"S***" insult is allowed on BGA !

[Claude Chabrol]

1) One week ago, before starting a game. we were waiting at a table where a player from Canada (Farman F 222) insulted the table creator with the term "slut"
We did not accept this player into the game and kicked him out because of insults.
But the table creator wrote a report, and i decided to write a report too, because i consider this insult is very unacceptable.

2) Today i checked the profile of this player.
The player did not get any penalty, and the report was not even studied by BGA team/admins !

3) The player played the whole week without any problem !
--> You can insult people with the term "slut" without getting any penalty, this is the conclusion.

4) Today, i played again a game with 2 Canadian players, one of them used kingmaking.
I wrote a message on her wall to say this was clearly a lack of sportsmanship

5) Two minutes later, the message was deleted, i suppose this player knwos one of the 4 moderators/admins (this player has around 100 "friends")
I wrote a report, but i suppose it won't be read either.

6) The conclusion is :
--> You can insult other players
--> If you know admins, kingmaking is allowed.

Thanks for reading.
And don't forget to insult me if you don't agree with any of my analysis !

[totes_not_pej]

I am not here to defend Seraphs/admins in any way, but you might have made an incorrect conclusion in your point 5). The other player prolly just deleted the message themselves, you can do that with messages on your wall. No need for admin intervention there.

EDIT: Forgot to insult you hehe. Also, I just realized something relevant to your point 1 - the standard punishment for slurs is about 3 days Devilkin. Could it be that you just missed it? It would probably say so in your report, but I dunno.

[sourisdudesert]

Hi,

Please don't insult admins and moderators. Of course "s***" is an insult and is not tolerated.

Moderation on BGA is community based. Sometimes this is fast, sometimes this is not so fast, but moderators are serious people and at the end players are found guilty when this is relevant.

In this case, the player has been found guilty and ban from BGA for 30 days.

Cheers,

[Claude Chabrol]

you might have made an incorrect conclusion in your point 5).

You are right, my mistake

In this case, the player has been found guilty and ban from BGA for 30 days.

Thank you for the answer.
Nevertheless, this player has 3 accounts with the same name, i suppose he will be using one of the 2 remaining accounts within these 30 days, which makes the penalty rather ineffective, if you would allow me to express a personal opinion

[sourisdudesert]

which makes the penalty rather ineffective, if you would allow me to express a personal opinion

Well, you can create another account and loose all your reputation, statistics, ranking and the rest. So maybe some users can have fun creating and loosing account every month, but most of them don't, which make penalty system effective.

[Tejo]

In this case, the player has been found guilty and ban from BGA for 30 days.

Thank you for the answer.
Nevertheless, this player has 3 accounts with the same name, i suppose he will be using one of the 2 remaining accounts within these 30 days, which makes the penalty rather ineffective, if you would allow me to express a personal opinion

which makes the penalty rather ineffective, if you would allow me to express a personal opinion

Well, you can create another account and loose all your reputation, statistics, ranking and the rest. So maybe some users can have fun creating and loosing account every month, but most of them don't, which make penalty system effective.

I'm really sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with sourisdudesert this time (and obvioulsy I agree with Claude Chabrol). I love this site and playing on it, but IMHO there's a big problem about the penalties on the site: they are REALLY ineffective, until anyone can create any multiple accounts he/she wants. Sure, a player cannot play with his/her main account (or with the one he used to broke the rules), but if he did something nasty against any other player (like insults, kingmaking, provoking, giving him reasonless red thumbs and so on) he can continue to do it with other accounts.

At least, it happened to me: I'm on the site from an year and a half, and once I met a player who started acting crazy against me. He continued to provoke me for months, with more accounts (he owns at least 8 for his ammission, and I suspect he has a lot more of accounts). During this time he insulted me, provoked me, he created accounts to play against me and give me red thumbs (I don't exactly know how many I get from his accounts, but at least four... at least the 25% of my red thumbs came from him) he exploited a well-known bug to gain an higher ranking in a game with his main account and he tried with more of his accounts to defeat me using the bug to destroy my ranking.
Furthermore his behaviour also against other players doesn't seem to me so fair, he provoked and insulted other users on public walls, he uses his false-new players accounts to sistematically alter the rankings of the game in which he is on the top or so, by avoiding playing with his "main account" and using the low-ranked accounts to play against high-ranked players, so if his opponents will win they'll gain a few ELO points, and if his opponent will lose they'll lose a ton of ELO points. I also suspect he plays against himself, but I'm not sure about it.
He has been recognized guilty of all I said in multiple reports on some of his multiple accounts, and his penalties has been closing one of his accounts (with only 6 games played), a good bunch of red thumbs and days of devilkin distributed on some of his accounts... but no problem about this, he can continue to play and to play in this way by opening new accounts as he wants, and he did it.

In my opinion you should be more strict against players who acts in this way, by banning (also not in a definitive way) their IP during the time they take the penalties. Or at least you should apply the rules of policies of the site.
Into the multiple account policy (http://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Multipleaccounts) the first phrase is: The Main Rule One BGA account = One person, and anyone can open how many accounts he/she wants, continuing to behave in the same way.
Into the moderation policy http://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Moderationpolicy you say that "In case there is a relapse, the penalty increases exponentially." but this relapse isn't true, or maybe the rule must be broken with the same account... and so if a user can create multiple accounts with no limit, he/she can continue to act as he/she wants. Also about the Bug exploit, the policy says that an an ELO adjustment for players who exploited the bug will be done, but there are players who exploited a bug in their every single table played, founded guilty for that, and they still keep their ELO points and positions in the game ranking.

Sorry about the wallpost, but I ever found a nonsense the chance to have multiple accounts to use them to avoid the penalties, and saying that the system works because the most part of the player doesn't abuse of the situation it's not a protection for the player who received any kind of nasty behaviour.

[Claude Chabrol]

In my opinion you should be more strict against players who acts in this way, by banning (also not in a definitive way) their IP during the time they take the penalties.

This is common sense, i totally agree with you.

Sorry about the wallpost, but I ever found a nonsense the chance to have multiple accounts to use them to avoid the penalties

Once more, this is bearing the hallmark of common sense and wisdom.

Well, you can create another account and loose all your reputation, statistics, ranking and the rest. So maybe some users can have fun creating and loosing account every month, but most of them don't, which make penalty system effective.

You are clearly admitting you prefer to have 10'100 regular players including 100 troublemakers (using several accounts), rather than 10'000 players respecting the policy.
In my humble opinion, this policy is clearly questionable, and hence BGA appears to me as a no-law zone, where troublemakers are favoured and almost encouraged.

This situation inspires me the following quote
Regular Players are from Earth, Admins are from Venus (i may have to create a new account next week if sourisdudesert does not like my quote )

[Een]

You are clearly admitting you prefer to have 10'100 regular players including 100 troublemakers (using several accounts), rather than 10'000 players respecting the policy.
In my humble opinion, this policy is clearly questionable, and hence BGA appears to me as a no-law zone, where troublemakers are favoured and almost encouraged.

Well, that's not what was said, it's only your interpretation.

I'll submit this to you: if it was easy to make sure there is no troublemaker in online communities, everyone would do it, and there would not be anyone misbehaving on the internets. Is that the case? Not what I heard of: just google it.

The thing is, it _is_ a hard problem. Sourisdudesert just said that we do what we can with the resources that we have and the help of moderators from the community, and that it mostly works. That doesn't mean it's perfect.

Tejo reports on a problem that we don't really know how to fix (an IP ban wouldn't stop a really determined cyberbully such as he describes). The only real way to do this would be to de-anonymize the internet: think about what you ask.

If you have proposals to make the system better, it would be more useful to outline them in detail (and I mean really in detail, just popping unsupported grand ideas doesn't do much else than waste reading time) than to indulge into standard admin bashing (which is also a classic internet problem, and a pretty disheartening one for anyone spending a lot of time and energy building a website).

In fact, the more importance you give to troublemakers, the more they win. It's common internet wisdom: never feed the trolls, and all that. Just hoping that I'm not feeding a troll myself today...

[Claude Chabrol]

If you have proposals to make the system better

Penalty ideas to make the website a bit "cleaner"
- If a player is found guilty, penalty should be applied to ALL of his accounts. In real life, if you lose your driving licence, you are not allowed to drive just because you use a new car.
- If a player is found guilty (insults, kingmaking), he should go back to ELO1500 and lose his potential trophee (for this game only). Next time, the player will think before insulting, or think before cheating.
- If it is possible, an IP ban for the duration of the penalty would be a good dissuasion tool. Or at least a devilkin avatar for any new account this player would create, with a very visible message on game tables saying that this player has been penalized for insults.
- If a player has >50% of red thumbs after 10 games, or >30% of red thumbs after 100 games, his account should be automatically deleted.


Fair play encouragement ideas
- Make more visible "advertising" or announcements for fair play
- Every week or month, a "tombola" could be organized among fair-play users. (>95% or 98% of green thumbs or even more selective) to randomly draw the "Fair Play user of the week/month" who would get a free 1-month membership
- If a player has more than 99% of green thumbs after 500 or 1000 games (pikiou, Tejo, brecol...) and never got any penalty, create a special avatar or trophee and reward these players for their extreme fair play. Just an incentive to reduce bad behaviours. Incentives sometimes work better than penalties. (only sometimes of course)

Tejo reports on a problem that we don't really know how to fix (an IP ban wouldn't stop a really determined cyberbully such as he describes)

But still, it would reduce the problem. Not everyone uses dynamical IP addressing, not everyone uses a proxy servor or a software to hide his true IP. Not everyone has time or skills for this.
Some internet service providers now impose static IP addressing ("Free" in france for example).
Besides, there will be more and more static IP thanks to the new IPv6 protocol

In fact, the more importance you give to troublemakers, the more they win.

I strongly disagree.
If you play against someone who just created a new account because of a penalty , he has 0 green/red thumb, 0 penalty, every parameter is 0.
Then you trust this person because there is the benefit of the doubt.
And very often you regret it. If you receive a red thumb, you can't even give it back (beginner's protection, personally i call it multi-account users protection, or cheater's protection)
I stopped playing with newcomers because of this problem

I think it's essential to fix much more strict limits if you don't want fair play users to quit the website, and "nasty players" to make healthy-minded newcomers run away.
It is also in your interest.

[-Kevin-]

I agree with Claude Chabrol and its proposals.