TJW's admin mod ... good or evil?

[Risujin]

The admins are drawn from the playerbase of a server. Those that play are often chosen after a lot of thought.

Ideally...

The admins are chosen by the person who pays/is responsible for the server.
They admins are representative of the person paying/responsible.
You know who to point to when something goes wrong and who to turn to.

Now you get the following case.

The players are the ones in charge.
The players decide what happens over one player/issue.
The server owner loses any authority he has.
Who is at fault when something goes wrong and who do you tell?

I'm not sure I follow your argument here. I understand admins represent the owner in a way, but I dont see the problem of "when something goes wrong" as being solved better by a designated specific player rather than by a specific player and approved with a vote.

You say the players should have fun for something they do not pay for and the server owner should just throw his money away?

Its a donation, just like the devs and players donate their time. We donate because we share a common idea -- a fun game to play. You can read my argument above, we dont give admins blatantly tyrannical powers just because they own the server.

The admins that do wrong are heard about.
There are enough admins who do right and have integrity ingrained but remain silent, some do not even log in unless it is needed. You make it come over that every admin is an idiot, I know you don't mean it like that but be straight about it.

Yeah I know. I wasn't railing against admins, but rather against the admin system. I'm looking for things we could do to do without the admin system or at least have less admins necessary, or lower level admins.

We have a vote system currently, it gets abused more than any admins do in my opinion.

This is true. I'm (possibly naively) thinking that changing the vote system from a simple majority to a 2/3 majority would help though.

Look at the poll, tough guy.

Yeah, I knew that would happen. Its kind of the joke vote because its not actually relevant to the real discussion.

On sst, we have a system that has TJW's commands, and some of R1's votes, along with a few new ones. We have kick votes with reasons, mute votes, teammute votes, teamkick votes, team designante and undesignate.

Come in, and if a player is a bad person, you can /callvote player reason
Or /callvote player mute

That sounds real nice. There are lots of fixes on SST that I keep hearing about but have never seen their patches on bugzilla. Are these published somewhere? (GPL!!)

Of all things, leave the US out of it. The one place where the election can be screwed easiest.
BTW where in your holy Magna Carta or Constitution was the US granted to implement Guantanamo?

Well I said authors of the Constitution and I do feel that comparatively its doing pretty well (see: communism and gulags, dictatorships and concentration camps, etc for alternatives that don't work so well). This is going broadly off topic though.

It takes whole 30 seconds to get teamvote designated

That sounds pretty good, I need to get my hands on this patch. My experience was on a server without designate vote, which of course is a pain. BTW did Designate ever address reactor/om deconning?

Well admin tools are like guns.

I would be the metaphorical gun control activist then.

!ABUSE ... yeah, right. There are websites, forums, and email addresses for that.

Well tracking it in-game has advantages. You can display how "abusive" an admin is when they enter the game.

well that sounds familiar.....o yeah, orc and stasis.

Huh?

[Survivor]

The admins are drawn from the playerbase of a server. Those that play are often chosen after a lot of thought.

Ideally...

Your system isn't ideal in all cases either.

The admins are chosen by the person who pays/is responsible for the server.
They admins are representative of the person paying/responsible.
You know who to point to when something goes wrong and who to turn to.

Now you get the following case.

The players are the ones in charge.
The players decide what happens over one player/issue.
The server owner loses any authority he has.
Who is at fault when something goes wrong and who do you tell?

I'm not sure I follow your argument here. I understand admins represent the owner in a way, but I dont see the problem of "when something goes wrong" as being solved better by a designated specific player rather than by a specific player and approved with a vote.

If an admin abuses you go to the server owner to get his rights revoked, if there is vote abuse what do you do? Well, appoint admins but you're against that.

You say the players should have fun for something they do not pay for and the server owner should just throw his money away?

Its a donation, just like the devs and players donate their time. We donate because we share a common idea -- a fun game to play. You can read my argument above, we dont give admins blatantly tyrannical powers just because they own the server.

The 'tyrants' can do with their server what they want. They pay for it. Yes thats how you put it, read your reply.
Now how you mean it. If an owner appoints someone then who are you to judge if that person is any good?
 

The admins that do wrong are heard about.
There are enough admins who do right and have integrity ingrained but remain silent, some do not even log in unless it is needed. You make it come over that every admin is an idiot, I know you don't mean it like that but be straight about it.

Yeah I know. I wasn't railing against admins, but rather against the admin system. I'm looking for things we could do to do without the admin system or at least have less admins necessary, or lower level admins.

You can't, see my other replies.

We have a vote system currently, it gets abused more than any admins do in my opinion.

This is true. I'm (possibly naively) thinking that changing the vote system from a simple majority to a 2/3 majority would help though.

50% out of 20 =10
67% out of 20 =14
It simply prevents teamspecific votes like nextmapping because people think it's over for their team, it does not prevent kickvotes abuse, nor mute votes abuse nor any other non-teamspecific vote which might come in the future.

Of all things, leave the US out of it. The one place where the election can be screwed easiest.
BTW where in your holy Magna Carta or Constitution was the US granted to implement Guantanamo?

Well I said authors of the Constitution and I do feel that comparatively its doing pretty well (see: communism and gulags, dictatorships and concentration camps, etc for alternatives that don't work so well). This is going broadly off topic though.

Wrong, democracy is a wonderful idea. But so is communism. Both lack in execution.
Get your facts straight. If you want a democracy that truly works you wouldn't need one since everyone is already doing what they should, which is adhering to the rules. Same goes for communism.

[Risujin]

If an admin abuses you go to the server owner to get his rights revoked, if there is vote abuse what do you do? Well, appoint admins but you're against that.

If you have to go to a server owner to fix an abusive admin, couldnt you go to the server owner to fix an abusive vote?

You say the players should have fun for something they do not pay for and the server owner should just throw his money away?

Its a donation, just like the devs and players donate their time. We donate because we share a common idea -- a fun game to play. You can read my argument above, we dont give admins blatantly tyrannical powers just because they own the server.

The 'tyrants' can do with their server what they want. They pay for it. Yes thats how you put it, read your reply.

The "owners pay for it, they can do whatever they want" argument irks me and I've tried to argue against it. Just because they are paying doesn't mean devs cant exert control by disallowing what they see as abusive powers to keep the owners in check.
 

We have a vote system currently, it gets abused more than any admins do in my opinion.

This is true. I'm (possibly naively) thinking that changing the vote system from a simple majority to a 2/3 majority would help though.

50% out of 20 =10
67% out of 20 =14
It simply prevents teamspecific votes like nextmapping because people think it's over for their team, it does not prevent kickvotes abuse, nor mute votes abuse nor any other non-teamspecific vote which might come in the future.

You would need more than 2:1 (at least 3 people) to votejack a server this way. No 2/3 majority voting doesn't kill group kick vote abuse, but it helps, as you say, nextmap vote abuse etc.

Your system isn't ideal in all cases either.

Yeah I know. I wasn't railing against admins, but rather against the admin system. I'm looking for things we could do to do without the admin system or at least have less admins necessary, or lower level admins.

You can't, see my other replies.

We're starting to get the admin-hate-backlash of admin-appreciation threads now, so I'd say many people agree with you. While I'll back down from calling for admin mod's head, there are still changes that need to be made to the admin mod and to the voting system to make both more fair.

My list would include:
-- In-game admin abuse reporting and tracking
-- 2/3 majority global votes
-- Admin abuse honeypot (since they dont seem to read these forums anyway...)
-- Additional voting options (these patches already exist, someone link please)

[Survivor]

If an admin abuses you go to the server owner to get his rights revoked, if there is vote abuse what do you do? Well, appoint admins but you're against that.

If you have to go to a server owner to fix an abusive admin, couldnt you go to the server owner to fix an abusive vote?

I'll only answer this one because this is what irks me most.
If an admin makes many mistakes you revoke his rights. He won't be able to do it anymore.
If people on the server keep voting stupid stuff, what do you do?
You can't revoke the rights of them all without adding another controlling entity (admin). But essentially all the abuse sensitive decisions like kick and mute end up with the admins again this way. See the problem now?

And don't say the serverop shouldn't decide but the devs because that isn't a democracy either.

[next_ghost]

It takes whole 30 seconds to get teamvote designated

That sounds pretty good, I need to get my hands on this patch. My experience was on a server without designate vote, which of course is a pain. BTW did Designate ever address reactor/om deconning?

The patch with complete documentation is here. Any structure can be protected either by building it as designated builder, using the /protect command on it from decon distance or pressing reload key from decon distance with granger/ckit. /protect and reload key toggle protection on and off.

[tuple]

The "owners pay for it, they can do whatever they want" argument irks me and I've tried to argue against it. Just because they are paying doesn't mean devs cant exert control by disallowing what they see as abusive powers to keep the owners in check.

If Devs try to lock down on "abusive powers" they will remove the operators flexibility in dealing with changing situations.

For 2 months, operator A has a nice crowd that is mostly friendly and responsible.  School goes into summer break and the crowd is overrun with rude and unruly people.  The operator could tighten down on some server configs to disallow certain forms of votes, or to allow admins more leeway to punish abusive players.  Things that were not needed with a nice crowd can suddenly become very useful.

The key to getting admins to use what is implemented is to make the documentation available. (which I do know many do)  There are a great number of cvar's and configs that can be changed and unless you are in the know, they can be exceedingly hard to find.  Operators are often NOT devs, so RTFS reading the source can be daunting at best.  There are many patches out there with variables that I've heard of, but could in no way consider myself knowledgeable of and would struggle to remember them all now. Normally I wouldn't think of this as bad, but tremulous seems to have skipped a couple point releases of the server side code  Difficult to find cvars can seriously complicate tweaking a system to tune it, especially when you only do it every couple weeks/months.

Might I suggest a wiki that devs making patches could add their cvars to?  I had the ambitious and naive thought of trying to document all of the cvars and commands in tremulous early on in my tremulous fun, I even had quite an extensive list going at one point.

[rasz_pl]

There are many patches out there with variables that I've heard of, but could in no way consider myself knowledgeable of and would struggle to remember them all now. Normally I wouldn't think of this as bad, but tremulous seems to have skipped a couple point releases of the server side code  Difficult to find cvars can seriously complicate tweaking a system to tune it, especially when you only do it every couple weeks/months.

Might I suggest a wiki that devs making patches could add their cvars to?  

Might I suggest a NEW VERSION ALLREADY? :/

[Risujin]

Might I suggest a NEW VERSION ALLREADY? :/

Where is my admin reporting patch?

Might I suggest a wiki that devs making patches could add their cvars to? I had the ambitious and naive thought of trying to document all of the cvars and commands in tremulous early on in my tremulous fun, I even had quite an extensive list going at one point.

The balance mod thread has some listen but not in a very user friendly way. I'll have to move it to a decently styled website. As for a patch wiki => WANT!

The patch with complete documentation is here.

Thank you! (Can't believe I missed that one...)

[Undeference]

That sounds real nice. There are lots of fixes on SST that I keep hearing about but have never seen their patches on bugzilla. Are these published somewhere? (GPL!!)

What patches do you want specifically? If you make a specific request, I can probably hurry up and submit it already (or if you have any suggestions or whatever -- it's not quite impossible to contact me).
Otherwise, you can filter through the code yourself. The game.qvm and patch being used on SST are at http://betaserv.tk/mkpdev.googlepages.com/

next_ghost: am I using an old designate patch or is it still the case that (I think I mentioned this somewhere) a new structure being built is protected if the last structure deconned was protected (i.e., designated builder A decons structure a, builds structure b; structure b is protected)?

[next_ghost]

next_ghost: am I using an old designate patch or is it still the case that (I think I mentioned this somewhere) a new structure being built is protected if the last structure deconned was protected (i.e., designated builder A decons structure a, builds structure b; structure b is protected)?

If a designated builder builds anything, it is always protected until somebody turns the protection off.

[Undeference]

Oh? I thought it was just structures explicitly protected with /protect. Oh well, I guess that makes sense.

[robug]

Today I was kicked from a server running my own mod. In the middle of a game, this guy joins and decides to decon my reactor and rebuild it, along with new nodes, next to a cliff so he can practice sky diving (not to mention how the other team gets points every time he dies). Being none too happy with his new plan for my base I resisted. Well turns out he's an admin, and bam, before I know it its !kick ris. I thought this was truly ironic since I was the one who patched the admin features into the mod in the first place.

I am very sorry for this...  After a quick grep of the log file the offender has been found and is no longer an admin on Yaknet Balance.  He has also been demoted on Yaknet Lair.

Thanks again for the mod.

robug

[Caveman]

smooth and fast move robug. respect.

[PyroJeff1973]

I'm afraid I'm guilty for kicking you.
Risujin, I owe you an apology. Sometimes me and some people have contests to see who can get the most negative kills in transit, because it lags too much for us to play a regular game. I guess I figured it was one of those games. Its not like me to kick people for things like that, anyway, even if I wanted to stop you, I would have !denybuild'd or !putteamed after a few warnings, not kick.
I promise you nothing like this will ever happen again.
-Jeff

[Risujin]

smooth and fast move robug. respect.

All I can say ... +1

[Radiohead]

Wonder how he got admin in the first place. =/

[Yarou]

In light of my experiences, Im unpatching admin out of my mod for the next revision.

Hmm, bad move.
People are gonna need to use an administration interface anyway, so they'll just manually use tjw's mod.

[Risujin]

In light of my experiences, Im unpatching admin out of my mod for the next revision.

Hmm, bad move.
People are gonna need to use an administration interface anyway, so they'll just manually use tjw's mod.

You necro'd the thread. Ive since changed my mind. In fact, I'm adding new and ever more abusive commands!

[PyroJeff1973]

Wonder how he got admin in the first place. =/

:/

do you have a problem with something I do as an admin? I am still currently admin in a few servers and if you have any comments on the way I admin, I'd like to hear them, instead of just bashing me.