Attempt at workaround for flawed moderation system

[Doubleshoe]

Moderation report of player FunWithFlags, player ID: I cannot be bothered to look this up again

Dear moderators. The aforementioned player, FunWithFlags is causing repeated, majorly disruptive issues with using your website in ways that you do not permit reporting through regular means. Specifically, they join hundreds upon hundreds of games and then do not make any moves. This would not be a problem as such, IF these games were in training mode. However, they are not. FunWithFlags keeps joining tournaments, and then not making a SINGLE move throughout the entire tournament. This has been ongoing for many months, could you PLEASE give us some way of dealing with this?

Due to some quirk of the reputation system, setting a minimum reputation requirement for tournaments does not seem to work either, even though I have literally never seen them with a non-red reputation, and only exceedingly rarely above 0%.

Also, before you say "give them a red thumb", point the first, that does not prevent me from being paired with them, I (and others) have tried. Point the second, when attempting to tell you that "everyone should avoid this player", the site tells me that "this is their first game". According to their player stats, they have played over 300 games of the currently relevant game, Race for the Galaxy.


*Moderator edit: Once again, please refrain from calling players out by name in the Forum. The Forums are for general discussion, not for witch hunts.

Author edit: If you are not willing to moderate your site against users who actually harm the experience of EVERYONE THEY ENCOUNTER, this is unfortunately the only venue we have to report player *. Sorry

*Moderator edit x2: You have been warned multiple times, yet again name the player as a provocation. You are being moderated for this.

[Tanjanica]

Agreed, this really is a major issue and I hope someone deals with it. 100s of games timed out each month.

[Shobu]

They won't do anything unfortunately, only edit his name from this thread.

[lundeeng]

+1. Since joining BGA, FWF has joined and caused disruption to *every single tournament* I’ve entered. Their pattern of registering for every tournament available, disappearing for a week while timing out of hundreds of games, then playing just enough fast games to restore karma and register for every new tournament available has been repeated 1000s of times. It is clear to anyone who takes even a cursory review of their history that they are deliberately griefing the whole community of tournament players. It’s outrageous that this has been raised so many times by so many affected players and is still a continuing issue- the tournaments are the most interesting feature of the site for me, and I will not be renewing my premium account when it comes time if admin refuses to implement a fix.

[Doubleshoe]

They won't do anything unfortunately, only edit his name from this thread.

And now they have done so, yep

Anyways, to remind everyone, this is about the player *, who has a consistent pattern of joining all available tournaments and then NOT MAKING A SINGLE MOVE. This is a problem, Mx moderator, which makes your website significantly less appealing to use.

*moderator edit: removed again.

[sourisdudesert]

I you ever wonder why Forums is not a good place for moderation, here is the perfect example why.

1. Believe it or not, but despite all the messages before that pretends that this is a long term situation that everyone knows, the first report against this player has been written... today. So approximately right after the author of this forum thread posted it.

2. Thus, between his report and this post on the forum this same player gives our moderation the incredible delay of ... ONE minute to process his report, before posting his message on the forum and accusing our moderators team to be weak and our moderation system to be "flawed".

3. This is not the "only venue" to report this player, since you perfectly manage to find a way to create a report for our moderators. And this report has been closed, by the way, because you not only publicly reported another player on the forum (which is forbidden by our TOS), but you also thought that a link to this post would be enough. I guarantee you that this is enough to prove that you care much about attacking this service than preventing bad players to do bad things on BGA, but obviously it was closed by our moderators since a public shaming do not make a valid report.

4. Your assertions are wrong. Check the player: he finished at least 8 tournaments games today. I am not saying that all what is said is false, but at least what I can see is that you are exaggerating and this is not good for your case.

Conclusion:

• 1. If you have something against this player, gather real and accurate proof. This is easy as most things are public on BGA.
• 2. Use the "Report this player" tool.
• 3. Do not public shame players on the forums.

[Silene]

4. Your assertions are wrong. Check the player: he finished at least 8 tournaments games today. I am not saying that all what is said is false, but at least what I can see is that you are exaggerating and this is not good for your case.

With all due respect - while he might have finished some tournament games in the past - today he only timed out in a couple of games (like most days). That's not "finishing".

[Silene]

1. Believe it or not, but despite all the messages before that pretends that this is a long term situation that everyone knows, the first report against this player has been written... today. So approximately right after the author of this forum thread posted it.

I think the main problem here is, that right now, this behaviour seems to be allowed. So there's not much ground to report them.
It isn't enough to solve this particular case anyway because they can just come back with a new name and do the same. When trying to report someone, it is quite clear in the menu that matters with quit games are not supposed to be reported because the system is handling those (you just run into a dead end if you try to report it). But right now as can be seen in this example, the system does NOT handle it sufficiently.

So when people exploit the unlimited tournament access like this, maybe it's time to restrict that possibility. Here are some ideas that might help the situation:

* limit the number of tournaments one can sign up for (maybe per day / maybe alltogether?)
* make karma more difficult to recover
* invent a tourmanent counter that sums up how many tournaments you have regularly finished / how many you timed out in
--> use this to restrict tournaments / amount of tournaments one can join
--> or hard-cap karma

And in addition: if the tournament is not a knock-out format:
* remove the player from the tournament after they have been skipped or the game was abandonend because of them

[sourisdudesert]

4. Your assertions are wrong. Check the player: he finished at least 8 tournaments games today. I am not saying that all what is said is false, but at least what I can see is that you are exaggerating and this is not good for your case.

With all due respect - while he might have finished some tournament games in the past - today he only timed out in a couple of games (like most days). That's not "finishing".

Yes, and the fact that we cannot see everything is why we ask reports to be accurate and detailled, so we cannot miss anything, and not just a link to a forum post with personnal attacks against players or moderators.

[sourisdudesert]

1. Believe it or not, but despite all the messages before that pretends that this is a long term situation that everyone knows, the first report against this player has been written... today. So approximately right after the author of this forum thread posted it.

I think the main problem here is, that right now, this behaviour seems to be allowed. So there's not much ground to report them.
It isn't enough to solve this particular case anyway because they can just come back with a new name and do the same. When trying to report someone, it is quite clear in the menu that matters with quit games are not supposed to be reported because the system is handling those (you just run into a dead end if you try to report it). But right now as can be seen in this example, the system does NOT handle it sufficiently.

So when people exploit the unlimited tournament access like this, maybe it's time to restrict that possibility. Here are some ideas that might help the situation:

* limit the number of tournaments one can sign up for (maybe per day / maybe alltogether?)
* make karma more difficult to recover
* invent a tourmanent counter that sums up how many tournaments you have regularly finished / how many you timed out in
--> use this to restrict tournaments / amount of tournaments one can join
--> or hard-cap karma

And in addition: if the tournament is not a knock-out format:
* remove the player from the tournament after they have been skipped or the game was abandonend because of them

This is not allowed, and as you see player's reputation is zero, so the reputation works. It is tournament's creators responsability to avoid this kind of players if they want to (very easy with the reputation settings), and if you join a tournament with no reputation limit, you know you may meet some players like this.

Conclusions:
- our reputation system works
- our moderation system works when players use it instead of posting on forums
- we provide tools to avoid such players => please use them
- when such player appear, you just have to wait, expel him and win the game
- if you join a tournament without no reputation limit, you accept that such player exists