KGS Has been around for many years now and is probably one of the nicer servers for players and teachers. Onne thing that is bothering me is that bans are either a kgs ban completely or not. I feel this action is a bit too harsh on a lot of mild chat offenses that are made.

I would like to see a temporary chatban implemented in KGS to better control the chat without kicking someone completely off kgs.

In addition to this feature roomowners can optionally get this power too to manage the chat in their own room (this would ligten the load of kgsadmin)
abuse of this power will obviously result in an empty room so abusing would make no sense.

I made this thread to see how much support there is for this feature so if i send this idea to wms it would hopefully help more to persuade him:)

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

People who get a chatban can get even more frustrated, log off, log back in with a new account, and vent double time.

So it needs to be implemented smartly

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North Lecale

it could happen, same with temporary bans of course. personally i think that chatbans should be between 5 minutes and 1 hour. anything that need longer chatbans would categorize a heavy offense and would be a kgs ban.

The main idea is to eliminate only white or black thinking and introduce a bit of a grey area for light offenses.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

I don't play on KGS, but all of this talk about chat bans makes me curious. How many chat rooms are there on KGS? Can people start their own chat rooms?

It seems like people are getting banned not just for offensiveness or abusiveness, but for off topic discussions. That sounds like a system where it is not easy to take a discussion elsewhere.

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KGS has a lot of rooms which you can join. not all rooms are monitored as well as the english game room (EGR) so doing off topic or nonsensical conversations can be done in any of those rooms.

the downside is that room owners (anyone can make a room and its pretty easy to make it permanent) have exactly NO powers to crowd control except type in bold letters. if you have a troll or have a flamer, you have to get an admin, explain the situation and hope it results in a ban. a room owner who can give someone a timeout or chatban would be a perfect solution for these kinds of situations, they just often need to cool down (and everyone in that room likely needs to get a break from the situation)

a KGS ban for saying something silly feels to me like overkill, there needs to be proper punishment to actions.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

It seems that any rule about behavior on KGS - this proposal included - is doomed to futility because a user can always change accounts. To improve KGS, I would make the first priority 'One person, one account'.

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Another option available to room owners is to temporarily make the room private...if you make the room private and remove the troublemaker's name from the access list they will be kicked out of your room.

The other thing I would be wary of is that while something like this may seem like a sensible solution to sensible people...often those being dealt with are not sensible, and it may end up escalating things. I also know in the past at least one admin has tried to implement this style of system, and it has been poorly received by many.

Can you tell us more on the details of that idea mef?

I often watch streams on justin.tv or twitch.tv and their timeout system works pretty well and they have tons of trolls+ nonbinded accounts

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

There are tons of rooms. Every room that you can start games or reviews in is also a chatroom, and vice versa. There are a dozen "main" rooms, organized by language, with the English room functioning as the center of KGS (right now, with 928 players present), with the German, French, Russian, and Japanese rooms lagging behind (100-300 players). Then there are a few other rooms with a hundred or so players each... Beginner's Room, Teaching Ladder, the Advanced Study Room, others I'm sure. On top of that, there are literally hundreds of rooms for everything from groups of friends to cities to real-life go clubs to non-go-related interests, most of which only have one or two people at a time. And further, people observing a game can chat in the game itself. Oh, and there's private chat. So there are lots of options, but it's difficult to move a conversation from one room to another because most people aren't in those other rooms.

The "problem" is that the players can get pretty familiar with one another, and at that point the conversations in the English Game Room and in the games with hundreds of observers lose their highly stilted quality and take on a natural, conversational feel. So people start talking about Lee Sedol and pretty soon they're trying to decide whether Quiznos or Subway make a superior sandwich. I think it's charming and once in a while actually interesting, but some admins practice benign neglect, others participate, and once in a while an admin starts threatening to ban people for "not being Go-related" or "making the chat go too fast". A sample of the current nonsense in the EGR:



See? Pretty harmless. I mostly care because when people are getting drawn into casual conversation, it's much more likely that people will be willing to provide helpful answers to other people's questions. It's part of creating a healthy community. Also, issuing over-broad prohibitions that are rarely enforced and which most people are expected to violate is a traditional tool of repressive societies, and something that I find unpleasant for that reason.

Quite simple solution here, don't tell them they're chatbanned. Just implement it as a "muted by all in this room", they'll still see their chat, it will just be as though everyone is ignoring them.

Impossible to logoff and back on a different account if you don't know you're chatbanned.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Yes this would work, but how to implement? People just have multiple disposable email addresses to create multiple accounts, and use a variety of IP addresses ( though I don't know what the common method for doing that is ).

Simpler would be just to charge to have an account. Track the payment details. Thus excessive numbers of accounts will quickly become the preserve of the rich (naturally rare), and the effort of anonymizing multiple payments becomes an additional hurdle. Non-PC, but effective.

It makes me wonder how many KGS+ members have ever had a ban on their KGS+ account. My guess is approximately zero.

Um, I'm a KGS+ member and I've definitely been banned. My estimate is that a higher proportion of KGS+ members would have bans than non-members, since KGS+ members are probably more likely to use the service more often and talk in chat.

I am really confident that charging for accounts would immediately result in 90% of the playerbase leaving for any of the free Go servers in existence, including myself, since it would decimate the community which keeps me coming back to KGS.

Chatbans should be enforced using the same account linking heuristics that are applied to normal bans (i.e. correlate accounts with IP addresses.) Not foolproof, but not worthless, either; most people don't have a large supply of different IPs they can proxy through.

Hello,



Admins on KGS do not take a person's KGS Plus subscription status into account when making decisions. For example, if someone is swearing or flooding, we apply appropriate penalties whether they subscribe to KGS Plus or not.

I have had several discussions with KGS Plus subscribers who were surprised to learn that the Terms of Service applies to everyone (whether KGS Plus subscribers or not). For example, I had a 20-minute discussion with a subscriber who expected to be able to advertise repeatedly in the EGR for rengo games because he paid $5 for KGS Plus. When he threatened to quit KGS Plus unless he was allowed to break the rules, I said that KGS Plus is not a "get out of jail free" card.

KGS Plus offers very good benefits (e.g., lectures from professionals which can be replayed at your convenience while you are a KGS Plus subscriber). However, KGS Plus subscribers are expected to meet KGS' expectations of appropriate behaviour just like everyone else.

Regards,
Doug

even thinking of the possibility to "buy power" is insane. It's like saying that when you buy groceries at a store you're allowed to take money from the register or take a dump on aisle 5.

about the banning on advertising in the EGR more then 1 time per day, wouldn't you think it is more fair to give this person a chat ban then banning him entirely from KGS?

if i advertise the ASR 2 times in the EGR and i get banned for that i would be very *bleeped* off because i try hard to make KGS a better place with the room i have and can't do my "job" as room owner when i'm completely banned. the consequence is that these advertisers may stop using kgs altogether, a lighter action, like the chat ban, would be more appropriate.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

Actually, this is a very difficult issue. It's already clear that for quite a few people, the ASR offers additional value to those on KGS. There is a fair possibility that more people on KGS would appreciate / feel drawn to the ASR, yet there's no way really of knowing it exists other than trawling down the rooms page or hearing about it on another server somewhere.

It would be great if KGS could have a "simple" sort of classifieds ads space for any room owners, separated by category, that people could browse through rather than just see the room name itself. It would be useful to have a tagging system for maybe 5 tags per room to help users filter it.

It does feel awkward that the reason people want to advertise is that room navigation on KGS is basically "you either know where it is or you never go there", without any interface designed to help people find interesting rooms. Not that KGS should be the big socialiser enabler either, but it does feel like it's rather missing out on an opportunity for improving user experience.

EDIT: Maybe this can be restricted by level of activity in the room. At time of posting, the ASR is the most active room on the site other than the French and Russian language rooms, the computer Go room, and the KGS teaching ladder. The beginner's room and the tournament room are close but behind, and most other rooms can't reach half the current active players as those just mentioned.

Maybe having a "featured room of the week" service displaying the room info would be a nice KGS feature when you log in, for a randomly selected room out of the top 20 active non-private rooms over the previous week?

Hello,



I don't think that admins would penalise you if you advertised the ASR twice in 24 hours. The problem originated because people who became new room owners were often enthusiastic about gaining new participants, so they advertised at 10- or 20-second intervals across multiple rooms. That was a contributing factor to the introduction of the one advertisement per day guideline.

In this instance, the person who wanted to play rengo advertised about five times in two minutes. Even then, I didn't ban him immediately. Instead, I spoke with him so that he understood that rules applied to both KGS Plus subscribers and non-subscribers. In almost all instances, a person who advertises multiple times will be warned prior to being banned.

it's interesting to see that the 24 hour guideline for advertising has a bit of a grey area, i thought rules were pretty much set in stone:)
It's always good to keep communication open with persons who broke a rule to reach an understanding but my idea is for this type of ban to happen after this interaction.
As was quoted in a different thread bigdoug enforces a type of chatban though my idea actually does prevent the chatting for a period so in a sense its already used on KGS.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

How come the percentage of admins who are female is so much higher than the percentage of baduk players who are female?

How is this relevant to this discussion?

I see almost 80% agrees on this idea so in continuation and to build on a pm chat with bidoug i would like to discuss policies. For example; in case of roomowners getting the option to give a player a chat ban, what timelimit(s) could be used? What should happen to abusive roomowners who ban a lot of ppl for no reason.

Also id like your views on how you think this option could effect how you enjoy kgs


…go!:)

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

2 hours, 4 hours, 24 hours. Yes, from 4 to 24 is quite steep, but I think anyone deserving a 4-20 hours ban can receive a 24 hour one.

I assume other owners of the same room can find out "chatban logs" as for why it was banned and the like. And then remove the ownership of the room? If a room is constantly being cleaned by owners of chat powers, I assume people will leave those rooms altogether.


I'm not sure this can affect me much unless you ban me, I only talk in the ASR and the Nordic Go Academy rooms. But does the band extend to the whole KGS? If it's like this, it could be a problem. Could a room owner of a room I'm not in ban my chat without me being in his/her room? This could end with people banning people for no reason.

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