The "Single RDM" reporting rule

It's a determent to not make single reports.
However, that determent is up to admin discretion, and the single RDM reports can be canceled with such.
Furthermore, it has to be handle case by case.
Not all single RDM reports are "bad".
Some single RDM reports can bring to light of situations that we might not be aware of such (i.e. toxic gameplay, loopholing, etc.).
However, those that hold little to no significance are those that we generally want to discourage people from making.

As to regulars getting upset, they have nobody but themselves to blame because they were the one who RDM'd.
Even if staff was on, the regular is going to get slain.
It's no different than single RDM reports.

Right now, I think it's a non-issue.
Mods can't exercise this power so mods can't abuse it and go outside the protocol.
Only admins(+) can so they can handle the single RDM reports case by case if they want to invalidate it.
Besides, the word, discourage, doesn't mean "Hey. You can't ever post single RDM reports. We don't want them."
People can make single RDM reports all they want, however, that ability is there to keep in check for single RDM reports that may be petty, silly, or whatever it takes for single RDM reports to be invalidate.
It hasn't been an issue yet, but that admin discretionary power is there in case such event occurs.
Sometimes, the best way to do things is to take preventative measures.

 

It’s not a deterrent if there’s no punishment that’s not how deterrents work. Issuing the ‘possibility of admin discretion’ as a deterrent when there has been no precedent isnt a deterrent.

Even admins+ tried to exercise the staff resources excuse and were told to finish the report.

They have only themselves to blame true but it still gives them a pedestal to argue from with the current wording.

Also why try to grass roots solve an issue that was otherwise solved before the reword?

 

Punishments don't always make good deterrents. Furthermore, you can create deterrents without needing to create a punishment.
https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx
https://undark.org/article/deterrence-punishments-dont-reduce-crime/

Besides, I did quick searching and found two reports where admin discretion were used.
https://www.seriousgmod.com/threads/report-against-winter-soldier.22234/
https://www.seriousgmod.com/threads/report-against-trouble-in-terroist-town.16439/

It's 50/50, Robokiller. There has also been some cases where it was exercised and used successfully. However, there will always be an exception to such cases where the people will be told to go back and finish them.

That's just my interpretation. Not the official answer.

 

I think it is fine the way it is, not like we really enforce it anyways. It is basically just there for us to step in and put a stop to players who constantly post reports dealing with a single report of rdm. This is actually problem when you think about how much work a mod must do to complete this single report. Not only does he need to get on the servers and comb through logs to find the situation, he also has to get both sides to give a stance and that can prove difficult if the player isn't on the forums. This isn't a problem of unlimited resources, it is about managing such resources as to not put them to waste. It is quite wasteful for us to focus so much attention on reports that have such a little impact on things, and more beneficial for us to take care of players who have mass rdmed.

Single rdm reports can bury other reports that may be of way more urgency, which is why we put that in place. If it isn't enforced that much why does it need to go? It's fine really.

 

There's no possible way that a crime that can result in the death penalty wouldn't be committed because they don't care about the death penalty. That Claim is based on the # of crimes committed within the research done on what crimes would relate to being a resulting death sentence. Think of what has stopped because people from committing those crimes in the first place. If people truly didn't care about being sentenced to death we'd see more crime. You lost be when that article stated outright:
After decades of research, there’s little evidence to suggest that the threat of prison, or even the death penalty, deters would-be criminals. You need to see two sides of the picture. That's the side of people who'd do anything to accomplish their task like break the law and or die. There's others who don't do that because the law shouldn't be broken at risk of punishment.

And when can it be 100%? 100% where we know for a fact that these shouldn't be made or should be and will be made and completed.

And to go to Pacifist about grass roots

The enforcement of this is to state at the end of each single RDM report "Please try not to make reports for single offenses." There you've enforced it. It's always been enforced like this. A simple sentence with nothing stating any punishments that could follow if done again and even can allow the person to make the report again. This is a grassroots effort to try to tell every new person on the forums which as long as the forums exist and thrive will be an endless journey. Not everyone will get the message at the end of the day and they'll just continue on with the next wave of new people coming in. So no matter what you'll be doing these reports anyway whether or not you're reluctant because this rule allows people to do this even though you the staffer are reluctant to do it.

There's no stopping them from doing so with no punishment it's simply a "hey we dont wanna waste our time with you single issue giving out a slay after spending 10 minutes on your problem we'd rather issue a ban if possible next time thanks."

Again when and why is it now necessary to view these things as one more valuable than the other when each offense in the rule book has been given its punishment? "When this guy commits mass RDM, come back to us in a forum report so we can ban him instead of slay him." A single RDM is a slay, 2 offenses is 2 more slays like it's set in stone what you're investigating is adhering to the rules and to think a slay isn't worth the punishment for a broken rule why even enforce it in the first place? Might as well allow accident forgiveness at this point.

As is with any report if there's not enough evidence it's over. You'd waste time on any hacking report maybe even more time if the evidence doesn't line up compared to a single RDM report.

Interesting point. I can see the argument in this, but then what I think about is if someone is planning to do forum reports without knowing what's going to be seen A la Agent A as he does from time to time what if they're all single RDM reports? Will you just ignore them and be like "well nothing worth my time here." Before you say "but that rarely happens" Murphy's law educate.

Here's something also very interesting I believe it is an issue because if it wasn't a non-issue we do see these kinds of rule change/reword/etc. threads get disagreed/dumbed into next year. People don't know what to think about the issue and the few that do have shown that they know the rule exists, but for what reason exactly? They know it's there they've expressed they want to go with a side instead of do nothing at all. So there's an issue at hand that people do want addressed but it's a tricky situation as we have pointed out to this point in this thread right now. So why leave it in the precarious situation it's in now when we can alleviate that by picking a stern side and enforce that?

 

U guys are making such a big deal out of this for no reason. My original point was that its petty to report one rdm on the forums instantly when he could have just waited for mod/admin to join the server and deal with the issue there

 

Though the thread spawned from the report on you this is using the reports of the past and how they were handled to address future reports so you don't deal with this again (or you could deal with it again).

 

Yeah obviously but simply using common sense should be enough to deal with this

 

Is this what it looks like when I go full tryhard :thinking: :confusing:

 

Hello,

Let me start by admitting that I have not read everything yet, but I have skimmed a few posts and found a few that would, in my opinion, already answer this topic.

Your tldr goal is: Either remove the rule, or make it so you just expose yourselves as lazy and say "We won't deal with reports about single offense RDM under any circumstances."
I shall assume the 'lazy' part is just wild conjecture and a little flair for the dramatic?


I would like to point at a few posts who in my eyes accurately described this conundrum. I will also use your list as that seems to contain all your points for the 'tldr' goal described above

1 & 2. Remove the grey area, either make it 100% not allowed or allow it entirely
The reason the grey area isn't as bad as you try to make it look is well put in this post:

The grey area allows for people to still report for single rdm cases, as no single rdm case is alike. If for example you got rdmmed once or twice by a person however there is also proof that he targeted in different ways, for example insults etc the case suddenly becomes far more than just a single rdm case.

There is no mold for TTT, new things and situations arise quite often so to say it would absolutely no longer be allowed would limit us as a staff team and community. However the truth is, new cases and situations aren't that often reported and most of the time you get single rdm reports that take up a lot of time for very little gain.

Now to counter the 'lazy' part, its just not efficient. It has nothing to do with being lazy.
Let's state it a little different than others have so far. We as staff have to play atleast 20-30 hours every two weeks on the servers. That equates to roughly 2 hours a day.
Next to that, we have a social life, we have work or school, a girlfriend.. There are only so many hours in a day that we can spend on hobbies or volunteering jobs like staffing.
Next to being on the servers, we are also active on the shoutbox, forums (replying to this post for example takes a good 2 hours to reply & read all the 3 pages), teamspeak etc.
We simply have to staff as efficiently as possible. If we wouldn't encourage players not to create single rdm reports we would probably be flooded with single rdm reports, which would take up a large chunk of the time we would otherwise spend differently, more efficiently. (we get more staffing done if we play a few rounds on a busy server, than if we were to spend that same time browsing through old logs for one single case)


3. There's no sugar coating it here. The staff have resources now, more so than ever before, and considering their very public stance on "petty reports" this is another "petty issue" that should be resolved. If their stance on taking care of petty things is to just say "it's nothing move on" make it so.
firstly, please allow me to clarify something that has been taken completely out of context. Single rdm reports are not necessarily petty reports.
Petty reports are reports that hold almost no ground for the reports to have been created in the first place. It has absolutely nothing to do with rdm in general. It has more to do with the reason behind creating the report, in a way to spite or further incite drama that could've been prevented in a myriad of different ways.

Then the staff's resources, a very good retort was this post:

4. I don't see how this is related to your goal, its merely explaining your original post, so let's skip over this one.

5. See previous points on why I disagree that this should happen.

6. And to those who enforce the rule, to the point that it has always been enforced, leaving the tid-bit at the end of each single RDM report, "Don't make reports about single offenses" which is as lackadaisical as it come, make it comes with enforcement or just none at all. Why leave that bit at the end anyway if they're just going to do it again or if anyone else is just going to do it again? What's the point?

The point is to notify them we would rather not do this, explained in the points above. There are obviously exceptions which is the reason why saying it would absolutely no longer be allowed would limit us as a staff team and community.

 

No it's lazy being lazy. "I dont wanna spend 10 minutes on this single RDM report when I could be spending 20 minutes on a hacking report that could be invalid or valid IDK as least it's a more serious offense and I get to ban someone instead of slaying them once. if it isnt a ban im working for why do it at all" "ROBO YOU JUST CONTRADICTED YOURSELF YOU SAID PPL WOULD SPEND 20 MINUTES THAN 10 TO DO JOB!!!"

Yea, but they'll still do the hacker report and then afterward complain about doing the 10 minute report.

What's with the excuses to not do your job? Either do the duty or say you have no time to waste on them. AKA Allow it all or don't and stop with the caveats. Like in all god damn essence what your entire post is saying "We'll do these reports regardless of what happens." SO WHY HAVE THE PHRASING IN THE FIRST PLACE??

Also the "we have lives" thing doesn't work here. This is strictly talking about when you are staffing, you do your staffing duty. This shouldn't be a "Oh I wasted 10 minutes on this single RDM now I gotta take 20 minutes to do a hacker report and be late for a play or whatever." Manage your time better no one said you had to complete all the reports, do the single RDM before the hacker, or do any of the reports at all to make you late to whatever you're doing.

Because that's what you're saying, I then bring up once again as you skimmed and didn't read it all. This phrasing has caused arguments that could've otherwise been avoided if this wasn't a thing. NO, I'm not just talking about Aarow v. Janppa. You know well enough people come into SB arguing this nonsense unless you're going to turn a blind eye to any of the comments we've seen. You fix the prolonged arguments by saying "we'll be doing all of these reports, no caveats." "But Robo who is arguing what?" People are arguing that you shouldn't report for single offenses because strictly that rule says so that "we'll do the reports, but dont do it again please it's wasting our time." They become public with it and question why does it happen in the first place. "Robo you're being dramatic." You dont have any time in SB if you think of that.

You're going to do the single RDM reports, clearly, as basically you've all said. Whether he she me you it or they it's been stated "we're doing the reports!" So again why why have the wording in there which has caused the "single rdm dont report me" arguments?

It's as easy as removing the wording. "Robo who cares about a few words???"

Talk to me when you care enough. https://www.seriousgmod.com/threads/hi-yes-hello-i-want-u-ppl-in-staff-to-do-a-quickie.43544/

 

I disagree with quite a lot here, it seems we are not on the same page.

It is not being lazy, I explained why.

Staffing hours (the thing we need to get 20/30 for every 2 weeks) do not include forum reports or anything forum related.
Doing reports does not get counted in your biweekly hours, its something we do besides that. Of course it's part of the responsibilities, just like remaining professional or hopping on the shoutbox, but it is not counted under the official hours.

I would much rather my mod spends 10 minutes on an unstaffed server and deal with an average of 5 reports, than spending those same 10 minutes on a single case of reported rdm.
Do note, we volunteer our time to help the community. We do this to give a little back to the community that we love and enjoy, and we do this because we get to help out keeping the server a relatively christian place (joke intended). We only have a certain amount of hours in a day, and as I said before we can deal with more issues if we mainly focus on mass rdm cases or staffing on the server compared to looking over old logs for one single rdm.

And why do we still allow them? Because sometimes Single rdm cases can actually turn out to be far more than just a simple single rdm case. Why would we fully close the door if we can just talk to people and let them know that they can report for it, but we really rather that they didn't? We're all people here, we can appeal to their understanding.

 

So again why have the wording about discouraging these reports when you even agree w/ @Zyp that more can come from completing these reports. Discouraging the single offense reports would disallow you getting as far as digging deeper with the offender. So again, why even have the wording when you will do these reports in the end and have even more incentive to do them??

“Id rather my mod do something else” they’ll be completed in the end anyway so it doesnt even matter why discourage them

 

In rare occasions more can come of those reports.
That is why I think we shouldn't bar them outright. However in most cases it is a simple rdm report that doesn't lead to further discoveries. Which is why I also think it is very good that we discourage people from making them.

Discouraging players from making single rdm reports is a very useful tool by itself, as it will deter most people from just creating a report out of frustration as we don't encourage it, but it does allow for people with more intriguing cases to come forward and 'more can come of those reports'.
You can see it as a filter

 

Staff using their time to help staff a server while using some of their off time to take care of reports of people that are too lazy too hop servers > staff who spend their lives doing single reports on the forums and dont go on to handle an entire server with mic spam and rdm included

 

Ok.

So, your stance is "We'll do them anyway, but we'd rather not." Hence reflecting the exact wording and not being creative. But then you decided to be creative and say "It's a filter."

Tell me then, was is being filtered here?

"Due to our limited resources, we encourage players not to report single RDM offenses on the forum."

You're filtering all single RDM offenses that would be reported. A filter is to block anything from passing through it, hence you want this filter to stop all single RDM offenses. Might as well just say "we dont want them" instead of "we'll do them but we dont want to do it again so please dont do it again but we'll do it anyway if you do it again". You'll perform your job as normal if they were reported without complaints other than "no single report pls" at the end. Want to know what's a bad filter? When the single RDM offenses get reported anyway and aren't being filtered. It's not working at all. No where in that phrase would anyone accept that their RDM report should be filtered other than "if it's a single offense, fork off". That phrase isn't filtering the "needless single offenses" from the "Ok there could be something here single offenses" it's saying "we dont want any of this but we'll do it anyway btw not actually filtering lol." If you want it to filter, specify what should actually be filtered. A filter that allows what it should be filtering through is a failing filter. "But Robo, what is reportable is listed below this phrase!" Nothing listed below the phrase specifies anything about single rdm offenses so the single rdm offenses aren't being "filtered" the phrase is just being "ignored" because it's "a grey area" and we'll just allow it to cause arguments.

 

Robo, the filter is what I explained above.
Discouraging players from making single rdm reports is a very useful tool (look at the discouragement as the filter) by itself, as it will deter most people from just creating a report out of frustration as we don't encourage it, but it does allow for people with more intriguing cases to come forward and 'more can come of those reports'.

The discouragement is the filter. It only filters for single rdm cases, as we only discourage single rdm cases.

 

And yet they’re still being made and so again not an effective filter. And you complete them anyway. Again no deterrent and not filtering the reports.

If you want an effective filter say “we wont do these anymore” and show you wont do them anymore by invalidating the rest.

 

Very sparsely though, so I'd claim the contrary!
I think its at an acceptable level right now, so I'm all for keeping it like the way it is, for all the reasons I put above

 

I think one point that @Robokiller87 pointed out that you admins that are defending the current policy are failing to address is that this policy doesn't have any limitations at all. It feels very very increasingly like the admin team just forgot that the power to not take reports ever existed and aren't using it. There are currently multiple regular offenders of this policy and nothing is done about it. It's fine to have a pocket punishment that you don't use frequently, but the admins need to address that there is a severe lack of enforcing this by any definition of the word. If you you take a mindful effort to just define a number in your mind or a ballpark as to where it's too many 1 instance report in the frequency, you can better identify the regular offenders and take appropriate action to actually deter people from making single instance report. Prove to yourself and the community that this isn't just something you "forgot" was in the rules or ever existed.