Do these have to be addressed in X amount of time, or does every time the entire staff looks over an appeal and says “I don’t know what to do” in unison, do these appeals just sit around forever?
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Admins are volunteers yada yada, also understaffed for the work they have so if you have to appeal you are pretty much going to wait up to 1 month to get a response given how appeal threads are going the way they are for last few months.
If you are a newbie reading this, you better not make bad typos on grasshopper as ninja teleports to you and cuts your neck while you try to type it down hastily on radio to scream for help cause its perma till someone gets to it. 
Who flagged that🫵🏼😵
It got flagged by a word in the link which is kind of funky but technically correct ig
We have a goal of getting them addressed within a week of posting but obviously that’s not going great right now. We have policies that lower the amount of work required outside of investigation for old appeals to almost the bare minimum, but most of the work is the investigation.
Like badman said, all staff are volunteers so we can’t really force people to do appeals. Every admin task is backlogged right now, so we can’t just solve the issue by prioritizing things without hurting other issues. I made a post on discord with a bit more info that can be read here: Discord
everything is backlogged/understaffed, server coverage is awful too. forcing people to spend time to work on appeals that they don’t want to work on instead of responding to issues on servers, which they seem much more willing to do, would probably result in an overall reduction in work getting done and an increase in burnout, all without any backlogs necessarily getting significantly better. I regularly see people point out that someone is ruining a round and no admins are on to deal with it, and that’s a problem that’d definitely get worse if people were made to work on appeals.
Even if we wanted to force people to work on appeals, we don’t really have a good way to tell them how many they should work on. No one has coded time frame based admin tracking, so there’s no way for us to tell how much time an admin has spent adminning in say the last week. That leaves bans as pretty much the only metric to go off of, so we can say something like “you have to do 1 appeal per week for every X bans you place” but that discourages admins from placing bans, even if they feel they’re appropriate, because it will require them to do something that they might really not want to do or might not feel they have time for. There’s also another issue because I can without even having to connect to a server run a database query and place hundreds of valid bans, and it wouldn’t really make sense for me to be then required to most of the appeals because I happen to know what magic words to type or because someone happens to admin during the time raiders are most active.
To your point about obligations and responsibilities, no one on the admin team gets compensated, they don’t have any obligations. The only responsibilities that anyone on the admin team has boil down to not abusing their positions. There’s only so much that can be done to try to make sure we have enough admin activity. I don’t think telling admins something along the lines of “you can volunteer but you can’t burn out and you better do appeals” is reasonable right now and I don’t think it’ll lead to a sustainable increase in admin activity. I’ve continuously brought up internally what I think contributes to and causes admin burnout, and I’ve made I think hundreds of github issues specifically related to things I think could or need to be improved for admins
It’s even worse for staff complaints, mine has been waiting for over 5 months now.
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The list is only going to get exponentially bigger unless there is a tangible adjustment to the ban policy. I’ve seen a lot of bans that are arguably overzealous(which might be remedied by a ban appeal system or more concise guidelines for how to administer bans) which only hurts the ban appeal system, at the moment it might aswell not even exist.
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wouldn’t hold your breath
The banning policy is already pretty light as CE posted already.
A lot of time is being wasted with people appealing sub 1 week bans tbh. If anything, the only appeal bans should be indefinite bans.
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It might be worth setting up tags for temporary vs indefinite appeals so that people can sort them easier, unfortunately it’s a massive pain to add more tags to appeals with the way the plugin works
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Ban appeals being slow to handle happens because an inordinate number of people generally need to be involved in them, in addition to any potential background investigation an admin needs to do. To just quickly summarize the banning policy’s section on appeals, you have to
- Do all of the required research to verify the validity of anything said
- Check for ban evasion, appeal history, notes, warnings, logs
- Reading the ahelp resulting in the ban is “highly recommended”
- Talk to the banning admin, ask questions of the player in the appeal
- Run at minimum a 24 hour vote with all of the other admins and handle the appeal when it concludes
The “speedy appeal” version just ends up skipping the voting process under certain circumstances like a short ban or they opted out of voting, but you still have to talk to at least two other admins meaning its not something you can just do in 30 minutes unless the banning admin and another admin are close at hand.
They’re not fun to do, they can’t generally be handled quickly, and the backlog just makes people want to handle them less, and the volume of procedure you need to follow to initiate them scares off people new to handling them.