Spring RTS Engine

I might consider setting up an autohost or some. Defining feature will be fair administration. If someone starts something they will be penalised. If ten people attack one person ten people will be penalised and not one person.

The problem is if someone sets up an autohost how to get players to it? Perhaps you should create a system where autohosts deemed up to good standards are somehow promoted for example in the top of the list or a separate list at the top.

The general pessimism "can't be done" in this posting plus a total lack of any proposal makes it very hard to see how you intend to fight the continues abuse happening on spring infrastructure / in BA.

Silentwings wrote:

All that is needed for that are a few trusted lobby moderators to kick them and their hosts if they don't follow the spring community guidelines.

We don't currently have any guidelines (beyond what is specified in EULA) on what should happen inside autohosts or other lobby channels. Instead, we have viewtopic.php?f=16&t=28199, which specifies a deliberate absence of guidelines.

The EULA and common sense is enough.

We're not talking about a political dispute here. The level of abuse - especially of newbees! - is really simple to judge.

Silentwings wrote:Consequently, lobby moderators don't currently have any power to remove individual users from autohosts - except in cases, such as the SPADS default config, where the autohost owners explicitly give them this power in the same config file as their own admins. (Lobby mods can ban users from the entire server, including bot users.)

That's why I want the BA maintainers blessing: to require autohost owners to include lobby mods as autohost users with kickban power. But it's not really necessary. If a user spouts enough rassistic, sexistic and and derogative stuff, he violates the EULA and can get banned from the lobby server. That's what would happen in every other ([non] commercial) game community.

Silentwings wrote:It is clear that the same standards that we do maintain on these forums would be absolutely unenforceable inside autohosts

I didn't say that.

I said that enforcing rules works here (mostly) as well as in RL (mostly) and it'd also work in the lobby (mostly).

Silentwings wrote:its a very different environment, things happen much faster, the base standard of behaviour is much lower, there is no serious authentication, emotions run much higher, etc.

Sure - that's why I (and others) would be relatively lax.

Silentwings wrote:It won't be easy to think of something sane as an autohost equivalent of them, but imo it is clear that this has to happen as a first step

It's not so hard. Just look at the EULA. To be understandable it'd have to be short and it will be interpreted anyway. That's normal and there will be problems, that's normal too, and it will still be lightyears better than it's now.

Silentwings wrote:Even if some generic one-size-fits-all decision could be reached on what autohost admins should actually do, it's great that you're offering to help, but I guess it would take at least 3-4 persons per big host to make it workable. A single person is likely to be either overwhelmed or isolated and brought down by occasional inevitable lapses of judgement. It is not easy to find 3-4 people with sufficient time/interest/maturity. (I am not offering.)

Why would you even write such a section? It is only discouraging! I already wrote that we'd need more moderators.
When we have multiple big-game hosts, I'm sure there will be more helpers. Let's please talk about now and 1 host - that is how you start something without collapsing for fear of the future before beginning.

Silentwings wrote:And here's the real killer - multiple attempts by responsible past autohost owners to find a group of trusted players to moderate their own autohosts have not yet resulted in a host that was both (a) free from controversy about its own moderation and (b) that players of 8v8 games actually preferred to use en masse.

That is because a) will never happen - and that's a good thing. And b) because for example Princess simply liked small to medium games.

Silentwings wrote:So, in reality, "all that is needed" turns out to be rather difficult.

No - you made it difficult, because you made it generic. My proposition was simple and geared towards only 1 scenario.

Silentwings wrote:

please take a position about the question if you want the BA 8v8 host to be monitored,

My opinion is that it is very difficult to actually do it. I could want it if there was a practical chance of achieving it, which would require that the issues described above were addressed.

That's good to hear. :)
The issues above that I could identify (please fill in, if I overlooked any) are:

• guidelines (beyond what is specified in EULA) on what should happen inside autohosts or other lobby channels
• lobby moderators don't currently have any power to remove individual users from autohosts
• A single person is likely to be either
  • overwhelmed or isolated and
  • brought down by occasional inevitable lapses of judgement.

Silentwings wrote:

in the hope to save what's left of BA.

I don't see any change in player numbers (at any time since Spring 93.0, which coincided with a drop). In my estimation the issue of players rejecting the recent BA releases is likely to be a more serious problem, in the long run. Games without updates are the ones that die out, in my experience.

Please don't side track.

Let's discuss the above three issues, to move forward.

• guidelines: anyone knows good ones from other communities, that we could steal from?
• power on autohosts for lobby moderators: imho this could be decided by the BA maintainer(s) and enforced by current lobby admins, incl. a requirement for BA autohost owners to give BA maintainer(s) their email address.
• A single person is likely to be
  • overwhelmed or isolated: obviously, but one has to start. No point in waiting for others to start.
  • brought down by occasional inevitable lapses of judgement: that's expected: we're all human. So imho the question is how to handle it.

Dan I have a proposal if you check above. I'm happy to setup an autohost or help someone else do it if the dev/admins work out a way to bump it. It would be a bit of gerrymandering or mild segregation but it would be far better than something like stealing away control from the existing community. I wont suggest bumping it with fake players. In fact you need to be on the look out for that kind of cheek. I would be tempted to suggest to make them impossible to fully filter somehow but it's a kludge. I'm very much against coercion and taking away control where it can be avoided.

If you have a class of officially supported or compliant autohosts it would probably work a bit better. The only thing is that I'm not entirely supportive of draconian measures where someone might get banned even for swearing or making a racket. The focus would really need to be on the worst of the worst exclusionary and disruptive behaviours. If you look at the community and the EULA they are completely at odds, extreme opposites. If you go from one extreme to another it's going to cause friction. There will also always be the case where players vent and as long as it doesn't go too far the liberalism in the community can be one of the positive aspects of it. Part of the reason people play games and go on line is to escape some of the boundaries imposed on us in real life where being as uninhibited can lead to real problems. It can also cause problems in online gaming but for the most part words are just words here today gone tomorrow and well people play games where they are committing genocide, mass murder, playing as criminals, etc, that duality is important to appreciate.

Saying that I do see one problem with it. If you want to get more people on here from certain backgrounds that might want to contribute, it's NSFW and by modern standards NSFS (school).

Anyway with the autohosts that might somehow be promoted the idea is that the autohost admins would commit to adhere to some level of official community guidelines. That is, if anything goes fine but the server admins continue as usual ruling by neglect, otherwise if an autohost conforms to an established bare minimum for quality control then it receives promotion that makes it more prominent. If not it loses promotion. There are so many ways to do that it might need a brainstorm. I would be tempted to particularly focus around making them especially prominent to new accounts.

Another option is to somehow handicap unofficial autohosts but I'm not a fan of that kind of solution at all. I think solutions should focus around UX only and steering players accordingly. If there is a benefit to an autohost it should come from the autohost itself (such as better server so faster games, etc).

The issues above that I could identify (please fill in, if I overlooked any) are:

You can find my list of the problems, one per paragraph, in viewtopic.php?f=16&t=36185#p582193, I think it makes a fine summary as it stands.

Other things you may want to think about, in addition to the points made there:

power on autohosts for lobby moderators

Lobby moderators (currently: myself, abma, nixtux, det) may not want to be handed power+responsibility for behaviour inside autohosts. It is not currently their role - the current role of lobby moderators is essentially to enforce https://springrts.com/wiki/Licenses_Forking_Mutators, plus some minor admin functions.

Aside from the (imo, very difficult) issue of how to decide+define what is/isn't acceptable in autohosts, I think what you are looking for here is something that does not currently exist: people with power inside autohosts who feel responsibility to Spring rather than to the host owner, with the ability to ban/kick/mute/etc players across the whole server, but who don't have any responsibility for forks/mutators/licensing guidelines. I don't really see why anyone would expect this to be possible without a reliable system of user authentication and/or restrictions on newly created accounts.

Please don't side track.

The fact that BAs player numbers have been long-term stable is not a side track - it is a suggestion that the "world is now collapsing around us, BA is dying" viewpoint may not be universally present amongst players. If the claim that there has been a recent degeneration in autohost quality were to be true, it would also suggest that autohost quality is not currently a limiting factor on player numbers.

general pessimism "can't be done" in this posting plus a total lack of any proposal makes it very hard to see how you intend to fight the continues abuse happening on spring infrastructure / in BA

I can't say I'm flattered by the implication that I must have no thoughts of my own, despite having spent much time handling BAs trouble causers during its calmest period of recent history. I simply dislike spouting feature requests with no real confidence that they would achieve anything, or that there is the manpower for them.

Fwiw, if I actually wanted to create moderated autohosts, my best guess would be
(1) Require that all autohosts in the lobbyserver also be hosted on the Spring server.
(2) Make lobby moderators be a subset of forum moderators (actually, this is almost the case already).
(3) Have lobby moderators be the people who assign admins to autohosts, but not actually moderate anything inside the autohosts themselves. Expect them not to increase in number.
(4) Specify that autohost admins should enforce equivalents of Felonies 3,7,8, and 5 (but permit almost all 'foul' language), plus something about not disrupting games + related infra. And nothing more.
(5) Give autohost admins server wide kick/ban/ignore-voting commands, applicable to players - but without the ability to create/remove autohosts.
(6) Make it so as autohosts can enforce that all new accounts must make X (I'd say X=30-60 was suitable) minutes of ingame as a spectator or in a single player mode, before being allowed to play in autohost game, or connect to an already running game.
(7) Force each new account to wait 5 minutes after creation before it can join an autohost or send pms.

Unfortunately, games tend tend to develop complicated ways to extend SPADS into autohost infra of their own (like BAs past/present), so (1) is hard, and it requires some significant effort on the part of server developers (limited server access privileges for autohost maintainers, etc). (3) & (5) require a substantial revision of the lobby protocol, which is rather difficult in practice, plus matching changes to SPADS. (2), (6) and (7) are reasonably easy. People will produce wildly different ideas of what should be enforced in (4), which makes it difficult. It still doesn't solve the problem of finding enough sane people to be autohost admins, to which I have no even remotely viable solution.

As you might imagine, these changes would have to come as a package - done individually I could easily see them making matters worse.

The EULA

I, like everybody else, have never read it, don't know where to find it anyway, and think that this basically cements its status as a bad place to say anything. It should be the minimal legal stuff and nothing more. Everything above that should have 'guideline' status and be wiki-fied.

I realised another thing. An autohost with a competitive mode versus an autohost for funmode would split up some of the different types of players as well and better delineate game types.

brainfart wrote:I'm happy to setup an autohost or help someone else ...

I like the initiative, but 8v8DSD community won't flock to it, so it won't tackle the problem I talk about :/

brainfart wrote:The only thing is that I'm not entirely supportive of draconian measures where someone might get banned even for swearing or making a racket. The focus would really need to be on the worst of the worst exclusionary and disruptive behaviours. If you look at the community and the EULA they are completely at odds, extreme opposites. If you go from one extreme to another it's going to cause friction. There will also always be the case where players vent and as long as it doesn't go too far the liberalism in the community can be one of the positive aspects of it. Part of the reason people play games and go on line is to escape some of the boundaries imposed on us in real life where being as uninhibited can lead to real problems. It can also cause problems in online gaming but for the most part words are just words here today gone tomorrow and well people play games where they are committing genocide, mass murder, playing as criminals, etc, that duality is important to appreciate.

Dansan wrote:

Silentwings wrote:its a very different environment, things happen much faster, the base standard of behaviour is much lower, there is no serious authentication, emotions run much higher, etc.

Sure - that's why I (and others) would be relatively lax.

Silentwings wrote:

power on autohosts for lobby moderators

Lobby moderators (currently: myself, abma, nixtux, det) may not want to be handed power+responsibility for behaviour inside autohosts. It is not currently their role - the current role of lobby moderators is essentially to enforce https://springrts.com/wiki/Licenses_Forking_Mutators, plus some minor admin functions.
[..]
I think what you are looking for here is something that does not currently exist: autohost moderators who feel responsibility to Spring rather than to the host owner, with the ability to ban/kick/mute/etc players across the whole server, but without any responsibility for forks/mutators/licensing guidelines.

Exactly :)
What would be the technical difference between lobby and autohost moderators?

Silentwings wrote:I don't really see why anyone would expect this to be possible without a reliable system of user authentication.

I don't understand. With the current system there are lobby moderators, autohost owners, bots and players. So authentication seems to work for me.

Silentwings wrote:

Please don't side track.

The fact that BAs player numbers have been long-term stable is not a side track - it is a suggestion that the "world is now collapsing around us, BA is dying" viewpoint may not be universally present amongst players. If the claim that there has been a recent degeneration in autohost quality were to be true, it would also suggest that autohost quality is not currently a limiting factor on player numbers.

That's correct, but what alarms me is the higher abuse of newbies. This is detrimental for a sane community. With current player and developer numbers, the long term survival of BA is not really secured. So our goal must be growth and not stagnation.
I think it was actually me side tracking, when I wrote "save what's left of BA". When I really meant "make BA great again"

Silentwings wrote:

general pessimism "can't be done" in this posting plus a total lack of any proposal makes it very hard to see how you intend to fight the continues abuse happening on spring infrastructure / in BA

I can't say I'm flattered by the implication that I must have no thoughts of my own, despite having spent much time handling BAs trouble causers during its calmest period of recent history.

That's not what I wrote. Also I didn't diminish your (much esteemed) work. Sorry if I offended you.

What annoyed me, was simply that you dumped a "list of the problems, one per paragraph" with a "can't be done" tone. In a situation that feels ignored by moderators for a long time - that doesn't feel very encouraging.
I see now, that you probably really meant - in a circumspect way - to point out a way to get your approval:

Silentwings wrote:I could want it if there was a practical chance of achieving it, which would require that the issues described above were addressed.

Silentwings wrote:I simply dislike spouting feature requests with no real confidence that they would achieve anything, or that there is the manpower for them.

Me too - that's why I didn't ask for any. I assume that "autohost moderators" are technically the same as "lobby moderators".

Silentwings wrote:Fwiw, if I actually wanted to create moderated autohosts, my best guess would be
(1) Require that all autohosts be hosted on the Spring server.
(2) Make lobby moderators be a subset of forum moderators (actually, this is almost the case already).
(3) Have lobby moderators be the people who assign admins to autohosts, but not actually moderate autohosts themselves. Expect them not to increase in number.
(4) Specify that autohost admins should enforce equivalents of Felonies 3,7,8, and 5 (but permit almost all 'foul' language), plus something about not disrupting games + related infra. And nothing more.
(5) Give autohost admins server wide kick/ban/ignore-voting commands, applicable to players and any non-autohost bots.
(6) Make it so as autohosts can enforce that all new accounts must make X (I'd say X=30-60 was suitable) minutes of ingame as a spectator or in a single player mode, before being allowed to play in autohost game, or connect to an already running game.
(7) Force each new account to wait 3-5 minutes after creation before it can join an autohost.

Unfortunately, games tend tend to develop complicated ways to extend SPADS into autohost infra of their own (like BAs past/present), so (1) is hard, and it requires some significant effort on the part of server developers (limited server access privileges for autohost maintainers, etc). (3) & (5) require a substantial revision of the lobby protocol, which is rather difficult in practice, plus matching changes to SPADS. (2), (6) and (7) are reasonably easy. People will produce wildly different ideas of what should be enforced in (4), which makes it difficult. It still doesn't solve the problem of finding enough sane people to be autohost admins, to which I have no even remotely viable solution.

Those points seem a good way - and totally doable :)

If it would be agreed upon (1), I could work on that. I had the idea to do that anyway (for semprini) and have already a technical idea regarding that.

The EULA
I, like everybody else, have never read it, don't know where to find it anyway, and think that this basically cements its status as a bad place to say anything. It should be the minimal legal stuff and nothing more. Everything above that should have 'guideline' status.

Ah ok... I was assuming you meant the springlobby intro. Relevant portion that everyone using it agrees to(!):

Springlobby notice wrote:You agree not to use any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, sexually-oriented or any other material that may violate any applicable laws. Doing so may lead to you being immediately and permanently banned (and your service provider being informed). You agree that the administrators and moderators of this server have the right to mute, kick or ban you at any time should they see fit.

By using this service you hereby agree to all of the above terms.

As I wrote: it's just a starting point. IMHO not a bad one.

What would be the technical difference between lobby and autohost moderators?

Here I am only trying to interpret your thoughts - but my impression was that you intended autohost moderators/admins to be responsible for which players have access/rights on autohosts, but nothing further.

authentication

There is no reliable authentication of users, new accounts are free+plentiful and circumventing kicks/bans is not hard for the technically savvy. This is completely different to the situation of forum moderation, where it is (now) not possible to circumvent punishments.

I assume that "autohost moderators" are technically the same as "lobby moderators".

No, I intended to use autohost moderators and autohost admins interchangeably. I don't really understand why "autohost admins" is the common term - they are not administrators in any sense of the word.

EULA

It says "any" in a rather all encompassing way, followed by a long list of loosely defined words, that to me spells "this is some legal stuff that covers the appropriate ass (-> yours, I believe) but is not intended to be enforced except when legally necessary".

totally doable

I think "probably needs more thought" would be a better description...

Silentwings wrote:Fwiw, if I actually wanted to create moderated autohosts, my best guess would be
(1) Require that all autohosts be hosted on the Spring server.
(2) Make lobby moderators be a subset of forum moderators (actually, this is almost the case already).
(3) Have lobby moderators be the people who assign admins to autohosts, but not actually moderate autohosts themselves. Expect them not to increase in number.
(4) Specify that autohost admins should enforce equivalents of Felonies 3,7,8, and 5 (but permit almost all 'foul' language), plus something about not disrupting games + related infra. And nothing more.
(5) Give autohost admins server wide kick/ban/ignore-voting commands, applicable to players and any non-autohost bots.
(6) Make it so as autohosts can enforce that all new accounts must make X (I'd say X=30-60 was suitable) minutes of ingame as a spectator or in a single player mode, before being allowed to play in autohost game, or connect to an already running game.
(7) Force each new account to wait 3-5 minutes after creation before it can join an autohost.

I made a proposal over here that seems to be relevant to these which also aims to address some other problems.

I like dansan's proposal and big thanks for it! Please let him administer stuff. And please don't artificallly overcomplicate things until they don't work anymore. It really isn't that hard to kick/ban players that insult other players.