Arianya wrote:Funnily enough its nearly a year later and the server hasn't imploded from the absence of the Salt Requests.
Really makes you think...
Beautiful straw man.
The argument was never "THE SERVER IS GOING TO DIE WITHOUT BAN REQUESTS AHHHHH!!!!!"
It's more like "The server is going to suffer a material, but not irreparable, deterioration in the quality of our administration without the ability to request bans"
And the protesting users are absolutely right. Our policy is more of a joke than I've seen it in years. I came here so many years ago because /tg/station was a shining beacon of due process and intelligent administration. When one admin stepped out of line either in harshness or leniency, ban appeals and ban requests were the dual checks in place to keep those shitty decisions from running rampant.
This wouldn't be a big deal if we had headmins who gave a shit about one of their only responsibilities, but we dont, I haven't seen it since 2015. Policy is an afterthought and as our admin's views evolve on various subjects, the problems become more apparent as they diverge over time. At this point it feels like Trialmins are making 80% of the policy decisions on our server and while I have faith in some (Kevinz, Durkel) I also see absolute shit coming from others (Danno, Sawrge). Not an issue if we have strong headmins will to make decisive ruling about what is and isn't acceptable, but like I said we haven't had that for years.
This is the sort of problem that doesn't rear its head overnight, it slowly eats away at the quality of our administration's decisions and undermines confidence that admins will make consistent, thoughtful, and proper rulings. We've had to rely on the hub to keep Bagil and Sybil off life support in the past year, maybe its just a fluke, maybe we never needed the hub at all, or maybe its a sign that /tg/ is no longer able to attract players because of our server's reputation for quality and so we must rely on random people wandering in the front door to keep our population up.
It's just speculation at this point, I'm not willing to say that I'm 100% sure our server is suffering from this absence of care about our policy, but nobody should be willing to say "LOOK WE ARENT DEAD YET!!!" as proof that it never mattered in the first place. Colonial Marines has some of the shittiest policy I've ever seen on an SS13-related server, but they still pull ~120 people during primetime because its a simple mode that is promises lots of action and fun and has an endless supply of hub players scoping it out. Does that mean their administration deserves a pat on the back? Fuck no.