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Permanent solution to the response time of administrators on forum reports (SLA Time + Grace Period)


ThatDutchPerson

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I will give a genuine answer for once.

 

When you make a report, don't write a 3000 word essay about how your character was sipping tea with his sister in law from another mother before the situation took place. Having to read a 2000 word essay just to understand that X killed Y because Y robbed X makes it much harder to handle the report.
 

Secondly, don't let reports reach 6 pages of you going back and forth about how your cat stepped on your router which made you desync and the other person swearing on their crip mafia XIII that it wasn't desync. Post one short response to a short report and trust me, the wait time will decrease DRASTICALLY.

 

Yours truly,

Moe

Edited by Moe
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Having been an admin on a few other games before, and having handled reports... I'm not sure an SLA is the optimal answer. A main issue is because SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a concept used professionally in customer service centers, which can't properly apply to volunteer admins ^^' The other is that time isn't infinite.

 

One server I worked with had an extremely heavy pressure on admins and moderators to handle reports, which led to an insane turnover and burnout rates. We kept showing the ropes to new admins while the old ones left after just 2 months, and it was really, really bad for everyone. We only had inexperienced admins, which means any simple thing took them longer because they didn't know "the tricks", and as soon as they started to get faster, they got tired of being pestered all the time and just flat-out left the admin team 😕 

 

That said, it's true seeing your report rot in the backlog for months can be frustrating as all hell... I'm not sure which solution is the best. It's true a first-come first-served solution may help. Encouraging people to not tell their entire lives in a report too, and keep it to the relevant aspects. 

On the other side, I tend to agree that admin jailing someone for something done several weeks (or months) ago makes little sense. In the meantime there's a real possibility the player will just have improved, and a sanction will not really have any positive effect. 

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Topic reminds me of the recently assigned staff member that notifies admins to clear out old tickets/reports but there’s definitely something we can do as a player.

 

Pretty sure you can organise a 1-1 discussion with the staff member and see how we could make their job easier.

 

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There's no response to this that can explain in one reason why reports get delayed, it can be a multitude of reasons, waiting for roleplay / chat logs since not all admins have access to them, perhaps an extensive deeper dive is needed which can take a lot of time, maybe you need to get in contact with another admin to see what happened when they handled something related to it in-game. My point is that there's a whole lot of factors that can simply depend as one might imagine, as already mentioned, people have real life obligations as well, and the staff team as a whole has a lot of work on their shoulders.

 

I of course can't speak for anyone else but myself, but I reached level 1 at the start of the month and I've been a forum mod for a couple months prior, I plan on getting these response times down some more as I personally have a lot of free time where some others don't, and if a player thinks their report is taking too long to answer then they can always Discord me and I can look into taking it if I'm able. I've already started picking up reports from the back of the list and plan on getting them down to less than 2 weeks sitting or even less.

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Maybe if people didn't post unneeded player report because someone used /outfit at a car or bumped into them going 3 MPH and didn't RP it, it wouldn't take your report a month to get handled. People report over the most pettiest things, which in turn increases the amount of time it takes for reports to get handled, stop making so many reports... 

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3 hours ago, Moonsong said:

So you're suggesting to pass the burden on to management who (along with all their other duties) already have to deal with 90% of players who receives anything from a forum warning, an administrative warning, an ajail, ban or just a stern ticking off for doing stupid shit but still file staff reports out of pure spite? Yeah sorry, not supporting this. It places a totally unfair burden on management.

 

There's nothing wrong with reaching out to an admin on discord if a report isn't taken within a couple of days, or if it's taken and the handling admin appears to have forgotten you're allowed tag the handling admin ONCE in the report itself or again reach out to them on discord. Most will be grateful for it if you as long as you don't spam them constantly about it or come across as needy/entitled. This is something that's only going to get worse with the holiday season and new variants of covid doing the rounds but it'll resolve itself for a while once the last batch of support staff become TA and join sub-teams specifically focused on handling reports and forum work.

 

 

If you read a bit further, you can clearly see me proposing an admin atleast posting ''handling'' on a report within 7 days. After that they can take aslong as they want, but the fact that we'd have a point of contact already eases a lot up.

 

Reaching out to admins after a report hasn't been looked at gets me the same answer over and over again;

''it will be picked up when its being looked at.'' < this isn't what I call an answer, its what I call avoiding to answer, honestly.

Edited by ThatDutchPerson
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2 hours ago, Moe said:

I will give a genuine answer for once.

 

When you make a report, don't write a 3000 word essay about how your character was sipping tea with his sister in law from another mother before the situation took place. Having to read a 2000 word essay just to understand that X killed Y because Y robbed X makes it much harder to handle the report.
 

Secondly, don't let reports reach 6 pages of you going back and forth about how your cat stepped on your router which made you desync and the other person swearing on their crip mafia XIII that it wasn't desync. Post one short response to a short report and trust me, the wait time will decrease DRASTICALLY.

 

Yours truly,

Moe

(sorry for double post)

 

Isnt it an option to auto-lock reports after they're posted? I think that would help a lot.

Then when an admin picks it up, he/she can unlock it and ask what he/she needs to know.

Edited by ThatDutchPerson
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50 minutes ago, DoomedAmerica said:

Maybe if people didn't post unneeded player report because someone used /outfit at a car or bumped into them going 3 MPH and didn't RP it, it wouldn't take your report a month to get handled. People report over the most pettiest things, which in turn increases the amount of time it takes for reports to get handled, stop making so many reports... 

And to be fully fair, there's also quite a few reports that wouldn't be needed if people communicated a little bit more ^^' I know some believe that never saying a single OOC word to anyone is a sign of superior RP, but really, it helps clear a lot of confusions. And as a consequence, it avoids wasting an admin's time clearing those confusions, that would only need a little bit of flexibility or 10 PMs to be fixed :x 

 

I might be weird, but to me, an exchange like : "- Hey, you really crashed into my face a bit, here xD dunno if you saw it tho?" "- I did, sorry girl :< I'm on the pacific coast and it's 3 am here I just wanted to get to bed asap" "- Ohhhhh ok, well it happens! Have a great night ^^".

Is much preferrable to a full-on report with passive-agressive wordings calling someone a mallrat, because they /vparked after a minor bump... all that petty kind of shit that needs to have a back and forth (with players from 2 continents, thus making it even longer), and on and on and on. 😕 

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41 minutes ago, ThatDutchPerson said:

 

 

If you read a bit further, you can clearly see me proposing an admin atleast posting ''handling'' on a report within 7 days. After that they can take aslong as they want, but the fact that we'd have a point of contact already eases a lot up.

 

Reaching out to admins after a report hasn't been looked at gets me the same answer over and over again;

''it will be picked up when its being looked at.'' < this isn't what I call an answer, its what I call avoiding to answer, honestly.

 

I did read but I don't really care to answer something that should be basic common sense. but it seems it needs to be reiterated. Admins are volunteers who have duties (and lives) other than handling pages upon pages of forum reports with huge essays being written over pretty basic stuff. Not to mention the toxic abuse admins have to deal with on the daily when people don't get their way, or want something immediately. It shouldn't be part of the job, but it is.

 

If you're always getting the same response from staff then maybe you need to change how you approach them about thinks you'd like handled. Be nice instead of being passive aggressive complaining that you've waited two weeks to get your shit back (just a random example), you'll be surprised how far that can get you. As others have said including myself, no harm in politely hitting up and active admin on discord or PMs (actually it might be better as a forum PM so you don't annoy them with a ping at 2am their time). Sadly forum reports aren't usually a priority and is something that's usually handled during off-hours or free time because IG reports normally take priority.

 

This isn't something that can be resolved by imposing unnecessary restrictions that ultimately won't solve anything but instead can be resolved by players helping out admins by bickering less in reports, tags on forgotten reports (i.e inactive for 2-3 days), more support staff coming through the ranks and most importantly players applying for staff if they think they can help lighten the load.

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Hear me out.
Maybe players could work with each other oocly more to resolve more ic issues without the need for admins assistance thus removing some of the current burden they have sifting through countless reports some over silly things. Maybe people being more open to re-rp or talk things out oocly more would do the trick. 

/shrug 

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