Accused of cheating

[badoing]

I just want to take a second to express my appreciation for the positive response to the thread. I was quite annoyed when I started the thread, but the willingness to help and improve the situation is awesome and feels kinda rare on the internet in ‘24.

Thanks everybody.

[Regenwasser]

@Eugene

Thanks for that. I really appreciate it when a person can see how they came across and acknowledge it.

The mod team for this community is actually really great. Yesterday a mod messaged me and asked me very nicely if I could maybe edit one of my messages a little because it caused someone in the community to get a little angry. I think it is great that he cared about that individual enough to reach out to me and I think it is also great that he didn’t just edit my message on his own but asked me nicely. This is great CM.

So I really shouldn’t have made this sound like you’re some kind of super villain

@Eugene

Can you clarify the approach you disagree with, and how you think it could be done better?

I think you’ve understood my position well enough. I guess we can just agree to disagree at this point. Having unwritten rules leads to issues with consistency and transparency. It also creates the risk of arbitrary or unjust decisions.

In the example of this thread a community member has been accused of cheating and he also had his game annulled even though he won it in accordance with the Japanese rules of Go (that he and his opponent chose for the game).

@Regenwasser

In the end, the fact that “score cheating” is even a thing on OGS stems from the inadequate UX design (again). These auto-messages are just a weird band-aid trying to shift blame to the users instead of fixing the design.

I worded this way to strongly but in the end I do think that this issue comes down to being a UX design problem rather than “cheating”.

[gennan]

@Eugene

general policies, with written rules where things are clear, and discussions and policies formed in line with current concensus as best we can

@xela

leave room for good administrators/moderators/judges to actually do the things they do well, is a common strategy

Indeed. And I’d say that OGS has this sort of system. There are written policy guidelines, but those leave out many details, leaving room for interpretation. In specific cases moderator consensus will play an important role in adjudication, but that doesn’t make the system arbitrary.
Moderator selection is based on an assessment of levelheadedness and some ability to make fair and wise decisions, taking into account those policy guidelines and various other aspects of specific cases. They are not infallible of course, but I think decisions made by a team of such persons are less arbitrary than if those decisions were left to the whims of a random individual.
In a sense it’s a simplified and informal version of a judicial system with a supreme court.

[Eugene]

@Regenwasser

I worded this way to strongly but in the end I do think that this issue comes down to being a UX design problem rather than “cheating”.

It’d be great if you could propose a means by which two people can be asked to “come to an agreement” about the score, that is not susceptible to one person in bad faith disagreeing with what the actual score should be. It would be interesting to see if this is “just better UX” or a whole different process (for example, we just set the score to be what the AI says it is after both players pass, removing the need for the players to actually assess their position at the end).

" One person in bad faith disagreeing with what the actual score should be" is what “score cheating” is, and it happens a lot (10-15 reports per day).

The cases like the OPs where “something seems to have gone wrong in the system” are rare, which is perhaps why up till now it’s been rare that folk receiving the unduly harsh message have not complained much. Because many folk receiving that message were cheating and they know it.

If we knew a better way to handle it, it’d at least be “on the list” to implement. Right now I don’t think there is a proposal with legs…

[Uberdude]

Also worth bearing in mind it’s not just an UX design problem for OGS itself, but all 3rd party clients like mobile apps, because if they have a bad scoring process (like race conditions in you agreeing to a score and opp then quickly changing status and your agreement counting against that new status which you didn’t intend) those users still end up getting accused and punished for score cheating by the global OGS policies and moderators. So then you also want your public api for the scoring process to enforce good behaviour in the design contract to defend against poor clients.