Clarification 1: My point was mainly that it shouldn’t stop happening, not that moderators don’t have to right to forget things. It can happen, I don’t think I should have to explain we shouldn’t be too strict with human error.
Clarification 2: If I report someone for score cheating, what is an acceptable notification to the reporter, for all involved? If I’m told report was correct, apparently it’s public shaming so it’s a no-no. If I’m told it wasn’t, it’s a lie. If I’m told nothing, I won’t bother again with the void. There should be some clear expectations for all sides.
(Do you know what happens when there are no clear paths for information that involves a community? Gossip. I wouldn’t bother, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an unofficial “avoid these cheaters” list, the same way there’s an “avoid office with closed doors when X is there” unspoken warning in companies with untrustworthy HR.)
Cheating is serious, it’s the cornerstone of any sport to be honest. I don’t really mind playing a newbie that didn’t know better (because I mainly play unranked) , but it’s not just about me, some people do and it’s understandable.
Maybe don’t say anything to anyone, because some people can get extreme, just make the cheaters play unranked for a year or something. Or make them unable to accept challenges, only send.
I believe collective mod experience counts for something, so if someone gets away with a warning, it’s probably for the best. But I have to compare side to side with responses about cheating pros and how they are the stain on the marble of Justice.
Like I said, I’d usually tell the reporter what happened. However, I don’t think that the end result should be a standard thing that is automatically passed on to the reporter, since there are plenty of situation where it’s simply not as clear cut or easy.
If you report someone for cheating, my standard response would be something like the following, depending on the situation:
Hi, thanks for your report. It’s clear from our logs that your opponent has indeed illegally changed the score at the end of the game, and I’ve given them a warning for it. Have a nice day!
Hi, thanks for your report. It’s clear from our logs that your opponent has indeed illegally changed the score at the end of the game, and since they had already been warned before about this, I’ve banned them.
Hi, thanks for your report. It’s clear from our logs that your opponent has indeed illegally changed the score at the end of the game, however, it seems they only clicked a single time and I cannot find any other evidence of cheating in their other games. For now I will assume that this was simply a mistake, but I will make a note about this player for when it reoccurs in the future.
In any case, in the vast majority of cases I respond to the reporter and tell them what happened.
In many cases repeat offenders do actually stop offending after appealing. Many cases have people being banned because they never saw the warning, or didn’t realise the severity of their actions. There’s also many children who grow up or get some parental supervision, there’s people who got banned unjustly etc. And we don’t generally give third chances; getting banned for the same thing twice is quite permanent.
It’s hard to have statistics about this, though… You may be right, you may be wrong, I don’t know which and to what extend.
Sometimes I feel like you think moderators are scouting the games looking for incorrect scoring and annulling those to save the ranking system.
We don’t annul games that aren’t reported by one of the users (or at least I don’t), and unless cheating or sandbagging is involved, I don’t annul games without the consent of both parties.
The only time I annul games without consent of the other party without one of the players being the reporter, is when dealing with botters or with sandbaggers (“to adjust the ranking system”). It’s not because I want to “fix our baby that we love” (I couldn’t care less, to be honest), it’s because the sandbagger / botter tends to get reported an awful lot by other users who do seem to care about their rank. What are we supposed to do about sandbaggers if not annul their games? “Sorry, this guy has indeed been resigning dozens of games while ahead, but there’s nothing we can do about that”? No, we’d annul those games and tell the sandbagger to stop resigning games.
I doubt that forgetfulness is very common. If so, the answer is to keep the report open until the acknowledgement/feedback is sent. As Vsotvep alluded to, some reports do get accidentally closed, and it may not be possible to remember who the reporter was. This happened to me on two occasions. On one I remembered the name, and on the other it was either a bizarre alpha-numeric name or a foreign script, so no feedback was sent. So it happens, but it is rare. As Gia cogently observes, if no acknowledgment is sent, then the reporter may, at best, think the report was accidentally deleted. This leads to extra effort and multiplying reports.
Again, as Gia eloquently expresses, not responding to reports is especially unfriendly to users and highly demoralizing. It may explain why the vast majority of score-cheating games are never reported.
The instances I know of are not forgetfulness, because they were repeated several times. I discovered the known nonresponding mod because I fielded a complaint about the lack of response. Subsequently I have seen several other instances involving that mod and my own reports. The unknown mod or mods who don’t respond is/are different from the known one because they have cleared reports at a time when the other mod is usually not online, and in a couple cases where I saw the report cleared before I could get the name, and I immediately verified that the known mod was not online. Therefore I think there is at least one other mod who does not respond.
Perfectly OK all of them, although I’ve been lucky enough to not report opponents as much as games I’ve seen being played. Imho the information is enough and clear.
Disclaimer: I’m not questioning reports I’ve already made and the responses, I’m talking here about the direction this seems to be going to.
Sidenote: I think one main point in things we disagree is that you have to have the official index of resources for something. I don’t need the exact numbers, it’s a soft fact that seems logically very probable, so in my opinion it should count. When you create a bad experience for someone, it doesn’t have to be a precisely defined crime for you to be excluded from their environment.
I don’t think you have the time, honestly.
I’ll try to rephrase it: my perception is, when someone is caught cheating, that the priority is to fix whatever ranking problem they caused, while, in my opinion, the harm they may have caused in the community should also factor in. That’s why I accept a case-by-case result and some leniency, the “human factor” of it all. The same way we can say “welp, it was a child, now they know better” we should also care about “welp, this person tried our beloved chess variation and a long-time cheater drove them away”.
I think there should be some clear guidelines and information for this very important part of OGS: Please report behaviors like A and B (score cheating, sandbagging etc).
We take them all seriously, but we are volunteers so we may take some time to respond.
We will let you know of the result.
We agree mod purple doesn’t look nice in player cards and hot pink is way better, but it’s tradition.
We prioritize a peaceful community, but know we’ll allow maximum 2 warnings.
Sure, but when it’s about making a policy decision, you’d want to know which is more probable, right?
If we don’t know whether there are more
users that leave because they feel moderators aren’t listening to their requests, or that the server is rampant with cheats
or users are staying on the server because they feel moderators are doing a good job,
then it’s hard to decide whether our current approach works or not.
There are cases where a user reports someone for something, and I reply that we don’t consider it a reason to ban the user, and then the reporters says they’ll stop playing here [insert expletives], but they’re a lot rarer than the cases where a user reports something and adds a compliment to how few times they feel they have nasty experiences compared to some other server.
I have some custom css that gives each mod their own tint of purple. Take your pick:
Moderators could do a lot of good if they did watch some games. Of course, one needs to enjoy doing so. Before I moderated, I watched games, while I moderated I watched games, and I now continue to watch games, approximately 1 hour per day, so the following stats could be multiplied by 24, I suppose.
In the past year I have reported 214 score-cheated games. 47 of these were in progress and not counteracted by the opponent. Of those, 5 were saved by moderator decision, and 42 were annulled. In 11, the winner cheated, presumably because winning was insufficiently satisfying. In 12, the winner cheated against himself (to sandbag, to frame his opponent—who knows?). 72 successful cheating games were old or unranked. Coincidentally, 72 games involved attempted score cheating (witnessed, and excluding the categories of winner cheating noted above); these were cases where the opponent successfully counteracted the cheating.
Many of the beginners who are victimized by score cheaters don’t even know what has happened and therefore don’t report it (and many may not know about reporting). We know this for a fact because their chat often tells up so, with comments like “What happened?”
This thread has now gone completely off topic, it’s time to close it.
Let’s finish with echoing the thanks to all who help around the place.
As I do so, I want to fully refute the idea that “there are moderators who consistently do not acknowledge reports”.
An internal poll of moderators has confirmed what you and I would expect: that moderators uniformly feel that every report should be acknowledged, and the outcome communicated where possible.
Any exceptions to this are “human error, forgetfulness etc”.
