Instead of showing just a “you’ve been banned from this server” message, show a form that a player could fill in. Why should I join discord rooms, register on forums etc when I am already authenticated and logged in?
I always figured it was to show a good-faith attempt. That extra hoop to jump through means someone is willing to put in some kind of effort to rejoin the community, or that they are already invested in that.
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Added space-station-14
register on forums
Your ss14 account is your forum account, you don’t need to create another one.
I don’t want to register on Discord. I’m willing to invest effort to join the community, but not if that community uses 3rd party service which I don’t want to use.
You don’t have to register on discord to appeal a ban or chat with the community, this forum is hosted by us on our own infrastructure, using the same ss14 accounts you use to play the game.
The forums provide the following benefits:
- They allow for appeals to be properly organized and triaged.
- They allow for appellants, and admins to upload media where necessary such as screenshots.
- They allow for proper 2 way communication between the appellant and admins without both parties having to be online at the same time.
Such requirements cannot be met by a form in-game. We make the process of using the forums as painless as possible by integrating it with your ss14 account which you should have if you are appealing a ban.
I can however not talk about how other servers do ban appeals which have different resources, and practices. They likely however also require the same capabilities.
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I’m not talking about just Wizden servers. I’m talking about other servers too. I’m permabanned on one (RMC) for a reason that definitely does not deserve a permaban. And yes I tried to reach through this forum but the mod from there explained that there is no way to appeal on RMC but to join their Discord. And its not just RMC, I used to play on another server where I was almost banned due to them not specifying an unwritten rule deemed powergaming and they all also used only Discord for appeals. Only managed to avoid a ban cause a mod decided to contact me before boinking.
From my perspective SS14 is too entangled with this spyware black box that is Discord, on a couple servers I’ve even seen them not specifying the rules and instead linking to some Discord post. Depending on a 3rd party proprietary service for an essential function such as a ban appeal sounds like a bad decision.
Hosting and moderating a Space Station 14 server and all necessary infrastructure is a lot of work, most of which is done completely for free. We put in the extra effort to make official servers not “rely” on Discord, but this is not something that is reasonable to automatically demand from smaller servers.
For example, integrating an entire ban appeal system into the game client itself, like you are suggesting, is a huge amount of work. You are free to contribute that yourself, but most developers would agree that time could be better spent on different things.
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