That admin flag thing just sounds odd to me. It'd make more sense to separate admin and player accounts.

@slj: I would agree except that would probably be redundant. Admins have a skype group where we keep in daily contact. If something comes up, someone it’s always available to take care of it. Just last night we had a guy sending crashwords, a beta member alerted us and he was stopped. We’re a very tight nit team, and everybody knows what’s going on as long as they read the group. A weekly meeting would not only be redundant but inconvenient as we all have very different lives.
@Draq: there are a number of problems with your proposal. Dark nailed one of them on the head. As I’ve already stated, admins are players too, and having a separate account for them would stop them from playing the game which just isn’t fair. Admins would also not be able to change names which you guys can do whenever you want. This is a problem both for annonimity and because it’s best to not let you guys know when there’s an admin logged in. This is all assuming that there’s an account system for redspot, which there isn’t, has never been and never will be. We’d like people to lose everything when they die, so Sam coded it from day 1 to not save any player info.
@dark: is it possible that you read the old readme? That one, much like the rules document, sucked pretty hard, I’ll be honest. The new one is 59.7kb and, although it’s a bit weirdly organized, is definitely not lacking in detail. Let me know what you’re confused about and I’ll add it if it’s not in there already.

@alec: I see regarding to a weekly meeting. I'm glad to hear that a Skype group works for you, and a weekly meeting might be difficult due to different timezones etc.

Well, if you have like half the community railing against one of the admins, that person probably shouldn't be an admin. People are gonna grumble if you have to step in and deal with them, but they probably won't hate you for it unless they're a child without emotional control, or just incredibly small-minded. However, if you have more than a small group of people hating on an admin, that person probably earned it. I would say at the very least, keep that person under surveillance. I don't know how the admin teams for Sam's games are organized, if everyone is on the same level, or if there is a hierarchy, but there probably should be some flag that a higher level admin, or a developer can set on another admin, or player for that matter. It would not announce to the person that it was activated, and it would start a file for that person, logging everything they see, do, or communications they take part in. It would log their admin commands, and provide a summary at the end of the file. An example might be: <insert name here> used 39 admin commands, performed 3 ban operations, send 42 messages, received 48 messages. Then you could just go and read the thing or search for what you were specifically looking for.

post 10, you may have misunderstood me. I by no means, was saying that using 1 account for everyone is a bad idea. rather, I was saying, if someone has an issue with an admin, and wants to speak with another admin about it, and ends up getting that particular admin on the other end of the line, they will recognise it. that was all. but yes, the smaller the team, the more organised it is, couldn't agree any more with that.

Personally I've always had a problem with "unified administration teams"; that is, to the user they appear to be one single entity rather than a collection of people. In the context of a nation, such an entity makes sense; after all, that entity represents the entire nation. What distinguishes that particular entity from a unified administration team like games like CR and RS have (in CR's case) utilized and (in RS's case) are wanting to utilize is that these entities have representatives, and if someone within that entity fucks up its pretty easy to figure out who did, and to subsequently punish them for it, nationally at least. (In the international spectrum, other countries blame the entire US, even if only one person did something to another country; that's international politics and there's a good reason for that, though I can't think of it at the moment.) But in the context of a game, such a methodology of administration doesn't necessarily work; the game is not a nation, or a state, but a game, ran by a selection of individuals who are (hopefully) trusted by the developer(s) of that game. So, if an admin uses the ban hammer indiscriminately, as has been done in the passed, the player base is going to blame the entire administration team, rather than blaming that one particular person. I understand that the admins of RS don't want any issues happening with admins vs. players, however in a game such as this preventing it is impossible, no matter how hard you try. Logging commands and all works fine until the log file gets so filled that you can no longer reliably use it; that's where services like Amazon CloudWatch come in play. When I say that the log file becomes unreliable, I mean two possibilities: either 1) the file will get so large that searching it from top to bottom won't exactly be practical, an unlikely scenario but one to consider anyway; or 2) admins learn its format and are able to hide the evidence, if not entirely get rid of it, making both the testifying arguments from the players and the admins becomes circumstantial and, therefore, impossible to confirm one way or another, which renders the final judgement useless. This is where a version control system like Git comes in handy: set up a cron job or action in the games source code to commit to a private Git repository every day, for example, or even every hour (but not every minute, unless your trying to acquire the most commits in a month award... which doesn't really exist). This would make it possible to go back a revision or two, and determine if the log file has been modified manually by an administrator who has done something nefarious but wishes to hide it.

It is. Many games try to do this anonymous crap and say, "We want to present a united front to our players," and they think it makes those players feel more confident, but really, it only plants the seeds of exclusion and distrust with the players because the players have absolutely no idea who they're talking to. Like I said in post 13: This anonymous united front shit works with countries but just barely. Its failed more than once with many countries: a representative attacks a representative of another country and the entire country of either gets blamed, not the representatives who are at fault; that, in turn, causes the seeds of distrust between countries to grow, which turns into hatred, purely because its not dealt with properly. A good tip: do not, ever, treat your game or administration team like a government of a country. Do not construct it as such, and do not make it look like that either. That only ostracizes you and your admin team because people think your weird. If your game is RP, your administration team can be a government IC, but definitely not IRL. That seems very weird and overly officious. That's the last thing we need. Also, another major thing needs to be added to RS that apparently isn't there: access control. You have rules, yes; but those rules will be incredibly hard to enforce without built-in systems in the game to prevent this kind of thing, or to monitor it. So add things like ACLs, or RBAC, or, even simple permission sets that are not modifiable by any admin except the creator of the game, and ensure that those permissions actually work before you release it. Ensure that said permissions are not tamper-able without some kind of decryption key (I'd highly recommend using an external cryptography API for this; BGT's cryptographic primitives are extremely weak, and are easily breakable.) Once that's in, monitor it, and monitor it closely.

@13 and 15
Before you go and yet again clutter the topic with irrelevant technical details to which you are clearly misinformed, rest assured that our development stile is a bit more intricate than a simple log file. While version control and kron is most certainly helpful in some instances, their is no requirement here. I have ever so carefully implemented a quite basic yet effective essential feature of every operating system known as file permissions, *gasps*. Access control list if you wish... that should serve quite adequately. Admins are in no way allowed to modify game logs for obvious reasons.

The way I look at it right now is this. If a player has a problem with the admin team as a whole, or the manner in which a case is carried out, they are more than welcome to get in contact with a developer. I can only speak for myself here, but I'll do what I can to make sure the entire case is thoroughly examined by both me, Sam, and when necessary the rest of the team. Admins are also required to write down information on key encounters with players.

Hi. So just to clear a couple things up here with the system of having anonymous admins. I understand how if you have an encounter with an admin that you are unhappy with, it's good to be able to report what happened. Keep in mind that all admin messages and actions are closely logged. Administrators can not modify these log files. If you have an undesirable encounter with an admin, all you need to do is report to a developer, not an admin, what happened and the date/time this took place. We can then view the log files and detain exactly what happened. The reason we are pretty much forced to have anonymous admins is simply because of the nature of the game. Admins are players just like you guys. They join teams, they kill, they insult, they die. We have found that the admin's ability to genuinely play and enjoy the game is massively impeded because if a matter appears where they are forced to take admin measures, everyone knows that that person is an admin of the game. This instantly opens that person up to false cheating accusations, PM's when admin flags are turned off, and commonly people thinking that that admin is a jerk because while that admin's flag was disabled, that admin had insulted someone with colorful profanity just like everyone in the game does, and should be allowed to do. So to clear up all the "this admin is a jerk because he killed me 3 times in a row" reports, and to allow an administrator who works on the game voluntarily, and for completely free, to enjoy and play the game they are administrating with out being accused of cheating or insulting etc etc. This also extends beyond a single admin playing the game, as it has been our experience that once people know you have the ability to enable your admin flag, they don't forget that you have that ability. Meaning that even after a situation is dealt with and the admin disables there flag to continue playing the game, then that admin insults someone and gets a kill streak of 10 players in a row, what generally happens is that many of the players get a negative view of the entire admin team because they were killed 1 to many times by someone who had the ability to enable an admin flag. I say this from experience of the many reports me and carter get all the time, I'm not assuming things here. So the general consensus, there for, was to make 1 admin figure that can show up when ever it is needed, and vanish when ever a situation is dealt with. This way it completely discards all controversy players may have when just playing the game with other people that are admins. Like I said though, the developers (me and carter)  an tell who sent which messages if you send a report to us. The point here is to try to handle things with the admin contacts, and if you are unable to make any headway with your issue or situation, then contact me and carter.

@20
You obviously have a profound lack of knowledge if your saying our data is stored in a log file that either 1, the admins can use, or 2, is a single massive text file. Also, I have first hand knowledge of the systems you discussed above, given the fact that most of my personal projects use git and occasionally AWS.
This topic was designed for getting feedback on our proposed changes to redspots administration. Again, and as I said in the last post, you obviously don't know the security measures in place. I have dismissed this as nothing more than our standard Ethonic game of technical expertise and hypothetical possibilities.
If you would like to continue playing, feel free to do so through Skype or PM's.
I don't see anything more that needs to be said here, oh yeah, maybe that admins don't have either access to the server directly or commands that deal with file I/O what-so-ever?

On another note, I appreciate the feedback we've received thus far. Keep it coming, and I hope the changes provide for a more positive playing experience overall.

I get what you guys are saying from the admin team about admins being able to play, and they should, they do a lot of hard work to keep things running smoothly, so they should have the option to play the game like anyone else can. I do think that they should not be able to play as their admin account though. Thinking about the rules in place for police officers. They can't really do certain things on duty. They can't go and watch a movie, they might stop off for a break and get something to eat real quick, but a cop on duty isn't going to be sitting in a diner for an hour and a half. But, think about a cop who is off duty. An off duty cop gets to carry his service revolver with him, he can call something in, I think even make arrests if the situation warrants, but there are variations of those rules in different places. This is more how it should be in my opinion, because think of it, if an admin were playing the game as a player and saw something that needed an admin to deal with, he could log in as an admin and deal with it, or call to someone else. When an admin uses his own admin account for playing, problems can arise. I'll make a few assumptions about the server and the way things are run, they may not be like this, and I have no knowledge, I am just making them to help with the scenario. Let's say that an admin cannot hand objects to himself, so no giving a loadout of weapons and ammo, he must go and collect like everyone else. He can be killed by other players. Let's say he can't tweak values in game like how many shots he has in his weapon before it needs reloaded, fire rate of the weapon, so basically, he can't cheat and still has to do everything like any other player. OK, so we have that, now, let's say a certain player has been giving him a bunch of guff for a while, he then goes and kills or cusses out the player repeatedly... Nah, to me that's not right. Admins shouldn't be doing that, they should act professionally. Now, if some of those previous assumptions are false, they might be tempted to take advantage of them. No good can come out of your admins acting like players while they're admins. It's like a cop going up to someone while he's off duty and saying, excuse me, but I need to pat you down. Remember, this guy's off duty, no uniform, no badge pinned to his breast pocket. Is that something you're gonna allow to happen, being that you have no way to identify he's a cop? This isn't exactly the same, but it's close enough that parallels can be drawn, cops on duty won't turn around and yell in someone's face if they bumped into him or something, and if reports were filed against that cop, he probably wouldn't be one for long. There really does need to be a divide there, I think, if there's not, it just invites issues. Now, if an admin cannot be killed, or has crazy high health like 500K plus, because he needs to test certain things, and he roams around and kills other players, then you stray into the unfair. I really can't see any good out of allowing admins to play the game under their own admin accounts.