Ban Appeal ETA Creation / Enforcement

[Yonio]

What's your Minecraft Username?: YonioTheNacho
What's the title of your suggestion?: Ban Appeal ETA Creation / Enforcement

What's your suggestion?:

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PREFACE
I debated writing this suggestion to avoid stirring up drama and causing rumours to spread around. However, after careful consideration with a few acquaintances and gathering contrasting evidence, I have decided to create this suggestion to express how I feel about the appeal system on SchoolRP

Furthermore, this is no attempt to "bombard staff with an appeal review". I am aware that this has been used as a reason to instantly deny appeals; As a member of the SchoolRP community, I am simply expressing my thoughts on the server's system and a constructive piece of criticism for the betterment of the network.

Finally, I will not be sharing any confidential staff information. All of the information provided in this suggestion is publicly available as long as you know where to look for it.

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INTRODUCTION
Before bringing up my idea, I must first explain the system that both users and staff members follow when a ban is issued for those who have never been banned or simply need clarification on this topic.

1. Pre-ban steps. Before a ban is issued, a staff member will either receive proof of a rule-break or witness it themselves. Note that all bans have some sort of degree of proof; While yes, evidence might be forged or taken out of context, staff members will never ban users due to suspicion of a rule-break.​

2. Ban execution. The staff member will anonymously execute a command to ban the user from a specific server within the RPH network alongside a reason. This reason is usually taken from a fixed naming convention available to staff members. To create this naming convention, reasons must unfortunately be left vague at times, which results in many users not knowing the exact reason behind this ban.​

Once the ban is issued, the user has the option to appeal their ban as stated below:

3. Appeal pre-requirements. Before appealing, the user must keep in mind two main factors:​

- If their ban is unappealable, they will never be allowed back into the community no matter how many times they appeal nor how much evidence they claim to have. Once it's unappealable, that's it.​

- If their ban is permanent, but appealable, they will need to wait 30 days before appealing. This means that whether you intend to know more about your ban reason, or simply want to debate your ban, you are unable to do this via the appeal system. Staff does, however, offer users the possibility to submit a staff report.​

4. Appeal Submission & Wait time. Once submitted, the appeal thread will go to a private list of appeals, only accessible to Admin+'s. Staff members will then have access to view the appeal and respond to it anonymously for their safety, and reasonably so. It is crucial to note that there is no estimated timer for an appeal to be reviewed, which is the main reason why I decided to post this appeal.​

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SUGGESTION
Essentially, my idea is to add an estimated timer for appeals to be reviewed. This timer could be a couple of days, a week, a month. Any reasonable amount would be valid. However, given the sheer amount of bans on SchoolRP (which do tend to happen relatively frequently), SRP players should have some sort of reference when it comes to waiting for appeals.

Now, I know a lot of you might come up with counter-arguments to this suggestion, so I will preemptively respond to some questions to clear matters up:

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Staff have lives outside the server. This is a voluntary position

- You're right. Staff are here voluntarily, but that does not exempt them from responsibilities. The fact that they are doing this voluntarily doesn't mean that players can just remain banned for months with little to no information on why they were banned in the first place. I will provide my personal experience as a former Admin when it comes to replying to appeals:

- Simple Bans. Bans for Trolling, Hacking, etc. take no longer than 10-20 minutes at most. The majority of this timer will depend on how long they take to actually locate the screenshot evidence. Given the nature of these bans, it is very simple to tell if the ban is legitimate or unfair.​

- Complex Bans. Bans for Toxicity, Malicious Behavior or Harassment can take a bit more, around 1-2 hours when the ban reason is iffy and several parties are involved. These bans are quite complex and may sometimes require the staff member to reach out to other Admins for further confirmation or compare their ban incident with other previous bans. However, the actual banning process shouldn't take longer than a couple of hours (generally speaking. There are exceptions but even so a ban review process never took longer than 3 days while I was an Admin on SchoolRP)​

- Bypassing Bans. These bans are possibly the ones that can take the most. This is because the nature of IPs and their complexity when it comes to tying them to other accounts can get tricky when VPNs or proxies are involved. As far as I can remember, the most I took to actually review a case of a bypassing ban was 2 weeks, which was caused by the fact that the server plugin was not cooperative and some other staff members involved were also unsure about the ban's circumstances.​

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Unfortunately, you will need to take my word for this, but any other former staff member can confirm the situation above.​

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Staff need enough time to properly review an appeal.

- I agree with this argument to some extent. Staff should never (and have, in fact, never) reviewed an appeal until they have gathered enough information to properly review them. Nonetheless, this argument would only be valid for so long until the process becomes excessively long. While it's true that gathering evidence might take some time, specially when reporters might not be responsive right away, forcing users to wait months until they can properly gather everything should not be a thing. Moreover, from my experience most of these long-standing appeals are caused by the fact that staff members have not actually started the process of re-gathering the evidence that resulted in the appeal, and instead focus on other aspects of the server. I will not debate whether or not this is the product of procrastination or negligence, as that would be a personal attack on staff and would not benefit this suggestion whatsoever. However, to sum up, staff should indeed have time to gather evidence, but the time they're allocated should be spent on actually gathering it up instead of leaving an appeal unadressed altogether.

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Users who are banned already know what they're banned for.

- As said above, ban reasons are taken from a fixed list of ban types that Admins have access to. These reasons are, again, very vague. To list a few, we can find:

- OOC Toxicity​

- FailRP​

- Sensitive Topics​

- Failure to Report Rule-breaking​

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While yes, you'll probably know what got you banned if the offense was committed a few days ago, some users are banned after the incident occurred months ago. In these cases, the users are left in the dark when their appeals asking for clarification are left unanswered​

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Moreover, it doesn't help that people who are banned don't have access to any evidence relating to their ban*.​

* I do not support giving banned players access to the incriminating evidence, as this would risk the reporter's safety. This is simply a way to explain why appeal users might feel frustrated as they have little to no information other than a vague statement on why their access to SRP was revoked.​

That said, it is clear that in many cases, users have no idea what they were banned for. Even if staff's responsiveness is restricted to protect user safety, players should have the right to know a bit more than just a few words to know what they were banned for and know how to properly address it in an appeal. However, with the current system, not having an ETA makes this process painstakingly long and frustrating, which is what's caused many players to feel betrayed by the community.

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SchoolRP is a relatively big community with quite a lot of bans. You should be patient.

- Due to a lack of public transparency in terms of how many bans there are, it is impossible for me to tell how big the influx of appeals actually is. However, what I can do is compare SchoolRP to other servers with a similar playerbase and their estimated ban timer. To avoid issues relating to advertisement, I will only include the first letter of said servers and give a brief description of what the server is about. This is purely a contrastive piece of evidence to support my argument. I do not endorse advertisement nor comparing SchoolRP to other networks in a demeaning manner.

1. T########## (RP server):​

Player amount: 30-175 online players​

Appeal's ETA: 1-2 days; rather quick thanks to direct conversation between staff member and appealer​

Staff Position: Voluntary​

2. L############# (RP server):​

Player amount: 100-250 online players​

Appeal's ETA: 1-2 days; exceptions for more complex bans​

Staff Position: Voluntary​

3. W######## (MMO RPG server):​

Player amount: 1250 - 2500 online players​

Appeal's ETA: 2-4 weeks​

Staff Position: Voluntary​

4. H###### (Mi****me/RPG network):​

Player amount: 20.000 - 50.000 online players​

Appeal's ETA: 2-7 days​

Staff Position: Paid​

5. C########## (Creative Plots):​

Player amount: 30 - 120 online players​

Appeal's ETA: ~1 week​

Staff Position: Voluntary​

6. O########## (RPG / Vanilla+):​

Player amount: 100 - 350 online players​

Appeal's ETA: 1-2 days; rather quick thanks to direct conversation between staff member and appealer​

Staff Position: Paid​

7. M###### (MMO RPG):​

Player amount: 300 - 800 online players​

Appeal's ETA: 1-2 days; rather quick thanks to direct conversation between staff member and appealer​

Staff Position: Voluntary​

8. M###### (Sub-server hosting):​

Player amount: 1000 - 6000 online players​

Appeal's ETA: 1 day​

Staff Position: Paid​

I could continue this list on and on, but that would make this suggestion way too long for what I intend. What I want to say with this is that staff should be more transparent with how long appeals should take. Most other servers, with both paid and voluntary staff members, and with bigger and smaller player counts have an official estimated time for their appeals. SchoolRP should also have one, but most importantly they should also enforce it. In order to determine a realistic ETA, staff should be instructed to follow it; otherwise this change will not have any positive effects on the community.

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If they don't respond or if your ban is permanent, you should make a staff report.

- Staff reports unfortunately also suffer from this same issue, ontop of the fact that there are fewer staff members who are able to review these reports (Senior Admins and above). While I can't see all the open appeals and staff reports, I can personally share that I have submitted a Staff Report with adequate evidence six months ago, and it has not been reviewed yet. Once again, I will not question the reasons behind this lengthy process, but users should have other options that don't take an undefined amount of time to be addressed. Furthermore, many of the appeals are already issued by Senior Admins themselves, meaning that filing a regular staff report will take just as long as if you simply left your appeal as is (both the appeal and the report would be reviewed by the same person).

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CONCLUSION
As seen above, the current state of appeals is quite concerning, as there are players who have been banned for over months with no response from staff and no indications on how long it will take for them to be responded. Users are even scared to bring up their bans publicly out of fear that it will be considered as "bombarding staff", which will result in said bans being automatically denied.

I ask that you read all the premeditated statements before posting your reply to prevent unnecessary flooding in this chat. I also ask that you stay respectful and civil when responding, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with my point of view.

Thank you.

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How will this benefit the server and community?:
As described above, it keep users informed about the reasons behind their ban and a fixed date to keep in mind instead of endlessly waiting for their appeal to be reviewed on a random day in the future. Doing this will keep users from asking how long their bans will take (for the most part, we all know there's always gonna be a couple of troublemakers) and a generous deadline for staff members to review their appeals.

 

[MinisterFudge]

+1
Seems like a perfectly normal and reasonable accountability measure to me.
I, for one, deeply resonate with requests (no matter how simple/quick to process, reasonable, or meritorious) taking months for *any* progress or communication to be made back.

 

[KimiNoUso]

Reviewed
Thank you for your suggestion!

As you've said here, our staff team do not action punishments against players who believe they haven't broken the rules without evidence. At some point somewhere (if you are banned), you've broken the rules, whether realising or not. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we will divulge a detailed and exact reason for their ban, any of your examples from "FailRP" to "OOC Toxicity" would risk the original reporter (if one is involved) being exposed which puts them at great risk for simply trying to do the right thing; for example if I then tell you exactly what you did, you would most likely remember when and who was involved. We will not, and will never expose reporters for reporting rule-breaking.​

- We provide 'Staff Reports' for those who do not understand their ban to get peace of mind that a Senior Administrator (or Owner if the situation involves a Senior Administrator and is reported correctly) has looked into the situation, however brief the response, the point is that if your ban was false, it would have been removed at that point.​

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Providing an ETA would not help solve this issue as the original staff member that banned the player is responsible for responding to the ban appeal, and as most of you know we have things such as Inactivity Logs and real lives behind the scenes. Whilst some tasks may be easier than others, I always encourage Staff Members to prioritise their own real life and mental health over a video game. Nevertheless, Admins are expected to respond to their own ban appeals in a timely manner and are reminded of such every month or so should any be left unanswered.​

- Occasionally, we may leave ban appeals unanswered for several other reasons, for example if your ban is complex and we have a lot to consider for the safety of our community, or if we're collecting any additional evidence/locating it.​

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To conclude though, all bans have reasons and evidence behind them, and Administration follow a strict guide when responding to appeals and issuing bans; more often than not, staff members look to each other for opinions on whether they should issue a ban, meaning there's typically always more than one Administrator responsible for giving that final decision. Not only this, but to receive a permanent ban, you would have had to of broken a rule multiple times, or broken a very serious one; we never immediately permanently ban a player unless they pose any sort of risk or have not learnt their lesson from previous bans.​