2024-AT-08: Staff and Delirium

Variable said:
Nuance is a thing. It gives staff and the CC a way of telling users they did cross the line, but there were forgivable circumstances, while also noting it in the record. Which is to differentiated from first-time offenders who may not have known their actions violated the rules of the site and get a staff warning.
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I'm afraid the nuance you're trying to communicate is very much lost on me.

The particular flavor of neurodiversity I've been saddled with has long left me with difficulty when there are no clear dividing lines between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. A major part of why I couldn't do a lot of normal sports like basketball was the rules about fouls being too fuzzy. Meanwhile, I thrived in martial arts where the increased stakes meant it was much more important to clearly define fouls.

My instinctive read of the "staff notice" vs "0 point infraction" distinction you seem to be drawing would be that it represents precisely that clear dividing line I would benefit from, where everything up to and including behavior that gets you a "staff notice" is acceptable, with the notice simply being a way to inform you that the line is approaching, and everything that gets you an infraction is unacceptable behavior, regardless of whether points were issued or not, with the number of points reflecting only the degree of unacceptability.

It is my experience with such systems that this is not what is intended at all. That you still need to change your behavior if you get a "staff notice" and if you continue to act precisely as you have after a "staff notice" this will eventually escalate to "infractions". The fact that you received a "staff notice" is treated as you having already been told that your behavior was unacceptable, not that you had been told your behavior was acceptable and that you were merely approaching the line.

I'd like it if it did work the way you describe, a world where I could treat a "staff notice" as confirmation that I didn't cross a line and where having a long history of "staff notices" was treated as a long history of official statements that you've been behaving in an acceptable fashion. Where such a history would be a mark in your favor rather than something that would be held against you.

But I don't think that's this world.
 
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Variable said:
It allows leniency while warning the offender for minor offenses, like this one.
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by the time an incident has gotten far enough in the process for the council to be involved in making a decision, the 'offender' cannot be un-warned (nor can anything be removed from the record, but it's cowardice to not want to put the word "overturned" in the record)
 
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Nerevar said:
I'd like it if it did work the way you describe, a world where I could treat a "staff notice" as confirmation that I didn't cross a line and where having a long history of "staff notices" was treated as a long history of official statements that you've been behaving in an acceptable fashion. Where such a history would be a mark in your favor rather than something that would be held against you.
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This would, indeed, be really nice.
 
The line is not in fact something you should be flirting with constantly, even from the right side, unless you want the conclusion to be that you're deliberately trying to be as awful as possible within the boundaries of the rules.
 
Nyvis said:
The line is not in fact something you should be flirting with constantly, even from the right side, unless you want the conclusion to be that you're deliberately trying to be as awful as possible within the boundaries of the rules.
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This additude is why the distinction between a zero point infraction and a staff notice is a false distinction. Crossing the line does not matter. It doesn't matter because the real line is well back from that point.

The idea that people might want to know where the real line is, is inherently treated as suspect at best, because obviously the only reason you might want to know is because you intend to somehow abuse that information.

You know what. I'll go ahead and say it outright. I am an awful person. As far as plenty of people and communities out there are concerned, I am the boogieman. The monster people warn their children about and who gather in mobs with proper torches and pitchforks to righteously purge.

Since admitting that is a pre-requisite for even questioning where the line actually is, I admit it.

Because this idea that wanting to know what side of the line you're on is a sign that you're already over it is corrosive and toxic, and worth challenging.
 
Nerevar said:
This additude is why the distinction between a zero point infraction and a staff notice is a false distinction. Crossing the line does not matter. It doesn't matter because the real line is well back from that point.

The idea that people might want to know where the real line is, is inherently treated as suspect at best, because obviously the only reason you might want to know is because you intend to somehow abuse that information.

You know what. I'll go ahead and say it outright. I am an awful person. As far as plenty of people and communities out there are concerned, I am the boogieman. The monster people warn their children about and who gather in mobs with proper torches and pitchforks to righteously purge.

Since admitting that is a pre-requisite for even questioning where the line actually is, I admit it.

Because this idea that wanting to know what side of the line you're on is a sign that you're already over it is corrosive and toxic, and worth challenging.
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I'm just going to ignore the hyperbolics because there's no point engaging with that.

The reason I'm opposed to 0pts infractions is not that I don't want you to know where the line is, it's that I don't think people are actually engaging in careful weighting of staff notices for just below the line and 0 pointers for just above. Or really can do so, because it's more of a no man's land than an agreed upon border. If you'll pardon me the analogy, there is no clear "close to the border on the right side" and "close to the border on the wrong side", just a "lost in the no mans land, which you should exit if you don't want to step on a land mine". You get 25 pts if you've obviously crossed into the enemy trenches. You get a staff notice or a 0 pointer depending on the whims of the first councillor who argued reduce if you're in the middle, and you get an overturn if you're clearly on the right side.

I'd rather either tell people they need to be more careful of the border in the future (staff notice) or give them points for repeatedly testing the line (a real infraction) than give 0 pts infractions, which I think convey neither with great purpose and instead show unwarranted mercy (the council obviously didn't think you were just erring, otherwise it'd be a staff notice). It also feeds a lot of confusion but is hard to argue for one of the other during council deliberations, because you don't really want to spend your time debating with other people who want to reduce too, you want to argue for reduce against overturn and uphold.
 
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Nyvis said:
I'm just going to ignore the hyperbolics because there's no point engaging with that.
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Nothing was hyperbolic in that post.

As for your no-man's land analogy, it fits perfectly with what I described.

The entrance to the no-man's land is where the real line is. And that is defined as any interaction with the staff in any official capacity, whether it's a notice or an infraction.

The line beween a 0 point infraction and a staff notice says nothing, because you were in that no-man's land either way. Just being there means you are in the wrong and need to modify your behavior, whether you stepped on a mine (technically recieved an infraction) or not.
 
Nyvis said:
The reason I'm opposed to 0pts infractions is not that I don't want you to know where the line is, it's that I don't think people are actually engaging in careful weighting of staff notices for just below the line and 0 pointers for just above. Or really can do so, because it's more of a no man's land than an agreed upon border. If you'll pardon me the analogy, there is no clear "close to the border on the right side" and "close to the border on the wrong side", just a "lost in the no mans land, which you should exit if you don't want to step on a land mine". You get 25 pts if you've obviously crossed into the enemy trenches. You get a staff notice or a 0 pointer depending on the whims of the first councillor who argued reduce if you're in the middle, and you get an overturn if you're clearly on the right side.
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This is closer to what I'm thinking honestly - the sort of hair-splitting a zero point infraction encourages requires a much finer control over the DMZ than we've really got established. If the appeal gets all the way to Council and you don't want to give them points, just overturn the infraction and tell them "this was against the rules, this thing you did, don't do it again". Nothing about the process is so mechanistic that that's not a viable option.
 
My take is that tribunal should not give 0 point infraction or staff notice.

For staff notice, it's because if the appelant is already in a tribunal, it's already a staff notice by itself. At best, it's just a hint from the council that the moderators should have infracted a staff notice. If the moderators value this kind of judgjing from the council, I can concede it can be OK to keep it. But for the appelant... I don't think it changes anything. Sure, if his case is overtuned, the appelant can say he is clean. But in the same time, the post is still a Staff Notice by itself because all the process it has to go through to prove he can be considerated as clean and that he has bring a bunch of discussion about it. Maybe I am just a "put under Staff Notice every post who pass the tribunal" team and I don't see a problem with it because it seems to fit about what a staff notice is.

For 0 points infraction, I don't see the point at all. Sure, it's not pleasant to receive 25 points, but at the end of the day, the only consequence they can bring, is that the hammer of permaban is taking a step in the direction of the appelant. But for this hammer to reach its target, the appelant will have to break the rules a bunch of times, repetitively and sometimes purposely. So, if the appelant has a good behavior for the rest of this life on SV, these points will not change anything, will not impact his life at all. If he has a bad behavior, well... 0 points infraction will only make the appelant to pass in permaban judgement later, which is... Maybe a not good idea as we are in a case of someone acting in a bad way ?
I can get councilors want to be lenient, but in the actual system, I think 0 point infraction just impede the smooth running of the system by giving way too much opportunities for people having bad behavior to enact their bad behavior.

I suppose my stance is that appealing should be for upheld (or more) and overturned and that middleground doesn't have its place here.
 
Corti said:
My take is that tribunal should not give 0 point infraction or staff notice.

For staff notice, it's because if the appelant is already in a tribunal, it's already a staff notice by itself. At best, it's just a hint from the council that the moderators should have infracted a staff notice. If the moderators value this kind of judgjing from the council, I can concede it can be OK to keep it. But for the appelant... I don't think it changes anything. Sure, if his case is overtuned, the appelant can say he is clean. But in the same time, the post is still a Staff Notice by itself because all the process it has to go through to prove he can be considerated as clean and that he has bring a bunch of discussion about it. Maybe I am just a "put under Staff Notice every post who pass the tribunal" team and I don't see a problem with it because it seems to fit about what a staff notice is.

For 0 points infraction, I don't see the point at all. Sure, it's not pleasant to receive 25 points, but at the end of the day, the only consequence they can bring, is that the hammer of permaban is taking a step in the direction of the appelant. But for this hammer to reach its target, the appelant will have to break the rules a bunch of times, repetitively and sometimes purposely. So, if the appelant has a good behavior for the rest of this life on SV, these points will not change anything, will not impact his life at all. If he has a bad behavior, well... 0 points infraction will only make the appelant to pass in permaban judgement later, which is... Maybe a not good idea as we are in a case of someone acting in a bad way ?
I can get councilors want to be lenient, but in the actual system, I think 0 point infraction just impede the smooth running of the system by giving way too much opportunities for people having bad behavior to enact their bad behavior.

I suppose my stance is that appealing should be for upheld (or more) and overturned and that middleground doesn't have its place here.
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I think there's a clear distinction between something being nowhere near the red line set by the rules and being fine to post and something being not quite over that line but being a territory we'd rather posters stay clear of regardless. Some way to say "this isn't rule breaking but stop limit testing" is important. I just don't think we need two of those, or one for each side of the line, because that territory is too fuzzy for that. But we absolutely need one of those.

Staff notice is what mods do use in practice. I don't think I ever remember mods giving 0 pt infraction. So that's what council should use there too.
 
There's been some evolution over their history AIUI but generally these days, the overwhelming majority of zero point infractions are the result of appeals on normal 25 point infracrions.
 
Potato Anarchy said:
There's been some evolution over their history AIUI but generally these days, the overwhelming majority of zero point infractions are the result of appeals on normal 25 point infracrions.
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So just.. overturn it? And tell them "we let you off this time don't do it again"? What does leaving it as an "infraction" do for us in this case?

(is it a xenforo thing)
 
Fey'lya said:
So just.. overturn it? And tell them "we let you off this time don't do it again"? What does leaving it as an "infraction" do for us in this case?

(is it a xenforo thing)
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I think way more people would get frustrated by that than would be soothed by it, frankly. Like, separate from the fact that I think there's a meaningful and useful difference in keeping "overturn because it wasn't really against the rules" and "reduce because it wasn't that bad" distinct. Looking at this solely through a user experience lens, I don't think it would actually make people buy in more or be less mad or less stressed.

People like being able to grab the lever and make something less bad, it's half of what appeals are for. Having a tangible but low stakes way to say "yeah, that was against the rules, but it wasn't the worst" - giving arbitrators a way to throw you a bone even when there's not good grounds for an overturn - is really useful! Like people talk about the law larp but a lot of this is really customer service.
 
Fey'lya said:
So just.. overturn it? And tell them "we let you off this time don't do it again"? What does leaving it as an "infraction" do for us in this case?

(is it a xenforo thing)
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One thing to note in terms of how it looks on our end is that when an infraction gets overturned the whole thing gets deleted and there's no easy-to-find indicator that it was there (obviously we can still dig through the reports and appeals logs to see what happened but it's not in the user's main 'record' so to speak), so if we want to leave a note that we told the user "don't do it again" it needs to be either some sort of infraction or a staff notice.
 
Potato Anarchy said:
People like being able to grab the lever and make something less bad, it's half of what appeals are for. Having a tangible but low stakes way to say "yeah, that was against the rules, but it wasn't the worst" - giving arbitrators a way to throw you a bone even when there's not good grounds for an overturn - is really useful! Like people talk about the law larp but a lot of this is really customer service.
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Don't most people only get one or fewer appeals to begin with? Granularity concerns aside, I'm having trouble imagining that being a red UPHELD with zero points is less satisfying than a green OVERTURN even if it comes with a finger wagging.

People talk about the "law larp" because the only reason we're talking about "zero point infractions" in the first place is because someone thinks we need a specific "thing" on the books to hang throwing someone a bone on. It's mechanistic in ways that it probably doesn't need to be? Maybe I'm just overtired and rambling but a lot of this really doesn't make a lot of sense.
 
Fey'lya said:
So just.. overturn it? And tell them "we let you off this time don't do it again"? What does leaving it as an "infraction" do for us in this case?
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I'm trying to not post in these threads anymore, I think it does more harm than good, but I think this can stay purely a theory debate that might be educational from seeing into my own head at least. I will emphasize that this is my perspective, there is no hard and fast rule in the department about this, or any official Standard.

Human psychology is that if you are punished, and then that punishment gets entirely removed, you did nothing wrong. Even if the arb says "don't do it again", that is something that is going to be harder to remember from likely at least a paragraph or two of text than the fact that you didn't get punished for it. That isn't a knock, I think it's natural human psychology- we try to remember the positives about outcomes rather than negative if our brain is functionally optimally. So I think a minor puinshment is totally understandable as a way to say "Okay, this definitely doesn't warrant points, but it wasn't good either."

And I think there are plenty of cases where context from the moderator or the fact that it is their first infraction can make things more complicated in a way that is no fault of the moderator's, but an arb can find on assessment and feel doesn't warrant points or a full infraction. Overturning in this scenario is essentially arguing that a moderator needs to be held to a perfect standard, which I think could have a chilling effect pretty easily.

In your opinion, let's say that somebody breaks the rules, but it's not a huge breach and it was their first time being hit under it. Should they have the infraction overturned, should it be upheld anyway?
 
Fey'lya said:
Don't most people only get one or fewer appeals to begin with? Granularity concerns aside, I'm having trouble imagining that being a red UPHELD with zero points is less satisfying than a green OVERTURN even if it comes with a finger wagging.
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strictly speaking it'd be a yellow REDUCED flair if it's zero points :V
 
The Last One said:
This is a joke, right? Like, the number of ridiculous loopholes in the rules for TKD & All Style is, well, ridiculous.
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I wasn't looking for loopholes. I was looking for guidance.

You are allowed to hit the person from here to here. This area of the body is off limits period. This area you may only use kicks, but may not use hands. No contact, light contact, heavy contact, and full contact all with spelled out definitions, with the only real room for honest misunderstanding being where the border between light contact and heavy contact might be, and there was sufficient definition to work out some level of force that is definitely light contact.

There is a clarity there that I found easy to grasp.

Meanwhile, I found the foul rules for many more normal sports to be more fuzzily defined. Maybe that's just a matter of people being disinclined to sit down and explain those clearly defined rules to someone who didn't already know them, but the result was the same. I didn't know where the lines were, and so was always either over-agressive or under-agressive to the point that I wasn't really playing the game either way.
 
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Nerevar said:
I wasn't looking for loopholes. I was looking for guidance.

You are allowed to hit the person from here to here. This area of the body is off limits period. This area you may only use kicks, but may not use hands. No contact, light contact, heavy contact, and full contact all with spelled out defintiions, with the only real room for honest misunderstanding being where he border between light contact and heavy contact might be, and there was sufficient definition to work out some level of force that is definitely light contact.

There is a clarity there that I found easy to grasp.

Meanwhile, I found the foul rules for many more normal sports to be more fuzzily defined. Maybe that's just a matter of people being disinclined to sit down and explain those clearly defined rules to someone who didn't already know them, but the result was the same. I didn't know where the lines were, and so was always either over-agressive or under-agressive to the point that I wasn't really playing the game either way.
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Yeah, no. Like, I can appreciate that you find that particular set of lines easier to process but they are still stupidly fuzzy. Particularly where contact is involved. For example, crotch kicks. If they're completely off limits, then it encourages someone to stick a well-guarded crotch into the path of the strike. So, exceptions are carved out for deliberately striking the crotch but it's a fast moving situation and it's really hard to tell if that particular kick was aimed at the crotch or just ended up striking the crotch because of how the participants are moving.

To pull this back to SV rules, it seems easy to just process that as "don't aim kicks anywhere near the crotch, stick to the nipple line" despite the strict interpretation and intent just being "don't intentionally aim kicks at the crotch." Combine that with 1 accidental crotch kick is okay but after the 5th, it's probably going to be ruled as intentional despite the kicker not actually trying to strike the crotch at any time.
 
The Last One said:
Yeah, no. Like, I can appreciate that you find that particular set of lines easier to process but they are still stupidly fuzzy. Particularly where contact is involved. For example, crotch kicks. If they're completely off limits, then it encourages someone to stick a well-guarded crotch into the path of the strike. So, exceptions are carved out for deliberately striking the crotch but it's a fast moving situation and it's really hard to tell if that particular kick was aimed at the crotch or just ended up striking the crotch because of how the participants are moving.

To pull this back to SV rules, it seems easy to just process that as "don't aim kicks anywhere near the crotch, stick to the nipple line" despite the strict interpretation and intent just being "don't intentionally aim kicks at the crotch." Combine that with 1 accidental crotch kick is okay but after the 5th, it's probably going to be ruled as intentional despite the kicker not actually trying to strike the crotch at any time.
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Like I said, I wasn't looking for loopholes. I wasn't trying to "get away with" anything.

I think your mention of aiming for the nipple line when trying not to get dinged on a rule against kicking someone in the crotch is a pretty good demonstration of what happens when the rule actually being enforced is "don't get anywhere near the line". I'm not sure I could come up with a better analogy for the chilling effect.

I get we had very different experiences with martial arts and am grateful I didn't have to deal with the toxic mess it sounds like you did.
 
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