RonStation Admin Policy

(heavily inspired from Wizden’s policies)

1. General Administration

General admin-guidelines. These apply to all ranks of admins.

1.1 Administrators will be held responsible for their actions.

Administrators are not unaccountable, and should be held to higher standards than the playerbase. If you have a problem with an admin’s behavior, discuss with the head admin. All administrators are expected to have a solid reason behind their actions.

1.2 Be professional, polite and welcoming.

Professionalism is important, and in general will help reduce the number of issues you run into as staff. We expect you to deescalate, rather than escalate situations. As staff, you’re often the first person that a player with an issue will talk to. No matter your opinion on the player, do your best to be respectful towards them.

This does pertain to any information posted in the game admin Discord chats, forum categories, information discussed in admin chat in-game, as well as PII (IP, Hardware ID) accessible through the central ban DB. This does not pertain to basic ban info (time, reason, count), admin notes, or admin log information.

This policy also covers and prohibits internal leaks. An example of an internal leak would be an Admin A sharing information about Admin B’s application vote/discussion with Admin B, if Admin B doesn’t have direct access to all the information that was being shared by Admin A. Generally, “leak” means to share the information in whole or in part with someone who does not have direct access.

1.4 Ban Appeals

Ban appeals are covered by the Banning Policy.

1.5 Refer to the rules regularly

While the project management board will try to keep everyone updated, it might be easy to miss updates. Please keep your wiki knowledge up-to-date, or have it nearby when admining.

2. Game administration

Rules specific to adminning a round of SS14.

2.1 Do not ever process a case you are/were a part of.

Even if you’ve started adminning after dying, do not process a case you were involved in. Request help for your fellow admins in case you need to process a case.

2.2 Deadmin when you play the game.

Don’t misuse your game admin tools to metagame, this is pretty self-explanatory. Do not use your admin powers to message players whilst IC. If something happens that breaks the rules, you should engage with admins as a normal player via the regular ahelp command.

Exceptions to this are:

You may start adminning a round after you have died and that you are considered round-removed. Do note that policy 2.1 still applies !
- If no other admins are on, you may re-admin while part of a round. Policy 2.1 still applies in any case.
You may use admintools when running adminevents if necessary, even if you are playing a character for it.

2.3 Admin events should be done in moderation without heavily altering the flow of the round.

An “event” here is generally meant to be any admin intervention in the round that affects more than a handful of people. For instance :

Spawning a cookie for a prayer is not considered as an event.
Spawning a sentient monkey that runs around and messes with people is considered as an event.

Heavily round-altering admin events (e.g. powerful wizard invasion, nations) should be voted for by the playerbase with customvote and only done on Extended (which means forcing the preset before the round starts !).

Events overall should not be something that occur multiple rounds in a row. Log what events you’ve done in Discord (when & what, and no need to log very minor stuff), and try not to overwhelm players. That said, a lot of lenience is given towards what kinds of events can be run.

When in doubt, you are free to ask on eventmin channels.

2.4 Do not interfere unless you are needed.

If it looks like the situation will be able to resolve itself, or escalated naturally; and nothing actually actionable has happened, then there is no reason to interfere.

2.5 Check with other admins before enacting bans outside of guidelines.

Bans and ban appeals are covered by the Banning Policy. Administrators who place bans outside of the guidelines are required to be able to justify the decision to the admin team at any point in time.

2.6 Use notes as consideration for punishment, and give notes frequently

If a player is AHelped for some behavior, but this behavior skirts the rules and is not explicitly bannable, you should always give them a note for it. When handling AHelps, you should always check their notes before interrogation or applying punishment. If a user is noted to have been skirting the rules multiple times previously in their notes, you may apply a ban for this behavior.

3. Head Admin Policy

3.1 Hold vote / discussion threads for all major decisions made

In discord, just make a new private thread and ping game admins. If it’s related to junior admin promotion/accepting, remove all current junior admins from the thread. Not all of them need to be votes, and votes can often hamper actual discussion, but they should always be done. Some discretion is given on what counts as a ‘major’ enough decision to warrant a thread.

3.2 Junior Admin discussions should be held at least every two weeks.

Can happen more frequently. These don’t necessarily need to be votes, but just a check-up on how all of the current trials are doing, what we can nudge them on, whether anyone is already promotable, etc.

This rule is suspended until the server gets enough traction.

3.3 Vote threads relating to admins in Discord should always be archived/locked after the fact

Any information that needs to be long-term from these should be outside of the thread.

3.4 Attempts should be made to further discussion on ban appeals older than one week

Don’t have to forcibly come to agreement on them, but its the headmin’s job to ensure that some discussion gets started on these. The actual discussion and specific decision making can be delegated to others obviously but the headmin is working in a managerial position here.

RonStation documentation Wiki