years ago

For the record, I have a fairly decent track record of benevolent community management.

That said, I think a no-nonsense, no questions asked approach can be marketed as a feature/perk/another thing that makes this server "unique".

mrxak commented 10 years ago

I'm all in favor of moderators banning dudes, then admins deciding later that was wrong. But I'm also in favor of rules for when dudes get banned being really clear, and only having mods who follow those rules, so that admins never have to get involved at all.

You only need transparency about what warrants a ban or not. If those rules are clear, and all the users know them, then there won't be a lot of surprises, and not a lot of people will have much cause to appeal. I know speaking for myself, I'm always going to let you admin guys know ASAP when I've banned somebody, so communication lines are clear and if I've made a mistake, it can be corrected immediately (both my knowledge of rules and the ban) even without an appeal.

nfreader commented 10 years ago

I think mrxak has outlined the best approach. Clear communications (either by hand or automated) on the backchannel about what's happening will keep things running smoothly. If we need an appeals process in order to comply with MCBans, we can let users send an email to an admin-only address.