Post by DragonSlayer2189 on Jul 7, 2020 22:34:01 GMT
(i wasn't sure where to put this so i put it in general discussion, if a forum mod wishes to move it to a more fitting board feel free to do so)
(I would like to mention that any time I mention Jokebans/Jokebanning I am not just referring to bans, while in most cases it might be a ban, for the most part I am referring to any punishment {smite, kick, ban, doom, mute, cage, etc.})
Introduction
Hello, many people have heard about my "IA report" where I reported almost every active admin (including myself) under the reasoning of "Jokebanning". Now, I understand that this report is over and done with, and that the ruling was it wasn't against the rules. However, I have a number of problems with how the report was handled and (at least from what I have seen) how IA does stuff in general. it has been a full month since the time of making the report, and I feel as if that was enough time to fix these issues, but no action was made, so I am making this post.
In this forum post i will be going over the following:
Before I truly begin this thread, I would like to make note that, while it may seem like I am trying to start drama, I am in fact, not. I truly feel as if my report was handled improperly and while I have only made a singular report, the fact that one report had these issues means that other reports may also have had/will have these issues as well.
Disclaimer: this thread is gonna be really long, so get ready for some reading
Background & Context
It all started on June 5th, 2020, with the creation of the thread "Joke punishments on OPs" in the Super Admin Lounge. In this thread the issue was brought up that due to jokebanning it is much harder to use ctrl + F in the punishment logs to see how many punishments a player has, this post was relatively controversial with one of the main points being brought up that you shouldn't just be using ctrl + F as a resource for making a permban request, and that you should be looking into the reasons for the bans. some people said that it's fine as long as it's clearly a joke, and both players are having fun.
However there is one major rebuttal to this argument which was brought to attention in the thread which is that there are policies in place that say that this is not the case and that it is against the rules, which may be considered true because technically it goes against the following rules:
* Rule 1j (Conduct Policy) : Admins that engage in rogue activity, rage quit, and misuse administrative commands. Also, an ex-admin that repeatedly fails to abide by admin conduct rules.
(Specifically Drawing Attention to "and misuse of administrative commands.")
* Rule 3e (Conduct Policy) : Attempting to interfere with an admin in the performance of their duties.
* Rule 3d (Administrator Conduct Policy): Minor cases of power abuse : Misuse of muting, caging, smiting, and other administrative control actions.
* Rule 4b (Administrator Conduct Policy): Extreme cases of power abuse. : Mass punishing operators, locking down the server without valid reasoning, and other actions that prevent players that have not broken any rules
I do agree with this, however i then went on to say (this is very summarized) that the thread itself is hypocritical, the main people who were giving the counter argument that it breaks those rules are some of the very people who break it, some of them on a more consistent basis than others, some of these people being higher ups, and that, if we were to make this a rule, I guarantee that many of the higher ups who voted on the rule, would be the very same people who break them, which happens more often than not.
In response to this, I was told, by more than 1 person, to report the people who were doing it, one of these people being an IA member themselves (it was fionn), And so, i did even saying "gimme like 3 days ill report everything i have to IA, i still dont 100% agree with no joke banning, but i will leave this argument here and report my evidence of higher ups to IA"
it only took me 2...
On June 7th, I submitted the report to IA, I had gone through every single punishment on the logs from March to then, and included some images from discord showing some cases of the abuse of tf!console. each admin had their own file, there was also a unknown/console file for any bans from console where i couldn't find the discord logs to show who did it, there was also a file with all of the logs from march to june and screenshots of the punishment list at the time of making the report, leading to a total of 39 folders inside the report.
In the report I specifically requested that "I don't want action to be taken on every single admin, and I think that each should be on a case by case basis." I also called attention to a few files however, I do not feel as if these files are necessary to be drawn attention to in this thread. However one thing that I think is very important to mention in this thread is the following lines in my readme, which were made to explicitly state the main purpose of the report:
(Yes i know some things are misspelled or don't have proper grammar however i feel as if it still important to not paraphrase this, and to directly quote this)
Now there was some backlash to the report, especially considering how, for part of me making the report, i live streamed it on discord (tho the backlash did also spawn the pretty funny meme of the IA report). now there is one bit of backlash that i would like to explain a bit because some people have quoted its points, this being a discord post in the general discussion channel (specifically this one), I would like to mention this one specifically because, after it was made, i saw how the person who made the post misinterpreted what i was doing, and we had a conversation in dms where i cleared up some of the things that they had thought, and they came into understanding of what i was doing.
Now after this I did do some more work on the report, not adding any new cases to it, but rather taking what i had already found, but trying to determine the context of each ban, and see which ones, if any, where jokebans, and which ones where not, even asking the people themselves about the bans in question. I did this on and off, but really stopped somewhere around june 14th, only really getting halfway done with what i really wanted to get done.
My Issues With How The Report Was Handled
To start off, I think that one of the main issues was the lack of communication between the IA team, and the person reporting the staff. now when i submitted the report I was told by the person who I made the report to "update me if there's any other pertinent information regarding this and i'll try to get it addressed i'll have the IA team look into this meanwhile". However, the only real communication I ended up having with the IA member was stuff like "how old are these?", and other messages that basically just said that "yes, we are working on it". the next day I asked if there were any updates on their end and was told that they were "looking into the most commonly abused command(s) and will likely look into restricting access to those tools if their rampant use becomes apparent". On top of this, I also was updating the member who I reported it too when needed even making efforts to ask if they wanted me to help with any investigation (i got no response).
I feel like the person reporting should have much more communication between the person who is reporting and the rest of the IA Team, other than the person who I reported it too no IA staff made any attempts to work with me (the person reporting) about the report. When you report someone you have to have already looked through logs of some kind to even make the report, and I feel as if the person who is making the report should be able to have a easy way to communicate with the team about anything that happens, or needs to be changed in the report.
In fact, I wasn't even told that my report was closed until i had conversation with an IA member, which i asked about this went like this:
(IA Person is in teal)
Now, personally I feel as if, as the person who reported these people, I should get to know if my report has been closed or not, it doesn't make sense that I wouldn't because i kept working on the report thinking that the report was still being looked at, and was never formally told that it was complete.
The next Issue I had with what IA did, or rather didn't do, is that they didn't even seem to acknowledge that I had a bunch of stuff in the readme about what I expected to be done even if jokebanning wasn't against the rules (which according to IA it is not, for both ops and admins). In my readme file I explicitly stated:
I feel as if this pretty clearly shows what should have been done if this wasn't against the rules, I said that if it isn't it needs to be much better clarified as their is still confusion about whether or not it is against the rules.
However, instead I was told unofficially that "jokebanning isn't against the rules, and so no action was taken with your report", and I feel like as if there should have been at least an attempt to make this more clear, one of the main points of making the report was to provide clarification on the rules, however that still hasn't happened and I feel as if that shows that IA doesn't even care enough to follow up on any requests made by the person who reported it, or even carefully read the stuff sent by the reporter (which is further exemplified by the fact that, after submitting my report, I was asked about stuff that was already clearly written inside the readme)
I feel as if this shows that the IA team wasn't handling the report professionally, and just glossed over the detail.
My last issue with how the team handled my report is how they went about discussing the report with the rest of the IA team. on the thread with the template for making a report, it said that if you are reporting a member of IA it should be dm'd to a different member of IA. The reason for this makes sense, if your going to report a member of IA they should not be in the discussion as that may make it biased.
However, I know for a fact, that the report was shared with the member of IA who I had reported, in its entirety. I feel as if that negates the whole point of "We're here to act as an impartial judge against abuse claims as well as re-evaluate the current staff's qualifications.", and shows that they are not impartial.
I would also like to mention out of the current members of IA: zevante,fionn ,Suprmn, and zeseryu, Suprmn was removed for inactivity, fionn was suspended by IA themselves (even if the suspension was then considered invalid, the fact that there was enough suspicion of an IA member to get them suspended, shows that they should not be part of IA), zeseryu is only part of IA because they are the EAO. the only one who is "impartial" is zevante, who is very inactive, however still does his job as an IA member.
I feel as if all of this shows the incompetence of the IA team as a whole, and that we may need to restructure how the IA team operates.
Other Notes That Relate To These Issues
After making my report about all these jokebans I have gotten a lot of complaints mainly from some specific seniors about me being a hypocrite, one such case that I know of thanks to an anonymous senior admin who told me about some of the conversations in the Senior Admin Lounge is about how some people where talking about a relatively recent case of me joke banning a OP (alternatedrifter) for saying "june 29th" with the ban reason of "no" after i had said "im banning the next person to say june 29th", shortly after which i unbanned them (however I was a bit slow because 4 other people yelled at me for jokebanning someone). After this I was actually almost formally warned for it, however I explained my case and the person who was going to warn me decided not to do it.
So, to address these misconceptions I would like to say the following message:
Despite what some people might think, I for one am not against jokebanning, I believe that as long as both the person being joke punishment and the person who did the punishment are both having a laugh, don't take any actual offence to it, it is ok to jokeban both ops and admins, also provided that the people who are actually breaking the rules are getting banned.
On top of this, I would like to Officially state (in case it wasn't already obvious) that I will not be making any more IA reports related to this, or continuing to work on this IA report, however if someone would like to follow up on this case, and would like my updated files, I am Happy to share them (provided you aren't going to do anything malicious with them, and that you are at least a telnet admin)
EDIT: Ok, I'm making some needed clarification here, the problem here is not that I'm fine with jokebanning but yet I made a thread about how I'm unsatisfied with how the IA team didn't do something about the jokebanning, I'm fine with that. however, I clearly stated, both in this report, and in this thread, that if jokebanning is not against the rules, then it should be clarified that this is the case, because as of right now, its a gray area, that could be considered against the rules, but according to IA it isn't
the problem is that IA did not make any attempt to clarify that jokebanning is perfectly fine, even after I explicitly said that even if jokebanning is ok that should be clarified
(I would like to mention that any time I mention Jokebans/Jokebanning I am not just referring to bans, while in most cases it might be a ban, for the most part I am referring to any punishment {smite, kick, ban, doom, mute, cage, etc.})
Introduction
Hello, many people have heard about my "IA report" where I reported almost every active admin (including myself) under the reasoning of "Jokebanning". Now, I understand that this report is over and done with, and that the ruling was it wasn't against the rules. However, I have a number of problems with how the report was handled and (at least from what I have seen) how IA does stuff in general. it has been a full month since the time of making the report, and I feel as if that was enough time to fix these issues, but no action was made, so I am making this post.
In this forum post i will be going over the following:
- The Background/Context of the report
- My issues with how it was handled
- Other notes that relate to the issues
Before I truly begin this thread, I would like to make note that, while it may seem like I am trying to start drama, I am in fact, not. I truly feel as if my report was handled improperly and while I have only made a singular report, the fact that one report had these issues means that other reports may also have had/will have these issues as well.
Disclaimer: this thread is gonna be really long, so get ready for some reading
Background & Context
It all started on June 5th, 2020, with the creation of the thread "Joke punishments on OPs" in the Super Admin Lounge. In this thread the issue was brought up that due to jokebanning it is much harder to use ctrl + F in the punishment logs to see how many punishments a player has, this post was relatively controversial with one of the main points being brought up that you shouldn't just be using ctrl + F as a resource for making a permban request, and that you should be looking into the reasons for the bans. some people said that it's fine as long as it's clearly a joke, and both players are having fun.
However there is one major rebuttal to this argument which was brought to attention in the thread which is that there are policies in place that say that this is not the case and that it is against the rules, which may be considered true because technically it goes against the following rules:
* Rule 1j (Conduct Policy) : Admins that engage in rogue activity, rage quit, and misuse administrative commands. Also, an ex-admin that repeatedly fails to abide by admin conduct rules.
(Specifically Drawing Attention to "and misuse of administrative commands.")
* Rule 3e (Conduct Policy) : Attempting to interfere with an admin in the performance of their duties.
* Rule 3d (Administrator Conduct Policy): Minor cases of power abuse : Misuse of muting, caging, smiting, and other administrative control actions.
* Rule 4b (Administrator Conduct Policy): Extreme cases of power abuse. : Mass punishing operators, locking down the server without valid reasoning, and other actions that prevent players that have not broken any rules
I do agree with this, however i then went on to say (this is very summarized) that the thread itself is hypocritical, the main people who were giving the counter argument that it breaks those rules are some of the very people who break it, some of them on a more consistent basis than others, some of these people being higher ups, and that, if we were to make this a rule, I guarantee that many of the higher ups who voted on the rule, would be the very same people who break them, which happens more often than not.
In response to this, I was told, by more than 1 person, to report the people who were doing it, one of these people being an IA member themselves (it was fionn), And so, i did even saying "gimme like 3 days ill report everything i have to IA, i still dont 100% agree with no joke banning, but i will leave this argument here and report my evidence of higher ups to IA"
it only took me 2...
On June 7th, I submitted the report to IA, I had gone through every single punishment on the logs from March to then, and included some images from discord showing some cases of the abuse of tf!console. each admin had their own file, there was also a unknown/console file for any bans from console where i couldn't find the discord logs to show who did it, there was also a file with all of the logs from march to june and screenshots of the punishment list at the time of making the report, leading to a total of 39 folders inside the report.
In the report I specifically requested that "I don't want action to be taken on every single admin, and I think that each should be on a case by case basis." I also called attention to a few files however, I do not feel as if these files are necessary to be drawn attention to in this thread. However one thing that I think is very important to mention in this thread is the following lines in my readme, which were made to explicitly state the main purpose of the report:
Is the joke punishment of other users (both admins and ops) something that should be considered as an action that goes against the conduct policy and/or the administrator policy, or is it something that doesn't go against the policies and thus should just be could be counted as just a joke.
If this is something that could be classified as going against the aforementioned policies then, to what extent would something be classified as a minor case of misuse or a major case of misuse? On top of that, would that, if it is against the rules, as I have shown in my evidence (in which I have reported most cases, including ones of myself), most of our active staff team would be then at risk of suspension/warning/permaban. lastly, should we reconsider the policies due to the fact that it may affect how much fun the volunteers who make the server run have. If you didn't already know, making sure that the people who make everything run, the people who are volunteers and do this during their free time instead of doing whatever else they could be doing, the main point of having the whole concept of free-op is to let people have fun, most servers don't let their players mess with these admin commands that can be used to do some really cool things.
If this is something that isn't against the aforementioned policies then, clearly, it needs to be better clarified as such due to there seeming to be a bunch of confusion on this (e.g. fionn stating that it isn't allowed and should be reported to IA, but sks saying that joking is fine, and that the point of MC is to have fun), if this is the case we then may need to evaluate if their is some line that we need to draw to be able to know what classifies as misuse and what doesn't
Lastly, if it is a case where their is a point at which it is considered misuse and a point at which it can be considered a joke, where is that point, and how should be go about the each of the people who I have found evidence for, should we make it so that there is a thread posted defining where that line is, and then giving a small warning to those who have passed that point from the evidence I have given. On top of this, it then becomes a question of how professional do we want to be, sure we are just a Minecraft server, but there is still some professionalism that should be taken into account. Or, should it be on a case by case basis, and depend on the ranks of the admins in question, past cases of this, and wether or not it was an issue for the other players playing on the server.
To End this all off I want to reiterate that I don't think that everyone who I have enclosed evidence for should be punished, I have found evidence on most if not all of the active staff team, and have even included evidence on myself, while I personally believe that joke banning is fine so long as it isn't interrupting overall server performance (as in, people who are actually breaking the rules getting banned), and as long as both the person doing the punishment and the person who is being joke punished are having a good time. However, I do understand the counterclaim, and thus I think that it really needs to be more clarified so as to not allow confusion over it and to prevent more cases of this, and show where the line is between fun and misuse.
If this is something that could be classified as going against the aforementioned policies then, to what extent would something be classified as a minor case of misuse or a major case of misuse? On top of that, would that, if it is against the rules, as I have shown in my evidence (in which I have reported most cases, including ones of myself), most of our active staff team would be then at risk of suspension/warning/permaban. lastly, should we reconsider the policies due to the fact that it may affect how much fun the volunteers who make the server run have. If you didn't already know, making sure that the people who make everything run, the people who are volunteers and do this during their free time instead of doing whatever else they could be doing, the main point of having the whole concept of free-op is to let people have fun, most servers don't let their players mess with these admin commands that can be used to do some really cool things.
If this is something that isn't against the aforementioned policies then, clearly, it needs to be better clarified as such due to there seeming to be a bunch of confusion on this (e.g. fionn stating that it isn't allowed and should be reported to IA, but sks saying that joking is fine, and that the point of MC is to have fun), if this is the case we then may need to evaluate if their is some line that we need to draw to be able to know what classifies as misuse and what doesn't
Lastly, if it is a case where their is a point at which it is considered misuse and a point at which it can be considered a joke, where is that point, and how should be go about the each of the people who I have found evidence for, should we make it so that there is a thread posted defining where that line is, and then giving a small warning to those who have passed that point from the evidence I have given. On top of this, it then becomes a question of how professional do we want to be, sure we are just a Minecraft server, but there is still some professionalism that should be taken into account. Or, should it be on a case by case basis, and depend on the ranks of the admins in question, past cases of this, and wether or not it was an issue for the other players playing on the server.
To End this all off I want to reiterate that I don't think that everyone who I have enclosed evidence for should be punished, I have found evidence on most if not all of the active staff team, and have even included evidence on myself, while I personally believe that joke banning is fine so long as it isn't interrupting overall server performance (as in, people who are actually breaking the rules getting banned), and as long as both the person doing the punishment and the person who is being joke punished are having a good time. However, I do understand the counterclaim, and thus I think that it really needs to be more clarified so as to not allow confusion over it and to prevent more cases of this, and show where the line is between fun and misuse.
Now there was some backlash to the report, especially considering how, for part of me making the report, i live streamed it on discord (tho the backlash did also spawn the pretty funny meme of the IA report). now there is one bit of backlash that i would like to explain a bit because some people have quoted its points, this being a discord post in the general discussion channel (specifically this one), I would like to mention this one specifically because, after it was made, i saw how the person who made the post misinterpreted what i was doing, and we had a conversation in dms where i cleared up some of the things that they had thought, and they came into understanding of what i was doing.
Now after this I did do some more work on the report, not adding any new cases to it, but rather taking what i had already found, but trying to determine the context of each ban, and see which ones, if any, where jokebans, and which ones where not, even asking the people themselves about the bans in question. I did this on and off, but really stopped somewhere around june 14th, only really getting halfway done with what i really wanted to get done.
My Issues With How The Report Was Handled
To start off, I think that one of the main issues was the lack of communication between the IA team, and the person reporting the staff. now when i submitted the report I was told by the person who I made the report to "update me if there's any other pertinent information regarding this and i'll try to get it addressed i'll have the IA team look into this meanwhile". However, the only real communication I ended up having with the IA member was stuff like "how old are these?", and other messages that basically just said that "yes, we are working on it". the next day I asked if there were any updates on their end and was told that they were "looking into the most commonly abused command(s) and will likely look into restricting access to those tools if their rampant use becomes apparent". On top of this, I also was updating the member who I reported it too when needed even making efforts to ask if they wanted me to help with any investigation (i got no response).
I feel like the person reporting should have much more communication between the person who is reporting and the rest of the IA Team, other than the person who I reported it too no IA staff made any attempts to work with me (the person reporting) about the report. When you report someone you have to have already looked through logs of some kind to even make the report, and I feel as if the person who is making the report should be able to have a easy way to communicate with the team about anything that happens, or needs to be changed in the report.
In fact, I wasn't even told that my report was closed until i had conversation with an IA member, which i asked about this went like this:
(IA Person is in teal)
"What are you trying to prove?
From one IA Member to a reporter
Like out of curiosity for the repotr"
"read the readme"
"I did"
"then you know"
"Why do you continue you update it?"
"no its not that i added more recent cases, i am finding the evidence supporting the already added cases"
"that's still updating it..?"
"and also while doing that i found more things that arnt just in the punishment log"
"werent you the one that said punishment logs aren't viable proof due to context for permbans?"
"yes, thats why im finding the context"
"jesus ch rist
you care this much??
i respect it but jeez"
"also i mean i never got a response back about what happened to my origional report, so idk if you guys are still working on that or not, so i have decided to help out a bit by looking through all of the logs"
"we don't usually inform the people that reported the action that was taken
unless it's a public suspension"
"ah
it would be nice to at least say "yeah, we did something about it, thats all you need to know"
ah whatever, im not like heavily working on the report anyways"
"all we can say is we acknowledged your report"
From one IA Member to a reporter
Like out of curiosity for the repotr"
"read the readme"
"I did"
"then you know"
"Why do you continue you update it?"
"no its not that i added more recent cases, i am finding the evidence supporting the already added cases"
"that's still updating it..?"
"and also while doing that i found more things that arnt just in the punishment log"
"werent you the one that said punishment logs aren't viable proof due to context for permbans?"
"yes, thats why im finding the context"
"jesus ch rist
you care this much??
i respect it but jeez"
"also i mean i never got a response back about what happened to my origional report, so idk if you guys are still working on that or not, so i have decided to help out a bit by looking through all of the logs"
"we don't usually inform the people that reported the action that was taken
unless it's a public suspension"
"ah
it would be nice to at least say "yeah, we did something about it, thats all you need to know"
ah whatever, im not like heavily working on the report anyways"
"all we can say is we acknowledged your report"
The next Issue I had with what IA did, or rather didn't do, is that they didn't even seem to acknowledge that I had a bunch of stuff in the readme about what I expected to be done even if jokebanning wasn't against the rules (which according to IA it is not, for both ops and admins). In my readme file I explicitly stated:
If this is something that isn't against the aforementioned policies then, clearly, it needs to be better clarified as such due to there seeming to be a bunch of confusion on this (e.g. fionn stating that it isn't allowed and should be reported to IA, but sks saying that joking is fine, and that the point of MC is to have fun), if this is the case we then may need to evaluate if their is some line that we need to draw to be able to know what classifies as misuse and what doesn't
Lastly, if it is a case where their is a point at which it is considered misuse and a point at which it can be considered a joke, where is that point, and how should be go about the each of the people who I have found evidence for, should we make it so that there is a thread posted defining where that line is, and then giving a small warning to those who have passed that point from the evidence I have given. On top of this, it then becomes a question of how professional do we want to be, sure we are just a Minecraft server, but there is still some professionalism that should be taken into account. Or, should it be on a case by case basis, and depend on the ranks of the admins in question, past cases of this, and wether or not it was an issue for the other players playing on the server.
Lastly, if it is a case where their is a point at which it is considered misuse and a point at which it can be considered a joke, where is that point, and how should be go about the each of the people who I have found evidence for, should we make it so that there is a thread posted defining where that line is, and then giving a small warning to those who have passed that point from the evidence I have given. On top of this, it then becomes a question of how professional do we want to be, sure we are just a Minecraft server, but there is still some professionalism that should be taken into account. Or, should it be on a case by case basis, and depend on the ranks of the admins in question, past cases of this, and wether or not it was an issue for the other players playing on the server.
I feel as if this pretty clearly shows what should have been done if this wasn't against the rules, I said that if it isn't it needs to be much better clarified as their is still confusion about whether or not it is against the rules.
However, instead I was told unofficially that "jokebanning isn't against the rules, and so no action was taken with your report", and I feel like as if there should have been at least an attempt to make this more clear, one of the main points of making the report was to provide clarification on the rules, however that still hasn't happened and I feel as if that shows that IA doesn't even care enough to follow up on any requests made by the person who reported it, or even carefully read the stuff sent by the reporter (which is further exemplified by the fact that, after submitting my report, I was asked about stuff that was already clearly written inside the readme)
I feel as if this shows that the IA team wasn't handling the report professionally, and just glossed over the detail.
My last issue with how the team handled my report is how they went about discussing the report with the rest of the IA team. on the thread with the template for making a report, it said that if you are reporting a member of IA it should be dm'd to a different member of IA. The reason for this makes sense, if your going to report a member of IA they should not be in the discussion as that may make it biased.
However, I know for a fact, that the report was shared with the member of IA who I had reported, in its entirety. I feel as if that negates the whole point of "We're here to act as an impartial judge against abuse claims as well as re-evaluate the current staff's qualifications.", and shows that they are not impartial.
I would also like to mention out of the current members of IA: zevante,fionn ,Suprmn, and zeseryu, Suprmn was removed for inactivity, fionn was suspended by IA themselves (even if the suspension was then considered invalid, the fact that there was enough suspicion of an IA member to get them suspended, shows that they should not be part of IA), zeseryu is only part of IA because they are the EAO. the only one who is "impartial" is zevante, who is very inactive, however still does his job as an IA member.
I feel as if all of this shows the incompetence of the IA team as a whole, and that we may need to restructure how the IA team operates.
Other Notes That Relate To These Issues
After making my report about all these jokebans I have gotten a lot of complaints mainly from some specific seniors about me being a hypocrite, one such case that I know of thanks to an anonymous senior admin who told me about some of the conversations in the Senior Admin Lounge is about how some people where talking about a relatively recent case of me joke banning a OP (alternatedrifter) for saying "june 29th" with the ban reason of "no" after i had said "im banning the next person to say june 29th", shortly after which i unbanned them (however I was a bit slow because 4 other people yelled at me for jokebanning someone). After this I was actually almost formally warned for it, however I explained my case and the person who was going to warn me decided not to do it.
So, to address these misconceptions I would like to say the following message:
Despite what some people might think, I for one am not against jokebanning, I believe that as long as both the person being joke punishment and the person who did the punishment are both having a laugh, don't take any actual offence to it, it is ok to jokeban both ops and admins, also provided that the people who are actually breaking the rules are getting banned.
On top of this, I would like to Officially state (in case it wasn't already obvious) that I will not be making any more IA reports related to this, or continuing to work on this IA report, however if someone would like to follow up on this case, and would like my updated files, I am Happy to share them (provided you aren't going to do anything malicious with them, and that you are at least a telnet admin)
EDIT: Ok, I'm making some needed clarification here, the problem here is not that I'm fine with jokebanning but yet I made a thread about how I'm unsatisfied with how the IA team didn't do something about the jokebanning, I'm fine with that. however, I clearly stated, both in this report, and in this thread, that if jokebanning is not against the rules, then it should be clarified that this is the case, because as of right now, its a gray area, that could be considered against the rules, but according to IA it isn't
the problem is that IA did not make any attempt to clarify that jokebanning is perfectly fine, even after I explicitly said that even if jokebanning is ok that should be clarified