Because we want to deter them from being nasty in the first place. If you just have a chat ban, they can swear at people, get a chat ban, and still have fun watching/playing. If you have a categorical ban, they have to choose between staying logged into KGS and swearing at people. At least some of them will choose not to swear at people so as to avoid the total ban. KGS doesn't have to keep nasty people out, but it wants to keep them quiet. Threatening to kick them out may make that easier.

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Occupy Babel!

Just have the option for an indefinite chat ban.

should we make a seperate topic to discuss or poll the possibility of a chatban (temporary or not)? maybe if we can get a lot of votes in favor wms will listen to the community and implement it.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

Stalkor: maybe.

Redundant: I think that's actually more draconian. But perhaps that's the goal?

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Occupy Babel!

If you're on KGS mostly for the chat you're doing it wrong. However, I find their current policy of a contagious IP/username ban to be much worse, given that if I was at home I could get about 10 households banned as our IP doesn't give us unique IPs.

Your policy would also require contagion, since otherwise, isuxdix could re-log on as isuxdixx and just start trolling again. Contagion is an implementation detail.

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Occupy Babel!

Nothing stresses out admins more than chronic troublemakers who use tricks to get around being blocked and who change their name so you don't know who they are. Stressed out admins, in turn, are a lot more trigger happy with the boot hammer than non-stressed admins. One thing that would be fantastic on KGS would be if I could somehow tell definitively when somebody logging in had been on KGS before. I don't need to know who they are, just "is isuxdixx the same person as <list of known troublemakers>?" Unfortunately, I don't know of any system that is both hard to get around, and non-intrusive for the KGS users. If I required a credit card, verified the number, then never used it, that would work pretty well; then the people who make the admins miserable could only change their identity once for each card they had. But I suspect that a lot of people would be unwilling to enter their credit card number on KGS. I know that I wouldn't do it for a "free" site. So KGS is stuck with these people who stress out the admins, which in turn makes the admins a lot less friendly than they would be otherwise.

i do wish you could address the admins who do more harm than good, such as bigdoug and not continually list "reasons" that its not the admins fault. we have the admins to always convince you theyre always right, we dont need owners doing that either

but there are just as many, if not more, who think bigdoug and others are actually doing more good than harm.

a lot of people do play on KGS and not chat. people who do talk to him realize how rude and arrogant he is pretty quickly, then see him ban 10 people on whims

Not that I don't appreciate self-righteous indignation, but speaking for "people" in general is both arrogant and presumptuous. For example, as an individual subset of "people", I haven't had any issues with BigDoug. I've even talked to him, both privately and publically, and have always found him to be logical, understanding, and informative. Yes, I've been banned before. Yes, I usually deserved it at the time - though the times I didn't, it was cleared immediately upon explaining the situation via admin@gokgs.com.
I didn't take the time to register here and disagree with you to further any arguments - I just felt that I'd clear at least myself of the opinion assigned to me by your ongoing vendetta. Which I fully support here, btw - if you'll be fighting the good fight against oppression and unfair persecution here, instead of randomly trying to take over the EGR seemingly every time you're on KGS (from my own experience, which no doubt differs from your own, due to timing and personal opinions), nobody will hear a single complaint about it from me.
All that being said, can anyone show me a completely sane admin? I have a feeling they wouldn't last long in this type of society...

Sure: one who just started.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

I think there is a lot to learn from KGS's real admin implementation.

The admin system is something i havent put a lot of work in yet, and would have to design from scratch.
It is likely that our admin system will have both volunteer and also formal employee-admins(eventually), which i think alleviates much of the stress wms mentions.

I read the entire thread, but it takes me some time to understand underlying issues. Below i wrote what i got and added some of my own observations.

*Facts

KGS has a moderately high number of admins.

All of them are volunteers(afaik).

A lot, if not most, admin required situations are solved with parties satisfied.

There are people discontent with aparent trigger-happy banning.

Dealing with users is sometimes stressful.

The English game room is officially not a place to chat about anything. It is also the room with most users.

*Personal Observations (might not be true)

Admins are not always in synch. They understand the rules differently and apply them differently.

Admins are not particularly active all the time. Problem situations(spammers, cursers) can take a while to get solved.

It is likely that volunteer chat-police causes a lot of stress, which probably causes admins to react in a not-nice manner.

Overall i think many of the problems that arise on KGS regarding this matter can be solved with some thought on design.
It could be more productive to look at these situations as problems(as a go problem, a situation that requires a solution),and only after the problems are well identified, you think about solutions.

For example.

Problem
-Some users want to kibitz about any subject
-Some users are not happy on how they got banned

etc..

This reminds me to a conversation i had with Jean, where i told him that as someone in charge of thinking solutions (as wms, and partially admins also) its way more helpful to hear problems, than solutions. Because wms, as any other developer in charge, has to make priority decision on the size of the problem at hand and the resources he has to solve it (mainly time).And he knows best what he can do.

So i would take names outside of the conversation unless the matter is personal. Focusing on the people doesnt let you evaluate the system, which is the most malleable of the elements.
And i would brainstorm about the definitions of problems.
And finally, i will literally take all ideas into consideration for when i implement my own Admin system .

Regards.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

Well, since you input an email address when you sign up, why not implement a method that would ban the email address? Sure there's nothing preventing someone from setting up multiple email addresses to purposely troll, but how many people with the intent to troll would take the time to set up an email address for that sole intent? And this could also work with Guest accounts. Instead of just having someone sign on as a guest, tie the guest account to an email address but if they do not register, then simply have the email eliminated from the list of active emails.

I don't know if this is late or not, but just an idea I thought of.

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Slava Ukraini!

Maybe it would be of help for the admins if they can see whether a user has received some muzzles to indicate whether he had spammed, used bad language etc.

I would also suggest to bring up this topic in an own thread in the kaya.gs subforum.

I've seen people going to a lot of trouble to continuously get around IP bans including all kinds of proxies and similar. (I'm a moderator on a different site)

Believe me, if someone wants to troll there's no way just creating a new email account will discourage them from doing it.

ill just say that it takes approx 1-2 min to set up a proxy

and it only takes 1 min to make a yahoo email. i have probably 75-100 of them

Out of curiosity, why do you (or why would anyone) have 75-100 e-mail accounts?
I understand the need for a personal, work, and a few non-serious accounts, but this is just wacky, to put in mildly.

have to get around forum bans somehow.

though i could only tell you about 2-3 of them that i actually use

Don't you think there's a possible indication about your own behaviour there? Unless they are all for KGS or something, I've never needed a second email address to get around a ban, let alone 70-100. Unless you think all those other admins are insane too?