Pending Consistency on Slurs across our platforms.

[;)]

I am making this a community suggestion instead of just a staff facing suggestion, since this topic is important and relevant to consider/grab feedback at a community level as many of you have expressed opinions in the past both privately and publicly. I will be alluding to certain slurs in this post, please don't take that as a reason to run away from this thread and loophole some funny words somewhere.

We have a pretty stern stance on slurs here; see a bad word/hear a bad word, get a punishment. The punishment does vary across our platforms a fair bit, and the idea behind this suggestion is to add some consistency as we expand. The following ideas are suggested as a package deal:

1. Add Slur Filtering to all of our platforms

• Minecraft and our Discord server are blessed with an automatic slur filter that prevents slurs from being used in text chat.
• TTT and future gamemodes should be considered candidates for such an easy addition going forward; even if it doesn't work in 100% of scenarios (RDM reports, etc) it will redirect unwanted behavior in an extremely easy way. For KOS problems (What if this guys name is a slur and staff haven't addressed it?), I'd imagine there's a way to make TTT_Radio immune to said filter.

2. For our game servers, adjust slurs protocol to be more akin to Disturbing Content and empower mods to ban for 1st offense

• Right now for a mod to issue a ban on our TTT server outside of discretion for slurs, they need to proceed through the protocol for slurs. The protocol looks like something in my spoiler lots of the time; a kick for the slur being targetted at someone on or off the server, and then a ban a little bit later.
• Spoiler

  Player69 has joined the server.
  Player69 in voice: What's up my "hard r"
  Player69 has been kicked by wink for Don't Use Slurs
  Player69 has joined the server
  Player69 in voice: why did you do that wink? I meant to say "soft a" not "hard r"!
  Player69 has been banned for Slurs 1st offense
• I'm proposing we remove the need for the kick for 1st time offenders for most cases of slurring. This can be done by either immediately escalating to a 5 day ban, or replacing the kick with a 1 day ban and adjusting the protocol accordingly
• A warning could be considered to be deployed as an optional measure for "light offenses" such as
  • A slur is in a steam profile pic of a new player
  • Singing along to a silly song that has a slur.
  • The slur was accidentally dropped somehow in a conversation(talking about car parts/mexican beer/ etc)
  • Loopholing Slurs can be thrown in here too, and then nuked from orbit accordingly if it keeps up.

3. Evaluate a consistent SoL for all of our platforms for all instances of slurs, not just some.

• There is no variance in SoL between our discord server and our minecraft server; right now if a player drops a homophobic hatemissile on eithe and gets a warning/mute, it'll stick with them for quite some time no questions asked.
• On TTT, there exists an outlier; while the bans stick with players for quite some time, it is technically protocol to "restart the slur clock" each play session in terms of the kick. I really don't see the need for protocol to reflect just kicking a player when he's been handled for the same slur 1-2-3-4 times already.

4. Make the staff slurs list public

• For full transparency, wink has suggested this in staff suggestions outside the rest of these suggestions; it was shot down for a few good reasons including
  • Mods have been given the ability to just warn instead of kick for using a slur in a silly way(akin to the "light offenses" list above)
  • The fear of players using the list as a menu to skirt around our slurs with other harmful words/rhetoric
  • The idea our list we have isn't exhaustive/final
• I'm throwing this in this package because I really do feel as we expand into new frontiers, being straightforward with our new friends of what they can say and can't is crucial if we are going to elevate the severity on our punishments here; there's some slurs on the list I'd admittedly would never guess if I wasn't a staff member. I don't want to see a new friend join the discord and get nuked from a voice channel for a day since he said used a "soft a" not knowing our stance on it.
• We are strict on loopholing and trust all levels of our staff to address it via the slurs protocol already.
• My original suggestion was made before "retard" was freed for the people from the margins of the list; that word alone may definitely confuse people where our lines in the sand are drawn on slurs and that clarity may help.

A quick little FAQ

• wink, what about EU/the vibe in other gamemodes we are exploring? Wouldn't a stricter approach here potentially avoid us making a few friends?
  • By making our rulings consistent across all of our gamemodes, we are setting expectations; we don't want looser expectations on EU to find new friends who like to call eachother a bunch of homophobic/transphobic slurs just to hit them with the cold water if they decide to join our discord and drop those words.
  • The filters/making the list public puts a few barriers in place to keep the right people around; someone using a homophobic hatemissile to talk about their cigarette can quickly warned as a "light offense" and be redirected towards the list of slurs to avoid them accidentally dropping a different hatemissile.
• wink, we are a gaming community. Even if we have the filters, slurs list, and enable staff to drop cute little warnings won't this get some good people caught in the crossfire of stricter punishments who just get a little "heated" playing games?
  • Leniency is a staff tenet here that we celebrate and embrace; if an accidental slur is dropped after all that stuff somehow/someway, there will be staff members going to bat for you if you are making a good faith appeal. While I can't guarantee every silly little heated accident will be forgiven and blessed by lenient larry, we are good about discussing things we feel aren't up to snuff.

 

[CelDamage]

I definitely think the slurs list should be public, no reason to leave our members guessing what is and isnt okay to say. I do however have my concerns with immediate ban escalation for slurs being the default. I do think there are times where we should have the discretion to skip past the kick and go straight to ban in cases where it is blatant and obvious, because in those cases the kick only protects the person using slurs because they just come back and tow the line for as long as possible, but on the other hand of the coin, I don't want people getting banned for lesser offenses without enough prior warning, hell there was one point where I was in the boat of the opposite where I thought first offense should be rgag instead of kick because I feel like a majority of the time a kick only agitates the offender further and they either come back with a vengeance and will absolutely offend again (or tow the line), or alternatively if it was a blatant hard R troll case, they dont come back from the kick when they were absolutely deserving of the ban, and they get away without a ban on their record that they deserved.

I also feel like rgag is a more easy way to gauge someone who is trolling vs someone who didn't realize it was against the rules and wont do it again. If it is a troll who came with the intention of causing vocal chaos, you now stripped them of their #1 weapon and they will either slur in text to get their second offense, or wait out the round and offend once their gag expires, but either way the rgag gives staff perfect timing because they know exactly when the gag expires and when to be attentive of when the offender can start talking again.

tldr I do agree that mods should have the ability to use their discretion on cases of slurs to ban blatant offenders so they are not able to just tow the line, but I do not think the solution is to make 1st offense a 1 day ban, mainly because thats too harsh for people who did lighter or accidental offenses and only serves to piss them off than to learn from their actions, and its way too light for blatant offenses.

 

[cooldude42]

we should do this and make the r-word a slur

 

[;)]

I definitely think the slurs list should be public, no reason to leave our members guessing what is and isnt okay to say. I do however have my concerns with immediate ban escalation for slurs being the default. I do think there are times where we should have the discretion to skip past the kick and go straight to ban in cases where it is blatant and obvious, because in those cases the kick only protects the person using slurs because they just come back and tow the line for as long as possible, but on the other hand of the coin, I don't want people getting banned for lesser offenses without enough prior warning, hell there was one point where I was in the boat of the opposite where I thought first offense should be rgag instead of kick because I feel like a majority of the time a kick only agitates the offender further and they either come back with a vengeance and will absolutely offend again (or tow the line), or alternatively if it was a blatant hard R troll case, they dont come back from the kick when they were absolutely deserving of the ban, and they get away without a ban on their record that they deserved.

I also feel like rgag is a more easy way to gauge someone who is trolling vs someone who didn't realize it was against the rules and wont do it again. If it is a troll who came with the intention of causing vocal chaos, you now stripped them of their #1 weapon and they will either slur in text to get their second offense, or wait out the round and offend once their gag expires, but either way the rgag gives staff perfect timing because they know exactly when the gag expires and when to be attentive of when the offender can start talking again.

tldr I do agree that mods should have the ability to use their discretion on cases of slurs to ban blatant offenders so they are not able to just tow the line, but I do not think the solution is to make 1st offense a 1 day ban, mainly because thats too harsh for people who did lighter or accidental offenses and only serves to piss them off than to learn from their actions, and its way too light for blatant offenses.

Accidental/lighter offenses is covered with the ability to warn akin to disturbing content; a mod shouldn’t be banning a new player off rip for a one off “kys” in response to a bad joke, similarly to how a mod should be expected not to immediately nuke a player when the context just doesn’t make sense for slurs .

The intent of this is to enable our staff to remove a player for dropping hatemissiles at players without care, making it so our server only needs to hear those words once not twice for a serious correction to happen.

 

[Zero]

I agree.

 

[Siddo]

Finally remembered to respond here. I'll be dividing it up and supplying my surface level thoughts to the conversation.

1. Add Slur Filtering to all of our platforms

• Minecraft and our Discord server are blessed with an automatic slur filter that prevents slurs from being used in text chat.
• TTT and future gamemodes should be considered candidates for such an easy addition going forward; even if it doesn't work in 100% of scenarios (RDM reports, etc) it will redirect unwanted behavior in an extremely easy way. For KOS problems (What if this guys name is a slur and staff haven't addressed it?), I'd imagine there's a way to make TTT_Radio immune to said filter.

I don't like filters in general on a personal level and tend to turn them off whenever offered. Consequently, I don't like the idea of introducing them across the platforms.
There's a lot of merit to it, but in the eternal arms race of moderation vs rule breaking, I'd rather people just say the n-word flat out instead of some obscure dog whistle reference or bone apple tea type shit. The damage the slur's presence in chat does vs how quickly a player can get booted by flat out breaking the rules, is proportionate and fine in my view. And even then, with a filter, you'd still have the bone apple tea crowd and dog whistle gang causing a ruckus and no amount of filtering and tailoring will get around that. You can make 1000 ways of catching the n word and people will come up with 1000 new ones.
The only exception I really see to that principle is Discord. I still don't like it for Discord, mind, but that's the largest social hub and the most accessible part of the community (literally thousand+ at time of writing), so having that auto-mod the classics prevents some spam bot damage from happening. That's worthwhile. I think for our game services which cap at significantly fewer concurrent users, I prefer moderation to rely on that human touch.

2. For our game servers, adjust slurs protocol to be more akin to Disturbing Content and empower mods to ban for 1st offense

• Right now for a mod to issue a ban on our TTT server outside of discretion for slurs, they need to proceed through the protocol for slurs. The protocol looks like something in my spoiler lots of the time; a kick for the slur being targetted at someone on or off the server, and then a ban a little bit later.
• Spoiler

  Player69 has joined the server.
  Player69 in voice: What's up my "hard r"
  Player69 has been kicked by wink for Don't Use Slurs
  Player69 has joined the server
  Player69 in voice: why did you do that wink? I meant to say "soft a" not "hard r"!
  Player69 has been banned for Slurs 1st offense
• I'm proposing we remove the need for the kick for 1st time offenders for most cases of slurring. This can be done by either immediately escalating to a 5 day ban, or replacing the kick with a 1 day ban and adjusting the protocol accordingly
• A warning could be considered to be deployed as an optional measure for "light offenses" such as
  • A slur is in a steam profile pic of a new player
  • Singing along to a silly song that has a slur.
  • The slur was accidentally dropped somehow in a conversation(talking about car parts/mexican beer/ etc)
  • Loopholing Slurs can be thrown in here too, and then nuked from orbit accordingly if it keeps up.

I've previously advocated for the ability to just warn instead of deploy the kick. I think it's fine to make harassment and slurs both be a warning/ban type offense. Warning for lighter offenses, straight to jail for egregious ones. I'd replace it with a 1 day ban which then elevates to a 5 day ban on 2nd offense.

3. Evaluate a consistent SoL for all of our platforms for all instances of slurs, not just some.

• There is no variance in SoL between our discord server and our minecraft server; right now if a player drops a homophobic hatemissile on eithe and gets a warning/mute, it'll stick with them for quite some time no questions asked.
• On TTT, there exists an outlier; while the bans stick with players for quite some time, it is technically protocol to "restart the slur clock" each play session in terms of the kick. I really don't see the need for protocol to reflect just kicking a player when he's been handled for the same slur 1-2-3-4 times already.

For spam, I think it makes sense to retain the per-session approach. Slurs and harassment *are* outliers in comparison and I think that it's fine to make it stick as SoL between sessions. Works well in conjunction with the suggested changes from point number 2 if implemented.

4. Make the staff slurs list public

• For full transparency, wink has suggested this in staff suggestions outside the rest of these suggestions; it was shot down for a few good reasons including
  • Mods have been given the ability to just warn instead of kick for using a slur in a silly way(akin to the "light offenses" list above)
  • The fear of players using the list as a menu to skirt around our slurs with other harmful words/rhetoric
  • The idea our list we have isn't exhaustive/final
• I'm throwing this in this package because I really do feel as we expand into new frontiers, being straightforward with our new friends of what they can say and can't is crucial if we are going to elevate the severity on our punishments here; there's some slurs on the list I'd admittedly would never guess if I wasn't a staff member. I don't want to see a new friend join the discord and get nuked from a voice channel for a day since he said used a "soft a" not knowing our stance on it.
• We are strict on loopholing and trust all levels of our staff to address it via the slurs protocol already.
• My original suggestion was made before "retard" was freed for the people from the margins of the list; that word alone may definitely confuse people where our lines in the sand are drawn on slurs and that clarity may help.

I've previously advocated against this and I still think it's a silly idea. I think the list itself is a silly idea that shouldn't exist - but that I can abide, since it works as an information tool for staff. Especially non-native speakers that might stumble into a slur they don't recognize as a slur, so it heightens quality of staff to have it for staff. I don't think it serves any clarifying purpose for the community. In most cases you know what you're saying is a slur. If you stumble into it by accident, whether a native or non-native speaker of Ingles, that should be fairly evident in the context of the message it's in. You can usually tell when someone is using something as a slur vs when they're using it in non-malicious ways. Should it happen, the player can be informed and course correct, problem solved, everyone's happy. I sincerely do not believe that making a public slur list is going to be a meaningful contribution to anything positive. And I don't really get the fascination with this list on a personal level. To me it is extremely silly, genuinely.

 

[;)]

I've previously advocated against this and I still think it's a silly idea. I think the list itself is a silly idea that shouldn't exist - but that I can abide, since it works as an information tool for staff. Especially non-native speakers that might stumble into a slur they don't recognize as a slur, so it heightens quality of staff to have it for staff. I don't think it serves any clarifying purpose for the community. In most cases you know what you're saying is a slur. If you stumble into it by accident, whether a native or non-native speaker of Ingles, that should be fairly evident in the context of the message it's in. You can usually tell when someone is using something as a slur vs when they're using it in non-malicious ways. Should it happen, the player can be informed and course correct, problem solved, everyone's happy. I sincerely do not believe that making a public slur list is going to be a meaningful contribution to anything positive. And I don't really get the fascination with this list on a personal level. To me it is extremely silly, genuinely.

With the funny filters we've seen set in place today/in general with the changes we've made the past few months, we've had people genuinely think words such as retard are being elevated to defcon slur status in terms of how we handle things. Transparency is a massive thing for this community, and it just seems against that philosophy to not be open about what will get you removed.

 

[kevin]

I definitely think the slurs list should be public, no reason to leave our members guessing what is and isnt okay to say. I do however have my concerns with immediate ban escalation for slurs being the default. I do think there are times where we should have the discretion to skip past the kick and go straight to ban in cases where it is blatant and obvious, because in those cases the kick only protects the person using slurs because they just come back and tow the line for as long as possible, but on the other hand of the coin, I don't want people getting banned for lesser offenses without enough prior warning, hell there was one point where I was in the boat of the opposite where I thought first offense should be rgag instead of kick because I feel like a majority of the time a kick only agitates the offender further and they either come back with a vengeance and will absolutely offend again (or tow the line), or alternatively if it was a blatant hard R troll case, they dont come back from the kick when they were absolutely deserving of the ban, and they get away without a ban on their record that they deserved.

I also feel like rgag is a more easy way to gauge someone who is trolling vs someone who didn't realize it was against the rules and wont do it again. If it is a troll who came with the intention of causing vocal chaos, you now stripped them of their #1 weapon and they will either slur in text to get their second offense, or wait out the round and offend once their gag expires, but either way the rgag gives staff perfect timing because they know exactly when the gag expires and when to be attentive of when the offender can start talking again.

tldr I do agree that mods should have the ability to use their discretion on cases of slurs to ban blatant offenders so they are not able to just tow the line, but I do not think the solution is to make 1st offense a 1 day ban, mainly because thats too harsh for people who did lighter or accidental offenses and only serves to piss them off than to learn from their actions, and its way too light for blatant offenses.

@jabba