A lot of people read logs. It’s a server tradition.
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Pulling logs is incredibly time consuming and tedious, you can also end up spending a massive amount of time trying to pretty up the logs for the forums.
Actually reading the raw logs is easy in comparison.
Personally, the only reason you’d pull logs is for transparency purposes as I feel there is little practical value in someone pulling them outside of having a second person checking logs in case you missed something, but you don’t need someone to pull logs to do that when they could just read the logs themselves.
We are still pulling logs for whitelist issues since councillors generally are not staff members ergo they can’t do their own log diving.
A lot of people read logs. It’s a server tradition.
True. On the one hand log pulling feels more like some form of entertainment more than a public service.
But on the other hand log pulls can help contextualize a situation.
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While it is indeed entertaining it’s also useful to be able to see real examples of how rules are enforced. That said I think it would be good enough for staff to just give a summary and maybe a few specific lines that are vital to the verdict. Don’t get me wrong full log pulls are still better but if a compromise has to be made then fair enough.
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Yeah, I always read the logs cause they’re funny, and that way I can form my own opinion on the ruling based off the evidence instead of just assuming the staff are right.
I think the latter is quite important, though I see why its a pain in the ass.
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Did management ever come up with a response to what happened here? I’d check the Discord chat, but I was permabanned with no warning for the unforgivable sin of making several jokes about the “r-slur” ban during the janitorial purge.
I just see Grim locking every thread. Did I miss the response? My apologies if so.
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I also enjoyed reading some logs, but that was typically only a matter of
“I never called him a rat fucker!”
Someone who just got off a shift at work trying to pull multiple strings of context together:
“Here are the logs.”
0:37 Jimmy Blood: "You're a rat fucker!"
In the case where someone fucks-up, I really don’t see what difference seeing text instead of a screenshot or recording really makes, or why it amounts to any more than “bro, trust me” when the results of either are going to be the same and the recourse of riding out the punishment or making a spite staff complaint/appeal remain the same.
I feel that some of my own reports are good examples, since they are “this bothered me enough that I brought receipts so we don’t need to worry much about logs anyways” or “yeah everything you said was true, we’re just exhaustively posting each line for the sake of it” (though Silencer was still a dear for their color-coding and effort). Staff has gotten more active in cleaning-up squabbles, but it’s not like even with logs being posted people didn’t have eight-layered arguments in the replies.
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Of course logs are important. I don’t see how this is even a question. They are needed for many reasons: as an evidence, for people both involved and uninvolved to understand the full context, to set up a clear precedent, as grounds for staff reports, etc. I understand that it’s time consuming and I don’t have a solution, but in some reports I’ve been involved absence of evidence was really confusing.
For example there was a report about a synth moving to hive (east caves) instead of LZ2 (robotics, LV, so, like, opposite parts of the map, literally) during nuke. I clearly remember that happening. But councillor who resolved the report said that the synth was moving towards LZ2 and there are plenty of logs supporting that. Logs that were not shown. I am supposed to take this by word. In reality, I just feel decieved, I feel like the councillor is biased, logs they found behind the closed doors are not full/incorrect, someone who was pulling the logs didn’t care/didn’t take effort, etc. But maybe I am really wrong and there is evidence? Now we will never know, and the trust is damaged. Yeah, councillors aren’t staff, but I don’t think there is much of a difference in the context. People are not going to just believe that they are wrong without being shown proofs.
So tl;dr logs are not just about fun.
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If all parties involved got to see the logs and review them then I wouldn’t have a problem with the logs being pulled from public view.
So I do hope that the reporter and reportee still are given access to the relevant logs so things can be disputed because sometimes staff can be wrong and miss something and it can be recontextualised if scrutanised. My own example for this would be when I found an MT R-Walling South Nexus, I pulled rank said he can’t do that the APC might go up or down from there and we need to see down it and I started deconning his wall.
He killed me a total of 2 times, without me resisting once and I reported him for it and the staff members who involved themselves misread the logs entirely and tried to implicate me as being as fault until I argued for them to go over and read them again. It might seem like a tedious chore but… like the whole point of the thread the transparency is appreciated.
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Since sanitizing the logs is the effort barrier and what has to be pulled is mostly static. An AI should be more then able to handle it. The poster would still need to double check but itll get 90% of the effort done.
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aislop detected
anyways basically this but just have a ‘verbose’ and ‘simple’ log printout, the simple one doesn’t include the sensitive info and can be posted right to forums. easy peasy
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I can totally get people wanting to see the logs to form their own opinions, and if there was a quick and easy way to post them, I’d have no issue with continuing that trend. The issue is, exclusively, that it requires a massive amount of time to make them presentable.
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@Biolock , I sincerely appreciate you engaging with us. I am going to ask a simple question: are the reporter and reportee provided copies of the logs?
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Sorry if I missed the question. No, they’re not, because the whole reason we won’t be posting logs is due to the time and effort it takes to sterilize them. The last person we want seeing another party’s IP is someone with the motivation to get back at them.
If we could easily post the logs without leaking people’s sensitive information, I’d be in favor of continuing with the current system. It’s purely a question of how much I value moderators’ time and energy.
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In order to make a reasonable log pull you need to do all the following.
- Start the process of log diving
- Hope the reporter posted the correct round ID (sometimes they get it wrong)
- Hope the reporter got the right name (sometimes they get the names wrong or slightly wrong)
- Search every single individual person who was involved and copy+paste every individual line of relevant information
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- This is one of the longest parts of the log pull as there is a metric ton of information you will need to sift through and not everything a person says is relevant to a log pull. It can also be hard to discern if something being said/done is relevant
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- (copy and pasting every individual line of information is a very long process, especially if its attack logs)
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- This includes anything they say, emote or if they shoot/are shot or attack/are attacked.
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- People’s ID can change if they swap to a new body, such as a marine dying, becoming a ghost, then becoming a facehugger/lesser/larva/ERT, so now you need to make sure you don’t miss something they say in a different name.
- While doing this you may then need to log pull secondary people who were involved in the incident
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- This now includes repeating the above actions for these secondary people
- Go find the admin help logs if any were made, now you also have to search for which staff member handled them
- Now that you have all of the logs you need to piece the story together as best as you can, this can be easier said than done depending on the circumstances
- Whilest doing ALL of the above you need to begin pruning CID/IP/Ckey logs from every, single, line, of text. As every single line of logs will contain privileged information.
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- You may also need to remove the in character names of admins/staff from admin help logs since its common courtesy to not reveal staff character names in admin help logs
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- You may also need to censor secondary player’s information if nessecary
- Once you’ve pruned all the information and you’ve got the story togther, you need to now edit the logs and post them to the forums
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- You can’t just dump the logs on the forums since then it’ll be a huge mess, so now you need to edit the logs with the forum tools to make it easy to read.
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- This is easier said than done, you can spend almost as much time prettying up the log pull as you did spend pulling logs
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- Once all of this is done, you need to proof-read your entry as it is near guaranteed you missed something such as accidently leaving someone’s ckey in
- Now you can post.
This is all a very time and energy consuming affair.
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So I feel like there’s three different issues being discussed.
The first is the overarching Gameplay/Direction of the Game the second being the reasons log’s being removed, and the third and probably the most important is the transparency of the management team.
I’ll try my best to address them one by one.
Firstly: Where’s the game going? what are we doing? what’s the roadmap?
A really good starting point is the published roadmap available here: Roadmap · GitHub.
The Current Dev team headed up by Drathek have done a good job of coordinating that roadmap and what everyone’s individually working on, but I get the inkling that you (and others) want something a bit more tangible in terms of the overall direction and what we’re working towards on both a staff and player front.
For that, the answer is pretty simple and that’s that we’re trying to capture the SOUL ESSENCE of CM and improve on it, without outwardly discarding and removing features which don’t contribute to the end game. What do I mean by that? Features Like techwebs, vehicles, agents, antags and others all seemed to get removed instead of fixed, and I think that building the core gameplay up is vital. The CM I dream for is one that’s equal parts Aysemtrical shooter and Roleplay experience. You should feel like you’re climbing an uphill battle as a Marine and I can safely say that the WINRATE statistic is definitely intended to be an important, but not all-encompassing metric towards defining the aysemtric component of the game. While we’re not aiming for a ratio, the golden idea is to make it so that Marines NEED teamwork and Collaboration in order to eliminate the perfect killing machine.
On the topic of Roleplay, I personally want to get the events and antag systems back up and running, stuff that includes bringing back the intrigue whether it be with a potentially dangerous research or that suspicious survivor. MPs turned into mini-mods because there wasn’t survivors and research to grief investigate.
On the broader level its adding features that we all enjoy, things like the Tank and Other vehicles like the arc (but only when population allows) should be coming back into rotation. Normally these things were admin spawns (and events) tied to population, but as a whole I hope we can find mechanical solutions which allow for this kind of emergent and combined arms gameplay, in a way which preserves the lowpop loop.
Now as you’ve probably realised, I’m a Host and Not the Dev, and there’s a reason that Drathek (and the gang) has free reign over this component. My ideas are pretty bad, and I personally believe that CM is the kind of WYCI project. My quest to learn DM is a tough one but I’m learning and YOU should too if you want to be actively involved.
Where did the Logs go?
As nice as it is to have beautifully (and sometimes IC rendered) logs for each situation 1) they were causing delays on processing waiting for staff to do them, 2) they were tiresome for individual staff, as it tended to be a metric for progressing to adminship and 3) We mostly never even used them and looked at the logs themselves to verify and make our own context. Damning I know, but its a lot easier to check the logs manually, and I think it’s unfair to force mods to essentially waste time posting them ( even if it does help public discourse transparency ). That being said, if logs become a disputed part of a report, its only fair that they’re posted, but this onus will probably be on the resolving manager and not the poor mod assigned.
Last but not least, transparency of the management team.
Look there’s an elephant in the room here and that is that I’ve probably been the least active I’ve ever been in the last few weeks because of the whole doxing situation. While I’m not here looking for sympathy, I do think it’s fair to say that I’ve been neglecting a lot of external community engagement simply out of the fact that I’ve almost lost my job because of certain members of the community.
I don’t think it’s fair to CM and the rest of you to do that though, and I’m making a personal commitment to step up my availability and my responsiveness. Forrest (baring the fact he’s currently offline due to BT), has been continuously working overtime to try cover my ass, he’s just as accessible as I should have been.
You can reach out to us anytime on the forum or discord and we should get back to you within a day or two tops. If we don’t, you have permission to ping, ding, bwoink, bump, whatever you feel like publicly or private to make sure we see the issue. (As long as you’re respectful about it ).
People in here talk about “bad faith” and “negativity” and speak about management as if we’ve clocked out, but the cold depressing truth is that we’re a bunch of veteran players who’ve made the stupid decision to take on additional responsibility. Sometimes we fall short and I don’t think that’s something to shy away from. The Depressing fact is that I personally am basically here to play medic and try improve CM and keep it turning over. If we need to make a playtime portal (and stats page) to showcase your hours, maybe that’s a fun project someone can work on, but the results would show that barring the last while in my case, every member of management is active in game.
Here’s a fun story, The whole slur drama had been brewing for like 6 months and the Whole R word situation was viewed in the eyes of many as a loophole and someone decided to basically close it. Yes, there’s a lot of me defending grim publicly and wrangling why deltard was banned, but that accurately reflected the internal conversation at the time. The point i’m getting at, is that a lot of the time CM Management is reactionary, and that’s something that has its pros and cons. Yes, banning the R word is controversial, but I understand the reasons why. Yes, banning Deltard was overeach and while I understood the justification, it’s pretty clear that it was the wrong decision.
It didn’t take 20 drama threads and people contacting my work to prove the point. The most compelling bit of the argument was steel point (moderator) fact-checking me and going hey this is literally not being abused respectfully in a public thread. You can argue we shouldn’t have done in the first place, and that’s fair, but the reality is that one person basically got the ball rolling on this and we ran with it because of the reasons they presented. The only reason we’ve switched the R word from contextually banned to not is that it was being used excessively and it needed to be nipped in the bud. We can debate this all you want (and i’m happy to do so), but the core argument is that the majority of use wasn’t kosher.
CM works when passionate people get involved and just do things. Bureaucracy stagnates. Sometimes those things fuck up, sometimes they aren’t great and sometimes they’re downright terrible. Management is an extension of that. The worst part is that the community and how some peeps participate genuinely isn’t helpful and results in an attitude where we end up yeeting features, making crazy policy announcements and shying away from a community that we once loved.
** The TLDR; get involved. Join Staff and come tell us how we should be moderating chat. Become a Dev and balance the game the way you see fit. Be a Mentor and teach people OP OT recipes. Join a WL and improve RP. **
And last but not least, I stand by what I said in the previous thread. I’m sorry it’s harsh but it’s the truth.
If you’re going to be toxic, or use slurs or basically not act respectfully on the forums, the discord or in game, then you genuinely should find another server. I now have even less tolerance for it then I did before being Dox’d
There’s another person on the side of the screen, whether it be me sitting here typing an essay, the marine who just friendly-fired you, or the lurker who just solo-cap’d you. There’s a difference between marine bravado and in-game banter, or blowing off some steam in dsay against being a dick OOC.
Don’t be a dick and you’ll be fine
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I was actually against the removal of posting logs until I learned that you guys have to manually remove all sensitive information in the logs before posting them, this is the first place I’ve read that so I really appreciate staff engaging with this thread and communicating it.
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As the moderators and admins, can they just make some python code to take a .txt file and remove all of the ckeys and other stuff from it then make another .txt file?
It would greatly increase the time to pull logs, if you guys even want to pull logs anymore that is.
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Thank you for posting this, Frozen. It’s good to see more input from upper management on this.
It’s a damn shame these things keep escalating into clusterfucks that shut down any discussion, especially that doxing shitshow.
Personally, I’m still heavily against the r-word ban because I’ll inevitably fuck up my filter and eat a whopping 7 day vacation, but if you say that the majority of use was directly malicious and not in-game banter, then I guess I can sort of see the justification behind pre-emptively banning it. Still don’t believe that’s true, but that’s just my subjective experience.
Regarding log pulls- Yeah, after seeing what Steel said it doesn’t look like it’s worth it anymore.
If it means greater response speed to PRs and such, I’m all for it- We see a lot of log pulls being delayed by literal weeks due to the time intensiveness of it all. Obviously it’s less transparent, but I think the cost-benefit ratio of prettying up those logs for posting (and it being an obstacle) just isn’t worth the effort.
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Very well said Frozen. Although I may be against the r-word ban, I appreciate the informative post. It’s incredibly sad and frustrating that people who were in this community were willing to go that far over a policy change in a video game. At the end of the day we are all here to play and have fun. No one should have to suffer IRL because someone isn’t happy they cant say their favorite gamer word on CM.
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