Mumberthrax

Gizzletinks, it's apparent that you aren't serious about this appeal. I've seen you write clearly and legibly plenty of times. You're just trolling around right now. You were spawncamping and you know it - both because you've been here long enough to know the rules, and because I kicked you with the warning "stop spawncamping" after you had been at it for a bit. You killed derpymarshmellow 9 times while in the immediate vicinity of spawn in the span of 13 minutes, along with avadakedavra03 who killed derpy with you twice. I'm not going to put up with your lying about it. For completeness sake, here is a short album of screenshots i took at each death location where derpy was the victim and you were the killer. https://imgur.com/a/HecKQ Not only that, but you were trolling the player, repeatedly spamming that the player was spawn camping you, when they were obviously not and obviously getting upset at not only your trolling but being seemingly unable to escape spawn. I warned you to stop trolling, and when you continued I muted you. Then you made multiple modreqs to be unmuted almost immediately. You've shown that right now you don't have any respect for the community here by disregarding our rules and by making this joke of an appeal. If you decide to make a serious appeal in the future, then we can talk.

Does anyone else have any thoughts or comments on this or are we not interested in having alternative minecraft servers? Maybe this should be moved to the modchat forum to get some more input from non-admins - or have there been extenuating circumstances deterring that?

Hi bmx, and others. We've made a post here regarding our decision to invite TheAcademician to join the sadmin team: https://nerd.nu/forums/topic/2871-please-welcome-our-newest-survival-admin/?p=22175 Regarding our usage stats on S, P, and C: Beastbruiser, redwall, and I all play on S, and like many of you we play on the other nerd servers as well. We even play non-minecraft games or do other things in our leisure time. Some of us even play on non-nerd minecraft servers occasionally. I don't think this is controversial. Like many of our oldtimer S players, we don't find vanilla minecraft quite as fun as it used to be. Its true this revision is mostly vanilla-ish, more similar to vanilla than the previous revision for example. Our focus is currently on creating a more appealing gameplay style, something novel and with long-term attraction. I hope that you can forgive us for not playing so much as handling administrative and development things. I'm sure the other admins can attest that a fair amount of administrative work goes on outside of the actual server itself, whether it is preparing the map/server, being involved in policy decisions, responding to private messages on irc, skype, forums, etc. or trying to compose responses to posts like this one. For myself, I will say that I spend far more time thinking and working on things relating to S and nerd in general than I ever did when I was super active on S in the past, like when I made my library, or post office, or commercial district road, or public superfarm, or trading post, or the city of Egreth, or assisting with some of the development of Sanctuary. You're welcome to read into that anything you like.

Hello everyone. We Sadmins noticed there is a flurry of activity in response to our decision to invite TheAcademician to join the Sadmin team. We'd like to clear a few things up about this decision. We chose TheAcademician as our next Survival admin for several reasons. She has a good history as a Survival player, having played and moderated here for quite awhile before gravitating more toward PvE in recent months. Some of you who have played on Survival in the past may recognize her as the architect of Sanctuary and Egreth (which were quite a magnet for PvP during revs 20 and 21). She also made the CobraCorral plugin that Survival has been using for a few revs. TheAcademician was chosen for the reason we choose any admin: we think she will work well with the team, handle the responsibilities we're trusting her with well, and be an asset in planning and developing future revs. We're looking forward to working with her to produce a fun server to play blocks on. :)

The way I see it we have two problems. 1) bans are already effectively automatic - but mostly only for people who have been banned a thousand times or are part of the group who has been banned a thousand times and know how to go through the appeal process whenever they get caught - it's just a slap on the wrist to them. 2) for new players, the appeals process is daunting, and confusing. Just the other day I was on C and a regular player mentioned in passing that nerd was unfair and corrupted because they banned his friends who didn't do anything wrong. SirTacoFace and I asked him for details, and apparently the bans were for minor grief from over two years ago. One of the accounts had been unbanned, but they never realized it because when they had logged on previously they were still banned. I told SirTacoFace that in my opinion since the bans were so old and for apparently minor infractions, and performed by someone who is no longer on staff, that they should be lifted right then and there - but because of our current policy these players cannot play with their friend on nerd without going through the appeal process again. We told this player they need to just go and appeal, and he said they already did in the past. It was difficult to help him to understand that if they just go and make an new appeal that one of us would unban pretty much instantly. This whole mess is not attractive, in my opinion, to new players who may unintentionally break minor rules, or be banned mistakenly if the claim of illegitimacy is true. It may seem ironic that I'm talking about two seemingly contradictory problems - but these problems affect different people. New players who we want to attract to the servers are put off by the appeals process. Our regular troublemakers know how simple it really is and get away with everything - including some of the most harmful behavior to the integrity of the servers such as [redacted] conduct in the past. (which if you look him up in mcbouncer for example - there is absolutely nothing there to indicate he ever had any problems on our servers at all) I'm not sure why it would be appropriate to hide past ban information from the public, or from other server administrators. It is currently accessible through our appeals forum with some searching - assuming that you don't have to search through the archives from the old forums - which is a hassle. What value can be gained by making ban information technically "public", but difficult to find? When people have a criminal history, though they may have reformed that record still is visible to all police who punch in the person's name. People make mistakes, yes, and people learn to live with their past. If we hide that relevant context away from staff who are evaluating a present ban, we are doing other players a disservice. Why have current bans and notes public, but not old bans or relevant information about their conduct that caused those bans? We do not have a formal note appeals process, so even if a player has a hundred bans if they are all appealed and removed, they're invisible. If the players have a note, its there forever (unless they feel bold enough to ask a head admin to remove it). Why even use a public ban system like mcbouncer at all? What is the point of it? It seems to me that it is for relevant information about players to be available. what is more relevant than information about past conduct that warranted a ban? Why would a note about behavior that led up to a ban be more relevant in a public system like mcbouncer than information about the behavior that tipped the scales and landed them an actual ban? And if you want to advocate for removing notes related to behavior leading up to bans, then again we come back to why even use the system at all? Lets say that I am a relatively new moderator - in fact I am, since nerd had existed for a long while before I even started playing here - and there is a player being disruptive. I run a /lookup on him, and see nothing so I just give him a verbal warning and nothing else. When in fact this player has a history of abusive or harassing behavior and has been banned for it previously, maybe even told that if it happens again it will be a longer ban. This contextual information would be valuable to me in determining how to respond to his conduct - but because it is more or less hidden away in the closed appeals section our forums, or worse the difficult to wade through archived version of our forums, I will not see it. Sorry for the wall of text. I don't mean to come across aggressively, I just kind of feel like there is a resistance to changing things for the better because "this is the way we've always done it". Maybe that is not how it really is, and it's just my own interpretation separate from the reality of the situation.

Since an admin comment was requested, I'll share that the sadmins are looking at the possibility of incorporating elements from the discussion here into S for the future.

How would this differ from having a minigame server hosting ctf, team deathmatch, etc. ?

/reqnote works as an alias too!

Hey four_down. You and others have my utmost apologies on this one - I dropped the ball. However I'll be making a post on the event forum quite soon about the belated shop contest. : )

So we have a development group for brainstorming/planning the server that is to come after revision 27 of survival. I've codenamed it Project Awesome, and the group involved in development/planning is the Project Awesome Strike Force. I'd like to know if there are any admins who are interested in being directly involved. We have a google doc setup for strike force members to collaborate in. This document outlines the goals of the project, a brief and informal confidentiality clause, membership roster, a short list of standards/philosophies for participation, a section on the purpose and use of the document itself, and then the rest is an open brainstorming sandbox, to be loosely organized when possible. So far we have a handful of moderately detailed plans/proposals for the server included. Ideally with collaboration and active brainstorming we can come up with a full cohesive plan to make the server into something very fun and attractive to many players. I'm trying to be cautious about who is added to this group, selecting only those who seem interested and likely to be productive and not disruptive. I would openly advertise it to all moderators, but I feel that making it open and all-inclusive would lead to disarray; that having it *relatively* small and focused is better. I know several of you have offered suggestions for the development of S in the past, so if you are interested in pitching in your thoughts or lending a hand then let me know. Below I'll outline some of the major ideas discussed so far. These are just excerpts and/or summaries in my own words and do not necessarily do full justice to the proposals in full. Even if you don't particularly want to be part of the strike force in any official capacity, I would appreciate any input you may have about the specific ideas touched on here or about the project in general, whether here in the comments or in irc or elsewhere. Dizney07's Islands Proposal TheAcademician's gameplay mechanics overhaul Smiler100's tech-tree, in-depth gameplay proposal

This is just silly. "OMG you gave me a speeding ticket! Why don't you just outlaw cars and then we won't have this problem if you hate people speeding!?!?"

I believe our banning policy is in need of an update. I've put together a draft of a proposal for such an update - though there are a few parts that are not fully fleshed out, and I'd like to hear any comments or suggestions. The short version is: temporary bans for minor offenses are automatically reverted when the time is up, bans for serious misconduct are "permanent" but may be appealed if they are believed to be unjust or if the player believes they have reformed themselves. I submitted this in the thread about policy on ban evasion with alt accounts, and mrloud suggested it should be in its own thread, so here it is. : ] Outline: Most bans should be temporary bans with automatic unbans if the user verifies via website or plugin they have read the rules or relevant section (These would include: crop grief, minor grief, pvp/fly/speed/macro hacking, spam, trolling, etc.) Egregious rule violations should be normal bans without automatic unban - essentially a permanent ban requiring appeal and believability regarding whether they have reformedThese would include: harassment/personal attacks, being a source of "toxicity" in the community (being a dick/disrespecting others), security threat, massive rule violation, compromised accounts, ban evasion, breaking the law, etc. These would also include those who have had several temporary bans in the past, and continue to demonstrate a disregard for the rules illegitimate bans of any sort should be appealed, and appeals claiming the ban is illegitimate do not follow any time limitations Appeal time limits (for those not claiming illegitimate ban) are not manually-processed automatic unban periods. they are a time at which your appeal will be considered. It does not guarantee that you will be unbanned just by repeating the rules and promising to be good. Recognition of what you've done and how it affects other players, an apology, some method of tangibly demonstrating your remorse or that you are reformed. This needs fleshing out but the point is that it's not something left up to an inconsistent enforcement of "ok ur unbanned lolz" sort of deal like we have sometimes. Bans apply to any and all known alt accounts of the player banned. Bans on alts for ban evasion must be appealed. Times until appeals (for legitimate bans) will be accepted would follow our normal routines more or less, and in the case of ban evasion: evade once, time is doubled; evade twice or more and time before appeal is heard = 1 year. (alternatively just going with the +2weeks for each evasion with a cap of 1 year) Bans for harassment, spam, trolling, being a dick, etc. (i.e. social misconduct) would apply across all nerd services (mc servers, irc, forums, mumble, subreddit, etc.) regardless of where the behavior that earned a ban took place. Bans for gameplay-specific misconduct (griefing, possibly xray, player traps on P, etc.) could be just for the minecraft servers and not other services. When a player is unbanned, it is documented in something accessible in-game, such as adding an mcbouncer note saying for example, "unbanned: griefing, xray, and jaywalking" Ban information needs more space for details - minecraft does not allow much space in the chat entry line. Perhaps a link to a special profile page on the website which includes all relevant information about their ban, and how to appeal it. Ideally evaluation of appeals must follow some set of criteria. A checklist of requirements perhaps which seek to evaluate if the appeal is sincere based on conduct outside of the appeal and past history, whether the player attempts to empathize with those they have harmed, any legitimate demonstration of remorse or of having been reformed... basically just a more stringent set of requirements than the easily deceived "have you read the rules and are you sorry?" Possibly such appeals should be handled by admins if they are uncommon enough thanks to the temporary ban system. But if the set of criteria for approved appeals are prepared effectively then it probably would be fine being any staff member or the staff member who banned the player. Phrased in another way: The appeals section should not be the "ok read the rules and reply back stating you have done so (whether you're being honest or not) and I'll unban you" section, nor should it be the "I was banned long ago for x (eg. grief) and i just now realized that I can actually be unbanned and have fun now but you're going to ask me to read the rules and I'll forget to reply saying I've done so and will try to log in a week from now and be disappointed that I can't play" section. It should be for bans that are believed to be illegitimate, or for those who have broken some serious rules and wish to be given a second chance. If you grief some crops and forget to replant, or you're having a bad day and being a little shit, then you should get a temporary ban - these work like our current ban system except they're automatic. You basically go into time out, and when the time is out you're back. But if you demonstrate a pattern of being banned like that, then you get a regular ban that you would need to appeal. Such an appeal for a legitimate ban would only be heard after a reasonable amount of time in which for you to cool down and perhaps develop some maturity or responsibility. What do you think?

Modified nerdspawn welcome message from "-" to "&5Welcome %u to the server!" on players' first login to the revision.

I think viewing this statement from head admins with anxiety or fear is the wrong way to look at it. There's a problem that has been growing, and this is a statement that it's recognized and will be handled per our rules. I don't see this as some sort of legal patriot act clause to become totalitarian monsters. It's just an attempt to put an end to behaviors that harm others, behaviors that create unneeded conflict that is anathema to a thriving community. d3north, bmx, eehee, If you were head admins and you were responsible for keeping the peace while still allowing people to express their opinions or to have fun without harming others, how would you go about it? What can we do in your opinions to improve the situation we have?

I like the idea of there being player-run servers accessible. I like the idea of not having to worry about staff administrating more stuff. I like the idea of players being able to contribute in yet another way to the community. I like the diversity in game accessibility that outsourcing servers to the community would provide. I worry about the potential for "unofficial" nerd servers that do not adhere for example to our standards when it comes to moderating the treatment of others with respect, or being pay to win, unfair, etc. I think we should be very cautious with anything that tries to use redditpublic or mcpublic or nerd.nu or any variation of our brand in its name. I also worry about the idea of us potentially freely advertising servers that do not attempt to treat players with the same level of respect nerd does. I think if nerd did not host additional official non-minecraft servers, then we should be careful with any servers that we claim affiliation with or that we specially feature. At this time, I believe the best route is to go with what we have: a section of the forums for players to list games they want to play, advertise their servers unaffiliated with nerd in any official capacity. Maybe if one game is particularly well-liked then in the future we can select staff to moderate an official server for that game which would follow all of nerd's rules/policies - and that should probably not be the near future.

So command blocks would be placed by admins, programmed by admins, and then players would be allowed to activate them with redstone at their leisure? Or command blocks would be placed by admins, programmed by players, and they could activate them at their leisure? I think some seriously careful permissions stuff would need to be done here. Command blocks have the same powers as the console, effectively OP as far as I am aware. With redstone clocks they could cause some major spam or even lag issues beyond just what normal redstone can do. First thing that comes to mind is a setblock command that creates more command blocks with commands in them. I've messed around a little bit with /setblock for creating custom monster spawners - it is inCREDibly easy to crash the server by entering the tiniest thing incorrectly - that is without any kind of clocks or anything, just running a command with the syntax off a tiny bit. This is something that should not be rushed out without careful testing. Should be approached with caution. What is it that players would like to be able to do with command blocks specifically? Do they want to be able to have the kinds of games and things that sethbling does in his videos? While those are neat, many of his command block builds use very rapid clocks that if used excessively could potentially cause lag issues. Do they want to be able to have pressure plates that teleport players or do things that easy signs can do? If we know what use cases they have in mind, we could possibly restrict commands allowed in the blocks, and possibly also require builds involving command blocks be approved and protected by admins so that the redstone cannot be spammed on them. edit: and if players just want command blocks for decoration purposes, then C could use cobra feats, which is on S. basically cancels command block usage for non-ops.

magnyus, I take issue with your comments. It is not that everyone is incapable of saying things without it "turning into absolute garbage". There are some people, for example some who I had to moderate on this thread, who have issues with keeping things civil. Those people do not constitute the majority of people nor the majority of our community. Lets move on with productive discussion and away from drama please.

So here's a bullet point revised version including some of the content from the comments below mrloud's original post. It's not well organized, but it's the main stuff i gathered and isolated: Alt Account Banning Policy: A minimum of 2 weeks will be added to the original ban length for every account used to evade a ban on any of our servers. Any accounts used to evade a ban will be banned for the same amount of time as the original banned account. Admins reserve the right to add additional time depending on the circumstances. Only appealed bans will be lifted. At the time at which an appeal is allowed or afterward, a player may appeal for their other accounts to be unbanned, and if the "main" account is unbanned then the alts are as well Unbanning of all alt accounts should be done by an administrator or higher. At the discretion of an admin, alternate accounts could remain banned if we believe that the person appealing isn't the actual owner Bans for the alt accounts will include the name of their "main" account I have three proposals. One of which is a complete overhaul of the ban system entirely. the other two are more conservative. I'll express the two conservative proposals first. The above policy, but with a default cap of 1 year on all bans that are extended through evasion with the +2weeks process - except in cases where head admins determine a longer ban is appropriate of course. Known or previously-declared alt accounts are banned at the same time as other bans - we don't do it passive-agressively and wait for them to evade with an alt edit: (tentative suggestion) If during the evasion of a ban with an alternate account a user breaks other rules, then the overall ban length should be extended by some amount in addition to the extension purely for the act of evasion itself. That's the most conservative modification. Here's the version I think is dead simple: The same policy as above including the default 1 year cap and auto-banning of known alts, except instead of the +2 weeks process, we use this: evade once, double ban length for both accounts; evade twice or more, ban for a year. Now here's what I really think we should be moving toward. Maybe my above suggestions would be best for an interim policy, and I think the following is what we really should be considering. Overhaul of nerd.nu ban system. Most bans should be temporary bans with automatic unbans if the user verifies via website or plugin they have read the rules or relevant sectionThese would include: crop grief, minor grief, pvp/fly/speed/macro hacking, spam, trolling, etc. egregious rule violations should be normal bans without automatic unban - essentially a permanent ban requiring appeal and believability regarding whether they have reformedThese would include: harassment, being a fuckwit source of toxicity in the community (being a dick/disrespecting others), security threat, massive rule violation, compromised accounts, ban evasion, breaking the law, etc. These would also include those who have had several temporary bans in the past, and continue to demonstrate a disregard for the rules illegitimate bans of any sort should be appealed, and appeals claiming the ban is illegitimate do not follow any time limitations Appeal time limits (for those not claiming illegitimate ban) are not manually-processed automatic unban periods. they are a time at which your appeal will be considered. It does not guarantee that you will be unbanned just by repeating the rules and promising to be good. Recognition of what you've done and how it affects other players, an apology, some method of tangibly demonstrating your remorse or that you are reformed. This needs fleshing out but the point is that it's not something left up to wily-nily inconsistent enforcement of "ok ur unbanned lolz" sort of deal like we have sometimes. Bans apply to any and all known alt accounts of the player banned. Bans on alts for ban evasion must be appealed. Ban information needs more space for details - minecraft does not allow much space in the chat entry line. Perhaps a link to a special profile page on the website which includes all relevant information about their ban, and how to appeal it. Times until appeals (for legitimate bans) will be accepted would follow our normal routines more or less, and in the case of ban evasion it would follow the procedure above - evade once, time is doubled; evade twice or more and time before appeal is heard = 1 year. Ideally evaluation of appeals must follow some set of criteria. A checklist of requirements perhaps which seek to evaluate if the appeal is sincere based on conduct outside of the appeal and past history, whether the player attempts to empathize with those they have harmed, any legitimate demonstration of remorse or of having been reformed... basically just a more stringent set of requirements than the easily deceived "have you read the rules and are you sorry?" Possibly such appeals should be handled by admins if they are uncommon enough thanks to the temporary ban system. But if the set of criteria for approved appeal are prepared effectively then it probably would be fine being any staff member or the staff member who banned the player. Phrased in another way: The appeals section should not be the "ok read the rules and reply back stating you have done so (whether you're being honest or not) and I'll unban you" section, nor should it be the "I was banned long ago for x (eg. grief) and i just now realized that I can actually be unbanned and have fun now but you're going to ask me to read the rules and I'll forget to reply saying I've done so and will try to log in a week from now and be disappointed that I can't play" section. It should be for bans that are believed to be illegitimate, or for those who have broken some serious rules and wish to be given a second chance. If you grief some crops and forget to replant, or you're having a bad day and being a little shit, then you should get a temporary ban - these work like our current ban system except they're automatic. You basically go into time out, and when the time is out you're back. But if you demonstrate a pattern of being banned like that, then you get a regular ban that you would need to appeal. Such an appeal for a legitimate ban would only be heard after a reasonable amount of time in which for you to cool down and perhaps develop some maturity or responsibility. I further propose that policy on bans, whether for ban evasion or otherwise, should be placed in a separate location from the rules. It isn't a rule, it shouldn't be something players have to read in order to play. It is something that should prossibly/probably be public, but a separate document on adminstration/moderation policy. edit: hopefully last suggestion regarding overhaul of banning policy/system: when a player is unbanned, have it documented in something accessible in-game, like adding a note saying "unbanned: griefing, xray, and jaywalking".

Before this gets made official - apologies for being so damned late on this - but how does this contrast with our current policy? edit: for example, forzaire's ban extension follows the same procedure outlined above, right? I'm okay with this I suppose, and it doesn't seem like we are changing anything despite the lengthy discussions we had in our two admin meetings. The only thing that seems to have changed is that alts would be unbanned at the same time as the original instead of being "permanent" bans. We have no upper limit on ban lengths for such situations, right? No distinction is made between the two kinds of ban-evasions, i.e. 1) avo-esque compromised accounts hopping on one after the other with each ban just griefing or spamming for the hell of it 2) barneygale/forzaire types who use alt accounts just to play or flaunt a disregard for the rules. I'm not saying that I have an issue with this per se, just trying to make sure I understand. Again, I apologize for waiting until the last minute to post this... edit2: and what about when someone with a known or declared alt account is banned in the future or has a note added? Is their alt immediately banned, or do we wait until someone says "oh hey, isn't that X's alt account? He's evading!" these are +2weeks for each evasion, not each evasion "session", right? we are not doing any kind of reset of the ban time before adding the two weeks as that might be too complicated, i guess. not going with the super simple "Evade once: double length. Evade twice: ban for a year" we are of course keeping head admin prerogative to extend ban durations for those who are particularly harmful to the servers/community, correct? (edit: ah i see "Admins reserve the right to add additional time depending on the circumstances") is there any sort of metric by which we define one account a "main" account and another an "alt" account?

What system do we have in place to track what accounts are alts of other accounts? word of mouth and old ban appeals? Obviously the irc .alts command only shows us which accounts have connected from the same IP addresses, so that's not a documentation tool so much.