Community Discussion: What should the policy be for deleting evidence?

[Pixelatorx2]

- Warning may contain harsh opinions -

While I believe this rule is bunk, and should be completely rethought, comparing it to a real life murder is literally taking it too far. Someone being removed from a game for a week is nothing, absolutely nothing like losing a real person. When someone is murdered, what comes of it? Human distress for years, if not forever. When someone is banned, you say "eh" and suck it up and move onto one of the other thousand servers. Unless you can compare both, do not compare it. You have no idea the pain that people go through. If you can, don't make that analogy anyway - you clearly don't get it.

Is the rule unfair to the reported player?
No, not really. Unless the ban is recent, and only happened a couple of weeks ago, then I believe the player who deleted the evidence deserves some sort of punishment. Is it 7 month old evidence, and the banned player has made no login-attempts, then no, the player who deleted the evidence is completely within the rules to do so. The banned player should then not be able to dispute their ban.

What I wonder, is why that both sides of this argument cannot agree on something. Setting a time limit, say 3 months, for the banned player to dispute their ban is reasonable. Why you ask? After three months of unsuccessful ban disputes, and or, no ban disputes whatsoever and have made no login attempts (this can be recorded) then they clearly aren't interested in coming back. Its like parole in a prison/jail (You insisted on comparing the two..)

EDIT: Gotta sleep, will edit this tomorrow

Pixelatorx2 tagging myself to remind myself.

Continuing on.

What I personally don't agree with is the fact that when the hacker has hacked and was banned for 7 days, then the evidence was deleted and BAM. The reporter is permanently banned. Forever. Gone. Over just a 7day ban. Wasteful, and will just cause further arguments. If you give the banned player a time limit to dispute their ban however, the evidence would/can be deleted after the set time limit. Better yet, get a database that stores the videos for 3 months (or however many you think the time limit should be) and then the video is deleted.

Perfect. Fool proof system to prevent this situation at all. If the reporter deletes the evidence off of his/her channel there would be no reason to delete the evidence. Sure, you say, "The database wont have enough". Think. Every day, the database would delete the same amount that come in. (+ 10gb of data, -10gb of data) leaving the amount of storage the same. During a clean sweep, sure the database will fill up even more (say, +20gb of data) but them remember, after 30 days (or however many you want it to be) that gets deleted (-20gb of data) leaving the same amount of space. To save even more space, limit the hacker video to under 5 minutes. If the player reports using their entire video, get a mod to trim it down to the part with the player. Not very difficult, any windows computer can do that with Windows Movie Maker.

Moo brought up a good point:

A secondary option to the permanent ban side of the suggestion for upholding bans despite a lack of evidence:
Rather than a permanent ban, because there's no evidence, shorten it to a month. They'll be able to come back onto the servers after just over four weeks, which is more severe than a 7-day ban, but still a large compromise to the existing permanent ban despite a lack of evidence.

Hopefully this comes to some resolve, bbl.

 

[123456789matrty]

Firstly, the fact of the matter is there will be no solution that can make everyone happy, it just isn't feasible. Secondly, we have to look at the fact that when a person uploads to their channel, many people do not keep the original video, for the size factor, or just the fact its clogging up the Desktop and etc and so on. The problem which then arises is the fact that if the video was accidentally or purposely deleted, the punishment is the same. In my view you cannot give the same punishment for a similar action if the intent wasn't there.

Ill use a football analogy here, for example there's 2 guys going for a 50/50 challenge..

Scenario 1: The red player kicks the ball before the blue player, but as the blue player is completely committed to hitting the ball, he cant stop, and kicks the man.

Scenario 2: The red player kicks the ball, and the blue players only intention is to kick the player, not the ball. He then of course kicks the man.

Now, would it be fair to give the same punishment to both scenarios? No, because it depends on the intent. If the person intended to delete to get a popular player unbanned for example, then i have no issue with the rule. If the person deletes their channel, for example, maybe deleting their channel or making a new one, (and lots of people change channel's regularly) then i don’t feel the punishments should be the same.

We also get told we get enough warning about evidence. There is no use warning us if we don’t have the evidence anymore, not many people can afford to keep all the files of hackers on their computer, I for one had over 70 odd on my desktop at one point, and it just isn’t possible for many people. If people, the minute they upload the video, deletes the file, then there isn’t any warning what so ever. it’s literally the minute you delete the video, gone bye have a great time.
There probably won’t be a solution that pleases many people at this point as different people feel different people are responsible for the handling and care of hacker reports, whether its the community who help the staff with their job, or the staff who help the community with the hackers. We also cannot even compare this to murder, this is a game, Murder is life threatening. Although concepts are similar, it likes comparing WWII to a 'little fight'.

I feel that we are starting to lose focus on the fact that we want the hackers caught, not the people trying to catch the hackers for the community.

 

[Perkins]

Dunno about anyone else, but hearing about Cscoop's case and this rule really motivates me to not report anyone. I mean, that's how you remove all possibility of being banned via this rule - don't report anyone, ever. Leave the game, or wait for them to cross paths with a moderator, or wait for some unknowing victim to record and report them instead.

That being said, if you're like me and you've already reported anyone, there's not much you can do to save you. All it takes is a YouTube glitch, or a regular spring cleaning of your desktop, or a malfunctioning computer before you become a ticking time bomb for a permaban.

Or, if you insist on reporting people, treat your evidence like a PhD student treats their thesis: keep a few copies on your machine, back it up onto a USB or 3, email it to yourself, upload it to Dropbox and any other storage services, send a copy to your friends, print it out (the image/each frame of video), send a copy to Chad, give a copy to Chad's cat, beam it up to space and tell aliens to hold onto it, etc.

 

[Sean]

Okay I finally got around to posting my thoughts on this. I don't think it will be as long as first intended.

Lets start off by saying the yes this 100% should be a bannable offence. By removing evidence you are allowing other users (hackers) to roam free which we already have an epidemic of. But it should not be a perm ban that is crazy. First of all people might now read the rules and this seems like a pretty harsh punishment. While yes I know if you play on MCSG you agree to the terms and conditions but the truth is that probably 10% of users who have logged onto the system have actually read them.

Also a lot of people might have active YouTube channels and for someone that is trying to keep track of videos, old out dated hacker videos can clog this up.

Also there is the case that YouTube can take down the video or sites like Imgur can remove the image. Why should a user be punished for the actions of another.

Now with that clear I would like to put forward a solution/ recommendations /new policy that I would see be effective.

The main backbone of this new policy would be as follows. The user who submits the report and deletes the evidence gets banned for the amount of time the user who was originally banned for.

Example A.

• [User 1] submits a report abuse of a hacker. The evidence is valid and [The hacker] gets banned for 1 week as it was there 1st offence. 2 months later [User 1] decides to clean out his YouTube and deletes the video. While at the same time [The hacker] decides too try and clean his record so he can apply for mod. So he makes a ban dispute. The Sr staff review the ban dispute and notice the evidence is deleted. [The hacker] gets a clean history and [User 1] is banned for a week.

Example B.

• [User 1] submits a report abuse of a hacker. The evidence is valid and [The hacker] gets perm banned as it was his second offence. 2 months later [User 1] decides to clean out his YouTube and deletes the video. While at the same time [The hacker] decides to make a ban dispute. The Sr staff review the ban dispute and notice the evidence is deleted. [The hacker] gets unbanned and [User 1] is perm banned.

Do you see where I am coming from. Now as well as this rule change I have some more recommendations.

1. Add a rule book to the hub so users can be more aware of the rules.
2. A new report abuse template as follows.

In-Game-Name [Of rule breaker]:
Reason:
Proof:
Key times on video [Optional]:
Time and date [Optional]:
Gametype:

I {Your name} agree to all the rules and regulations of MCGamer and understand that if I purposely remove/ delete evidence I risk being removed from MCGamer.

3. Before a user is banned from the network they should be first contacted and given a time to explain there situation/ re-upload the evidence.

I hope you (The administration team) take this into consideration and I would love to hear some feedback on my proposed solution.

Wow that felt like I was trying to sell a product on Dragons Den or something xD

Finally shared my thoughts on this matter xD

 

[IronOre12]

Hacking = Week ban. Deleting evidence = PermaBan for innocent person. Something here is wrong.

 

[cscoop]

Finally shared my thoughts on this matter xD

I like what you said about this topic, but I have one critique. You say that if it is the players 2nd offense then they should also receive a perm-ban.. this doesn't really make any sense. As there is almost no way to tell if someone had been banned before, they would be doing the exact same thing as the person that got banned for a week for deleting evidence of a player banned for a week. In my opinion it should be tiered on it's own. What I mean by this, is whether the ban was perm or 7 day, the player who deleted the evidence would get a 1st offense ban, unless of course they had already previously had a ban for deleting evidence. It should have the same structure as hacking offenses do, 1st offense is a week, and 2nd is perm. I'm not entirely sure why this wasn't something brought up when the rule was first made.. but oh well

 

[Sean]

I like what you said about this topic, but I have one critique. You say that if it is the players 2nd offense then they should also receive a perm-ban.. this doesn't really make any sense. As there is almost no way to tell if someone had been banned before, they would be doing the exact same thing as the person that got banned for a week for deleting evidence of a player banned for a week. In my opinion it should be tiered on it's own. What I mean by this, is whether the ban was perm or 7 day, the player who deleted the evidence would get a 1st offense ban, unless of course they had already previously had a ban for deleting evidence. It should have the same structure as hacking offenses do, 1st offense is a week, and 2nd is perm. I'm not entirely sure why this wasn't something brought up when the rule was first made.. but oh well

You have a good point there. I will add that in as a second proposed solution.

 

[cscoop]

Reserved for a long reply later.

still waiting lmao

 

[Ceroria]

So, allow me to get this straight.

Even if the evidence was for a 24-hour ban, the person who deleted the evidence could get permanently removed from MCG?
Okay, yeah. Sounds completely fair. Woohoo.

First off, this is my take on the rule:
No. No. No.

Obviously, there's been a few dozen good arguments against this rule already, both on and off this thread, so I won't go over those again in detail, but just to recap:

• What about accidental deletions? ex: say there was a Google+ account that was linked to a YouTube account, and the Google+ account got deleted, thus indirectly deleting the YT account and all videos on it... including the hacker report(s).
• The option where people have the chance to re-upload the evidence is completely absurd, and even staff members know it. Do you really think that we're going to save all of the hacker reports we've ever made on our own storage space? Personally, my laptop has less than 300 GBs of storage, and it already has 50 GBs of software and other miscellaneous files, and a good 100 GBs of business files. For an international company. Worth real money. Do you really think I'm going to move aside and delete those files just so that I can have a few dozen videos that take up the rest of my storage, and then not even be able to download a 10GB Steam game? No thank you.
• Rather than comparing it to murder, let's say... bullying or general abuse. It's not as extreme, but still a comparison. A bystander takes a video and gets the bully suspended for 7 days. Half a year later, after the evidence was deleted to save storage, the bully wants the suspension off of his school record, so he appeals to the school administration. There's no evidence any more, but the suspension was still there. Does he get the suspension lifted? No. Does the bystander get expelled? Of course NOT!

However, there are still potential cases in which the person deletes the evidence on purpose. Very few, but they're there.
So rather than just raising my hand and shouting "REMOVE THE RULE!!1!!!!!!!1", I'd like to propose something else.

Ordinarily, the reporter would get permanently banned, and the rule-breaker would get the ban wiped off his or her record due to lack of evidence.
However, what if the reporter got a 7-day tempban, and the ban was kept in place for the rule-breaker.
A permanent ban is extremely severe, and in some cases much too severe, particularly in the cases in which it was an accident.
A 7-day ban is a clear message saying 'Don't do it again', but eventually they will be able to return to the servers that they originally tried to help by reporting the user.

The rule-breaker, however, keeps their ban even if it is disputed.
Yes, this would mean a change in policy, but it's not a particularly bad one.
Think about it - If the ban is temporary, it'll be lifted again and the user will be able to play after a few days/weeks, and even after a year they'll be able to apply for Mod.
If it's permanent, odds are they did something really bad, or a second/third offense. If it's that severe, obviously the evidence was clearly sufficient to warrant a permanent ban, so why not just keep it in place even if the evidence is gone?

A secondary option to the permanent ban side of the suggestion for upholding bans despite a lack of evidence:
Rather than a permanent ban, because there's no evidence, shorten it to a month. They'll be able to come back onto the servers after just over four weeks, which is more severe than a 7-day ban, but still a large compromise to the existing permanent ban despite a lack of evidence.


Whether you accept my suggestions, tweak them, or just say to yourself, "Mooclan, what on Earth were you thinking?!?!?"....
Just please realize that this is something that I really think should be changed. It doesn't even have to be completely removed, just changed to make it less harsh.
Video games are supposed to be fun for players. Being banned off of one of your favorite servers for a crazy reason that more than half of the community doesn't even know about really isn't fun, just sayin'.

The like button only lets you like posts once ;-;

That makes me very sad

 

[cscoop]

I haven't really said what I think on here, but before I start I have a question.

Why is this a permanent offense? I have asked staff and all they do is give me reasons why it's bannable. I know this is a bannable offense, and I don't disagree with that at all, but I haven't gotten a straight answer as to why its permanent. There are so many reasons as to why this shouldn't be permanent, and that's what I want to dig in to.

First off, a lot of staff like to fall back onto 'it's adding more hackers into the system.' That's simply not true, there were the same amount of hackers before and after the initial report. If anything, the 'hacker' probably would have learned their lesson after, say, 3 days of being banned, but since the evidence was deleted they got off early. They still would have had the experience of being banned and most likely stop. If they didn't stop, then they would just get banned permanently

Something I firmly believe in, relating to the first thing I said, is having the ban tier the same as the hacking ban tier for evidence deletion. It only makes sense.. Hacking is a much worse offense than deleting a hackers evidence. If it's even worth a ban, it should definitely not be permanent for deleting evidence. There's so much that could make it invalid. For example, someone getting all of their friends to flag the video down, YouTube shutting down the channel, or just general annoyance of having a video file left around from months ago serving no purpose. It's all too finicky in my opinion. It's all based on circumstantial evidence and opinions.

You guys really like to use analogies, but the one about murder is so far off it makes me cringe. An analogy that would actually make some sort of sense to this situation is as follows:

You go to an amusement park, and you see someone tampering with a part of a ride or something like that and there's no staff around to see it, so you take a picture with your phone. In a realistic standpoint you would sent the picture over to the staff of the park to get the people out of the part for breaking the rules, but in MCSG's logic of how this would work, you would have to keep the picture on your phone and keep showing the park's staff it over and over until the caught the people, then keep it unless they got the wrong person. If the person where to delete the photo, the staff of the park would ban you from it, to never come back. You could have just let the trouble makers be, and wouldn't have been banished from the park, which is against the whole common courtesy thing of telling staff that those people where breaking the law.

You can see why that would be a problem, many people feel threatened to even report hackers. A way to fix that would be to have the mods download the evidence like they used to be required to do. I don't know much about internet caps, but from how I see it, how can you be a mod if you have an internet cap? Because, correct me if i'm wrong, it would also tap into the amount of data you can use when you upload a hacker video of your own. Besides, i'm sure there are plenty of mods that do not have internet caps, and the files are relatively small if they're 2 mins long on average. Honestly, the person reporting the hacker is going out of their way to do the moderator's job for them, the least they can do is keep the evidence safe.

To sum it all up in a TL;DR sort of way, I think deleting evidence should have the same ban tier as normal hacking bans. First offense, 7 days. Second offense, perm. I honestly have no idea why this wasn't the case initially. Hopefully this gets changed, because I have absolutely no idea why it would be bad to change the rule. Thanks for reading <3


(waits for scott to reply)

 

[3point]

So, allow me to get this straight.

Even if the evidence was for a 24-hour ban, the person who deleted the evidence could get permanently removed from MCG?
Okay, yeah. Sounds completely fair. Woohoo.

First off, this is my take on the rule:
No. No. No.

Obviously, there's been a few dozen good arguments against this rule already, both on and off this thread, so I won't go over those again in detail, but just to recap:

• What about accidental deletions? ex: say there was a Google+ account that was linked to a YouTube account, and the Google+ account got deleted, thus indirectly deleting the YT account and all videos on it... including the hacker report(s).
• The option where people have the chance to re-upload the evidence is completely absurd, and even staff members know it. Do you really think that we're going to save all of the hacker reports we've ever made on our own storage space? Personally, my laptop has less than 300 GBs of storage, and it already has 50 GBs of software and other miscellaneous files, and a good 100 GBs of business files. For an international company. Worth real money. Do you really think I'm going to move aside and delete those files just so that I can have a few dozen videos that take up the rest of my storage, and then not even be able to download a 10GB Steam game? No thank you.
• Rather than comparing it to murder, let's say... bullying or general abuse. It's not as extreme, but still a comparison. A bystander takes a video and gets the bully suspended for 7 days. Half a year later, after the evidence was deleted to save storage, the bully wants the suspension off of his school record, so he appeals to the school administration. There's no evidence any more, but the suspension was still there. Does he get the suspension lifted? No. Does the bystander get expelled? Of course NOT!

However, there are still potential cases in which the person deletes the evidence on purpose. Very few, but they're there.
So rather than just raising my hand and shouting "REMOVE THE RULE!!1!!!!!!!1", I'd like to propose something else.

Ordinarily, the reporter would get permanently banned, and the rule-breaker would get the ban wiped off his or her record due to lack of evidence.
However, what if the reporter got a 7-day tempban, and the ban was kept in place for the rule-breaker.
A permanent ban is extremely severe, and in some cases much too severe, particularly in the cases in which it was an accident.
A 7-day ban is a clear message saying 'Don't do it again', but eventually they will be able to return to the servers that they originally tried to help by reporting the user.

The rule-breaker, however, keeps their ban even if it is disputed.
Yes, this would mean a change in policy, but it's not a particularly bad one.
Think about it - If the ban is temporary, it'll be lifted again and the user will be able to play after a few days/weeks, and even after a year they'll be able to apply for Mod.
If it's permanent, odds are they did something really bad, or a second/third offense. If it's that severe, obviously the evidence was clearly sufficient to warrant a permanent ban, so why not just keep it in place even if the evidence is gone?

A secondary option to the permanent ban side of the suggestion for upholding bans despite a lack of evidence:
Rather than a permanent ban, because there's no evidence, shorten it to a month. They'll be able to come back onto the servers after just over four weeks, which is more severe than a 7-day ban, but still a large compromise to the existing permanent ban despite a lack of evidence.


Whether you accept my suggestions, tweak them, or just say to yourself, "Mooclan, what on Earth were you thinking?!?!?"....
Just please realize that this is something that I really think should be changed. It doesn't even have to be completely removed, just changed to make it less harsh.
Video games are supposed to be fun for players. Being banned off of one of your favorite servers for a crazy reason that more than half of the community doesn't even know about really isn't fun, just sayin'.

I'm sure that eventually you will make a post that I'll think is stupid or wrong. Today is not that day. This sums up most of what I want to say.

I'm against the rule, and the one reason I have that hasn't been said yet is that I have MCSG friends *cough* The_Bubbly_Brit *cough* who delete evidence all the time and have never gotten in trouble. Tons of people do it, which gives any staff the ability to ban tons of people. It makes it so easy for a mod with a grudge to target someone.

 

[I_love_desk]

I haven't really said what I think on here, but before I start I have a question.

Why is this a permanent offense? I have asked staff and all they do is give me reasons why it's bannable. I know this is a bannable offense, and I don't disagree with that at all, but I haven't gotten a straight answer as to why its permanent. There are so many reasons as to why this shouldn't be permanent, and that's what I want to dig in to.

First off, a lot of staff like to fall back onto 'it's adding more hackers into the system.' That's simply not true, there were the same amount of hackers before and after the initial report. If anything, the 'hacker' probably would have learned their lesson after, say, 3 days of being banned, but since the evidence was deleted they got off early. They still would have had the experience of being banned and most likely stop. If they didn't stop, then they would just get banned permanently

Something I firmly believe in, relating to the first thing I said, is having the ban tier the same as the hacking ban tier for evidence deletion. It only makes sense.. Hacking is a much worse offense than deleting a hackers evidence. If it's even worth a ban, it should definitely not be permanent for deleting evidence. There's so much that could make it invalid. For example, someone getting all of their friends to flag the video down, YouTube shutting down the channel, or just general annoyance of having a video file left around from months ago serving no purpose. It's all too finicky in my opinion. It's all based on circumstantial evidence and opinions.

You guys really like to use analogies, but the one about murder is so far off it makes me cringe. An analogy that would actually make some sort of sense to this situation is as follows:

You go to an amusement park, and you see someone tampering with a part of a ride or something like that and there's no staff around to see it, so you take a picture with your phone. In a realistic standpoint you would sent the picture over to the staff of the park to get the people out of the part for breaking the rules, but in MCSG's logic of how this would work, you would have to keep the picture on your phone and keep showing the park's staff it over and over until the caught the people, then keep it unless they got the wrong person. If the person where to delete the photo, the staff of the park would ban you from it, to never come back. You could have just let the trouble makers be, and wouldn't have been banished from the park, which is against the whole common courtesy thing of telling staff that those people where breaking the law.

You can see why that would be a problem, many people feel threatened to even report hackers. A way to fix that would be to have the mods download the evidence like they used to be required to do. I don't know much about internet caps, but from how I see it, how can you be a mod if you have an internet cap? Because, correct me if i'm wrong, it would also tap into the amount of data you can use when you upload a hacker video of your own. Besides, i'm sure there are plenty of mods that do not have internet caps, and the files are relatively small if they're 2 mins long on average. Honestly, the person reporting the hacker is going out of their way to do the moderator's job for them, the least they can do is keep the evidence safe.

To sum it all up in a TL;DR sort of way, I think deleting evidence should have the same ban tier as normal hacking bans. First offense, 7 days. Second offense, perm. I honestly have no idea why this wasn't the case initially. Hopefully this gets changed, because I have absolutely no idea why it would be bad to change the rule. Thanks for reading <3


(waits for scott to reply)

Pretty much my exact thoughts in one really well-written post. Nis.