Now let's get some things out of the way, because I am the person who actually coded in this verb and am honestly not surprised this is happening for a multitude of reasons.
The actual incident
Pragmatically, what happened is a bad judgement call of honestly wild proportions. Pasting in player ERP emotes, especially subtler emotes, anywhere, including asay/adminchat, should not be done intentionally unless it's pertinent to an active investigation. There is/was no active investigation going on. Therefore, there's no need to post them anywhere.
Mouse and everyone else should know this by now if they've been active on the server. We've had a lot of internal and external debate over this feature and its rammifications. I'm not sure why he decided to post it in asay, but, yeah.
Broken privacy, blah blah. It wasn't publicly posted. The damage actually done to the players in question is pragmatically, pretty minimal.
Unfortunately for us we're going to be here for a while because there's some longer winded issues to all of this because boy I refuse to believe that everyone is here over the emote and the emote alone.
I find no reason to kick Mouse out of staff. I do want them to read the rest of this post in the entirety, along with everyone else who has chosen to get involved with this mess, because there's some things I do need to make clear as I don't want a repeat, or anything close to a repeat.
Subtler-Anti-Ghost / Expectations of Privacy
The verb in question is supposed to hide emotes from ghosts. It is logged. On the server it was developed for, Main, it goes into individual say logs (which can be accessed with F6 --> Logs), and obviously, server logs.
Administrators were given a bypass on RP by FreeStylaLT. Originally I was going to hard deny it, but, I decided to step out and allow the other maintainers and the RP head administrator to handle it.
Unfortunately, given that the first headmin/maintainer post on this thread is going to be me, you can tell I'm not very happy that I decided to step away on this issue.
The verb was quite literally coded due to concerns of people stalking each other. The climate of when this verb was created made it more of a necessity than paranoia. It was made by myself after observing malicious behaviors from ghosts. Is it going to fix the problem? No. Will it make our players feel a bit better, for those who are interested in using it?
Yes.
The expectation of privacy on the modern internet, is honestly, nil, if you have enough sense to realize that anything you say and do is logged by countless servers that you will never be aware of.
That doesn't mean I feel it's pointless to give people engaging in this kind of thing a bit of console through adding this verb. Otherwise, I wouldn't have added it. If I felt admins needed a bypass, it would have had a bypass from day one.
This verb has existed through every singular era of Main without a hitch or even a molecule of drama that came from the verb itself.
When the protections were lessened, here we are.
It just shows me why I shouldn't step away from such sensitive topics. To be entirely frank, from now on, if anyone wants to overrule me on precedential things like this, they better be prepared to have a plan, and to handle the fallout themselves, because I'm sick and tired of doing damage control because people refuse to listen.
Mouse hiding their ghost
Guys. There's way easier ways to stalk someone than this. Bluntly.
I don't think we should be using any language that extrapolates what actually happened and assumes Mouse is doing it out of bad faith. This means you, Monara.
There's many reasons to hide a ghost. Mouse is enough of an old time player they know damn well admin ghost communications aren't impacted by not being in the room.
If they were trying to spy on people I highly doubt they'd talk about it in achat in that way at all.
This is ultimately a non issue to me.
Monara taking it to the forums
Monara was asked directly by Bhijn to take it to the forums instead of an internal adminhelp ticket, because the ticket was getting too heated and we had to shut it down.
Tragic we still don't have a way to deal with things like this in 2023 but this went down when iirc all of the head staff were out.
As I understand, the reason for taking it to the forums is also to incite a response to something Monara perceives as hostile to the playerbase.
I can't blame them for that.
It takes two people to make drama. If you witness perceived gross abuse of power, you're free to take it to the forums, as we have a complaints forum and it's for recording cases like this.
As I've told people before, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear for complaints. It's easier said than done but when I look at a complaint thread, all I care for is the objective fact of what happened. Not who wants to yell at who, and extrapolate why people are here.
It's more important that we can fix why we seem to come to blows all the times than get hung over on "but you made it public". It looks bad for the server but covering shit up is not the way we do things here.
This is ultimately a non issue to me.
Mouse commenting on ERP/otherwise scenes on ASAY at all
I'm very tempted to say non issue. If they thought there might be an Incident (tm) from a scene happening in a public area, it's fine to bring it up.
It is not fine to post emotes. We don't need to know the context and the rest of us don't give a fuck about the context. It's as simple as just saying "Hey so there's a xyz scene happening in this department like 3 tiles away from the door lol hope that doesn't result in problems".
Whether or not it's a problem that actually needs saying, well.
Prior Antics, Inactive Staff, Administrative Reach, Cliques, Ousting, ...
See, I took note of the actual asay screenshots. Allegedly, all of this happened due to concern that we're going to have dumb non-con drama.
Frankly, that was a very valid concern back when Mouse was regularly active, instead of connecting once every x. I should note that Mouse is probably one of the least inactive of the never-player staff. Which is an issue in of itself, but we're still looking for the answer to that.
It is, however, 2023. The entire rule page has been rewritten by myself. We now have stringent standards, that are actually enforced, for ERP scenes that are allegedly disruptive to the environment.
For the past year I and others have been pushing RP to be more self-policing and have IC reasoning trump OOC rules where it makes sense to. This is the one part of it that it doesn't, because frankly, people are horny and rather than just banning what they are doing I've chosen to write a paragraph of rules to dictate how they can go about it that doesn't wreck the atmosphere.
The people in question for this incident were following the rules. Thus, there's no reason to really bat an eye administratively at what they're doing. It's not our problem, and shouldn't be our problem. We do not need administrators proactively dogging pepole because they potentially have the capability to make drama, as opposed to when they do make drama. This isn't old Citadel anymore, drama is not hard to shut down. Trying to shut it down pre-emptively just causes more drama, no matter what way you go about it.
Mouse and Monara are both very old players. They've seen more shit than most of the active staff. Monara by specific has probably seen what happens when we don't care enough about privacy because again, once upon a time, there were actual, standing concerns over ghosts dogging each other over dumb ERP drama.
I have:
- No reason to believe Mouse is doing this to target specific players.
- No reason to believe Mouse is doing this for personal enjoyment
- No reason to believe Monara is doing this to try to get Mouse kicked because it's Mouse, as opposed to because they find the situation stupid and something that should not happen and Mouse happened to be the first one to do it.
Monara has spoken their piece very loudly on inactive staff and frankly they're not wrong. However, it's kind of stupid to dismiss this entire complaint because you think it's just to get rid of inactive staff. I have no doubt most people would do the same or be even louder if a group of players/admins they view to be the problem do something that seriously hurts their sensibilities. This is exactlly what happens when people who usually aren't around do stuff and end up treading on some landmines that have always existed, but the people who do play / admin actively would know to not tread on.
From their perspective, given that, and the fact they were one of the ones who argued that subtler-anti-ghost shouldn't be admin visible at all due to this exact issue, Mouse basically, as an inactive staff, waltzed in and did the exact thing you're not supposed to do with Subtler being visible.
What the fuck would you expect to happen?
What will happen to Mouse
As said earlier,
I'm not kicking a staffmember that's been here that long for a clear mistake. I do want them and everyone else to understand, however, that times change, and they should change with them, because frankly I really expect a lot better from a lot of people at this point, though the community is as always a bit of a painful process to change.I find no reason to kick Mouse out of staff. I do want them to read the rest of this post in the entirety, along with everyone else who has chosen to get involved with this mess, because there's some things I do need to make clear as I don't want a repeat, or anything close to a repeat.
I'll leave the thread open for the other head staff to put in their pieces.
