RaveRadbury wrote: ↑Wed Jun 25, 2025 8:25 pm
Timberpoes wrote: ↑Wed Jun 25, 2025 7:36 pm
Also doublepost to state the admins being able to formally approve names is necessary for this part of naming policy to be functional:
Species have naming conventions that are part of their in-universe culture. These may be subverted if they have a sufficient amount of in-character reasoning and effort explaining their non-standard name. Non-standard names are held to higher scrutiny and you may be questioned on why your name breaks these conventions.
Disagree, this is carried out the same way naming policy has always been carried out: by explaining how it works and underlining the caveat.
"Yeah so naming policy can be subjective. I hear your reason and I think it's fine, but another admin might not. If that happens and you disagree you can always appeal it on the forums."
I considered that an undesirable outcome. To me, that's really player-hostile. It assumes the admin team doesn't have its shit together and admins can only be held accountable when the player drags their ass to the forums to sort out what is ostensibly one non-headmin overruling another non-headmin because those non-headmins disagree on a topic.
Last term when I spoke on the topic in the admin channels, I re-affirmed that admins could place notes allowing players to have names and those notes would prevent other admins from disallowing those names.
I did it because I trust that our admins aren't so utterly devoid of critical thinking skills that they'll start approving names that have no place falling under any exception or exemption. And I trust that all admins are on board with the mission statement that we serve the players and that every action we take should be in the best interests of those players, to improve the game, the community, how players percieve the admin team and everything else related. And I trust that our admins can respectfully disagree without drooling all over themselves and soiling their undergarments because papa headmin forgot to change babby admin's diaper this morning, in pursuit of that objective of taking the best interests of players into account.
That's how my thought processes go.
Normally when an admin tells a player something that is patently false/incorrect/honestly mistaken, the admin is responsible for any reasonable response or actions a player does in response to that. We get it all the time. Admin bwoinks player, player says some other admin said thing was okay to do, and we have a little ticket dive to verify what was said and do our internal due diligence processes without punishing the player if they were genuinely or honestly misled or reasonable mistaken as to what they were told. Because we serve the players and not ourselves.
What definitely does not matter to our players is how much wanky LARPy red tape or other impenetrable admin-favoured and bullshit-flavoured ginger bread houses we use to construct our Ivory Tower. What players care about is that they can trust admins, trust what admins say and that when admins step on eachothers' toes we're able to resolve it without requiring the player to waste their time fixing our problems for us.
And honestly, from where I stand, appeals and complaints are the
final line of defense. They're not a LARPfest we force players to interact with to solve petty and pointless inter-admin disputes. Instead, they're the nuclear option, which when used mean
a disgruntled player has no more recourse available to them. Appeal rulings are final. Complaint rulings are final.
By allowing admins to approve names and requiring admins that disagree to do what we do with every other disagreed ruling - talk it out or call headmins - we add a new player-favoured line of defense that sits between them being told they can use a name and them having to make an appeal or a complaint to solve what is ostensibly admins being fucking morons overruling eachother.
Honestly, I feel like I'm sat here in my "/tg/ admins are the best admins because we serve the players and not the other way around"-tier Ivory Tower. I'm laughing at those servers with the terrible admins that overrule eachother and do shit just to inconvenience players over themselves. Only I start to realise there are calls from inside the tower to be just like those terrible admins. To prioritise our experience over that of our players.
And this player-advocate stance is not even off-brand for me. As headmin I was always involved in appeals trying to guide them to resolutions that mutually satisfied all parties and didn't result in pointless headmin reviews. My second term I was involved in writing the ruling that prevented admins from modifying notes or ban reasons outside of appeals
with a caveat that it was allowed if the modification was to the player's benefit.
https://wiki.tgstation13.org/Admin_Conduct wrote:Modifying Notes and Bans
Do not modify non-secret notes/bans outside of appeals
unless it either benefits the player in question or you are correcting an error within a reasonable period of time of it being placed.
Why? Because making players jump through pointless hoops just for the sake of appeasing admin corpo red tape mandates is patently one of the dumbest stances imaginable when it comes to community management and player<->admin relations. If we can solve something internally to a player's benefit without having to rope the player into engaging with our LARPy admin corpo-plus bureaucracy-laden wankfest then we can and should do so, every time.
Admins being able to take ownership over this topic and positively allow names is of benefit to the players, even if the Naming Stasi might lose some of their powers to micromanage names.
That this may make other admins unable to change that player's name forcibly without invoking headmin involvement is of benefit to the players.
That there's a chance that admin disagreement over a player's name can be resolved to the player's benefit, without the player even having to do anything or perhaps never even realising at all there was a disagreement that got solved in their favour, is of benefit to the players.
That this new process activates without forcing the player to need to appeal means that an appeal against the decisions can continue to be the last line of defense rather than the default setting, which benefits us all by not turning admin team retardation into public spectacle unless absolutely necessary to ensure high quality fertiliser for our peanut farms.
Player appeals it 
