Alright, so I'm just going to address this here and now. The rule that is currently being discussed, is one that is a necessity to be in place. Were proud to say that 99.9% of our bans have a solid evidence behind them. Every moderator is *required* to have a solid evidence behind their ban, and if they don't, repercussions are had. Furthermore, we require players whom submit evidence to keep their evidence around in order to not only keep up this standard, but to protect our players of any future damages, loss or hate. If we ever allowed removing of evidence, we would be wronging everyone who's been banned off our network, and we would only be more biased with the situations. Should we come across bans without evidence attached to it, should it be a moderators ban, they get in serious trouble. To the extent of being fired and possibly banned themselves. Upon seeing those bans, we do un-ban the person, which only lets another hacker or rule breaker onto our system, due to the fact that someone didn't have evidence to begin with or removed it. Without evidence, we cannot guarantee that whomever this person is, is truly breaking our rules or even deserving of the punishment given.
Now, lets get into the real meat and cheese of this thread eh? Removing people who remove evidence from our network. This rule has been in place for a very substantial amount of time, (I think coming up on a year to a year and a half), and it was put in place for the reasoning in the first paragraph. Its always been standard, and made known both on the rules page itself, in the template for the report abuse section, in some moderators replies to report abuses (This is now becoming more standard), and so on and so on. As harsh as people view this rule, its as necessary as it is harsh. If we allowed people to delete evidence, the quality of this community would drop exponentially. There is no right balance of removing evidence and letting people off free. We are working on a much better system for evidence in general, that will alleviate all of these concerns, but until that time comes around, this is the system that will be in place. If you have a better idea of a system to run for the removing evidences, that is possible, contact a member of the sr staff. No matter how many signatures this petition gets, it won't get any of its idealisms put into place until a reasonable one is brought up, and while remaining in the realm of possibility and fees-ability. To address some of these ideas, no we can't just "store them all in our database", as there has been too much to ever be amassed. So say the average video size is between 1 and 200 gigabytes, depending on the video compression, put the average at around 50 gigabytes for standard math purposes. We average 2000+ bans a day (if half of those are hacker videos, which more than half are), for the last 720 days of MCG's being at this average. That comes out to somewhere near 36,000,000 gigabytes of hacker videos alone. Im not even accounting for all the screenshots on a daily basis. Thats 36,000 terabytes, or 36 petabytes. For more information on a single petabyte, see
http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/What-does-a-petabyte-look-like . This is unrealistically impossible because we (nor google, nor the government), have enough money to buy, and maintain that much data. We are working on a similar solution however too this that won't be anywhere near as extensive.
Another large suggestion is that we either let those who delete evidence off free, I'm sure anyone who's read this far in this post understands why we simply can't do that. Some suggest we do lower the ban times, or try harder to get in contact with people. We keep the permanent ban time because thats how on scale of an offense it is. We get nearly 150 ban disputes a day, and if more of those lack evidence, the amount of rule breakers on the servers will go up. This rule is as necessary as it is harsh in order to provide the best playing experience for the 90k people who play our system per day.
Now, its been made public for a while now, but I guess never necessarily went "viral", is the procedure if you want to remove videos either from your channel, for any generalized reason, etc. Should you for some reason want to "clean up" your channel, your plenty fine to go to a moderator and ask them to re-upload your videos (if you have a LOT of videos, you may require multiple staff members). From there, the moderator will go to a sr member of staff in order to add the new evidence link to the current ban tab so that all records are kept. For "accidents" if you (or someone else) re-upload the video and contact a member of staff, you will be unbanned, simple as that.
