Hey mods -- who do you hate worse...the krellin, or the "I'm not making a cheating accusation" crowd? lol

Kestas' love is unconditional and unending.

Since SYnapse has now left this thread, apparently, it's probably a bit redundant to note that the timeline of events in the Blankflag case is *different* from the one he's claimed in this thread. Oh well, I've mentioned it now anyway.

The prosecution rests. Again.

So you are telling me that the game i pointed at is not meta?
Did you see the game?
You all now i am not a troll and i not against the mods.
I usually don't make accusations of this kind .
But i am so sure of it, i can't let go.
May i please read the conversation between the two players during this game and their pm's?

"May i please read the conversation between the two players during this game and their pm's?"

Someone get this man a comedy cube.

I feel stupider for having actually spent 5 minutes reading this thread.

@taos, There's really nothing else I can do to help you if you aren't willing to believe us when we say we've looked into it. We really can't have you slandering a random player though. So please stop posting your suspicions in the forum. If you'd like you may email Kestas about the issue (pm me if you need his email) and see if he will take a look. Maybe he can find something we missed, but unless he does the public accusations have to stop. Thanks.

I wonder what would happen if when players posted shit about the Mods in the forum, and no Mod showed up to respond.

^it probably wouldn't make a sound.

"So you are telling me that the game i pointed at is not meta?
Did you see the game?
You all now i am not a troll and i not against the mods.
I usually don't make accusations of this kind .
But i am so sure of it, i can't let go.
May i please read the conversation between the two players during this game and their pm's?"

Dear webDiplomacy Member,

Stop making cheating accusations in the forum.

Thanks,

Eden

My understanding is taos was told there was no cheating there and suffered as a result. That is when he brought it sarcastically to the forum only to have the mods reverse the decision and declare metaing after all.

So I ask this... If taos hadn't gotten pissed because the mods said "move along, nothing to see here" and suffered jmo's silencing, would the cheater have been banned after all? Or did it take taos pushing the envelope to get justice. Sometimes, vigilantism has it's place and, in this particular instance, it seems that it did.

Having finished reading the thread, I withdraw my suggestion that the vigilantism was justified. But it sure looked it from the outside.

That's why transparency in judgment is of the utmost importance.

Transparency in judgment?

Yes. In the US, all evidence in a trial is available after the trial unless it is locked for very specific reasons (to protect the innocent who may be in witness protection or the victim who may be a minor).

You want them to publicly archive their investigations?

How much do you actually know about the case, Draugnar?

@Draug, the #1 rule for new mods is they may never reveal how we find cheaters. That would just make it easier for people to cheat and harder for us to catch them. So we're willing to occasionally reveal why someone was banned, but transparency into the actual evidence isn't going to happen. If that player had been banned only for metagaming then meta would be the reason on his account. Because it's multi and or multi/meta ( fairly interchangeable with multi) you can tell that the game taos was referring too wasn't the reason for the ban.

For reference there are several different reasons I give:
multi - the person was cheating with more then 1 account without metagaming
multi/meta - the person had a multi but may also have been metagaming however the evidence was so strong that the exact form of cheating wasn't going to make a difference in the punishment
meta - only metagaming
multi/no reply - accused of multi only with backing evidence and after a significant period of time they never replied
multi/meta/no reply - the same as multi/meta but they didn't reply after being emailed.
repeat multi - someone who has snuck back several times
impersonating a god/idiot - for making an account impersonating Kestas
multi/idiot - have multi's and do something outlandishly stupid to the point that even us senior members headslap.

That information, plus looking back at someone's games should easily tell a curious member what happened. If there is a situation where someone disagrees with a ruling all they have to do is email us asking for an admin to appeal, which taos never did.

Instead I caught this cheater and his multi while looking into a separate report. Hope this clarifies a bit.

P.S. all mod actions are recorded for review by an admin or kestas at any time, per the site rules: http://www.webdiplomacy.net/rules.php

"Appealing decisions
Mod decisions can be appealed, either by another mod or by the admin. See below for the mod and admin contact details."

@PE - Only what I've read here and what I saw of the game when taos posted it (which I didn't see cheating necessarily happening then). And I'm not suggesting all the evidence, just the result and the why (we found user X had created user X2: X United and was playing both together in game X3 Last Stand) that type of thing. We don't need the details of how you found it, just what the verdict was and which games you felt were affected by it. That's a form of transparency that doesn't reveal webdip state secrets.

Then surely you're aware that one of the two people taos accused isn't a cheater, as concluded by our investigation of the game, which is all you need to know to recognize that taos is unequivocally in the wrong for continuing to slander someone's good name on this forum. Yes?

I agree which is why I reversed my decision at one point. But perhaps with a little more info simply posted to the guilty party's ID, we could have avoided all of it. Again, just the verdict (we find the defendant guilty of multigaming with these two IDs in these games) is all that would be needed.

The user who was banned out of the two taos accused (username 'wiltarded') was banned in another case for actions unrelated to this case. The other user (username 'JungGunz') was not cheating and has not been reprimanded. taos was notified of this and then went to the forum not once but twice to complain about nonexistent cheating; his first thread was silenced and this thread has been allowed to stay open.

That work? I'm not sure I'm at liberty to discuss more specifics.

@Draug, I understand your suggestion, and at one point I put multi to userid X when I banned someone for having a multi. The problem is the interface for us to ban someone is pretty small and doesn't accept long input. The other problem is that we generally cancel games where 2 or more people are cheating. So while we keep a record of the games in the mod email there isn't any way to share that information on the site. A lot of what we've worked on in the mod team over the last year is breaking up moderating into an efficient process, so adding more overhead would hurt our efforts to catch people who are cheating.

I know it probably doesn't seem too complicated, but the problem is how interconnected cases become. When I find a cheating group some are cheating with others, some are slightly metagaming, some aren't cheating enough to get banned and will only get a warning, etc. It's hard enough to keep track of all that and run a case with the mod tools and having the mod email to organize and search for data. Trying to present that data in a way that would make sense to anyone without access to the actual evidence would just be a nightmare.

In general I think we do a pretty good job satisfying members when they have concerns with our cases, but there is always going to be a level of non-transparency where members are just going to have to trust us. As always, we welcome members to email concerns relating to cases to [email protected] and we do answer every email we get.

I'd like to underline that last remark. Really, every email that comes in and gets read and scrutinized quite quickly. Every appeal is treated by people other than the original case handlers, including sometimes Kestas. However, giving a conclusion on a suspicion or an appeal takes more time because everybody is given the right to reply. The key value to mod's work is not speed, but thoroughness.

Like jmo says, the connections between accounts are complex, and are not all traceable on the site itself. When games are cancelled, or CD positions taken over, some of the publicly visible evidence disappears.

So please, email us with suspicions! Please email us with your appeals to decisions. It keeps us sharp an on the case. But please cut some slack too if things don't *seem* to correspond with the public data. It really doesnt tell the whole story.

DRUGS4MODS2014 - he's knocking on the door, he's ringing the bell, do us a favour, open the door and let him in

Sorry, Nigee, but even if they want me, I don't have time to dedicate and couldn't do the job justice at this juncture along the space time continuum.

10/10: Would be trolled again.

And taos, cut the mods some slack.

It is a volunteer position and it is entirely possible one or more of them might do something other than this 24/7/365. Volunteering chews up time and volunteering for something like this is pretty thankless to being with. If they're not working to your speed and to your satisfaction, well, you probably got a lot more than what you paid for using this site to being with.

So, thank you, Mods. I'd give you a +10, but I'm pretty cheap.

Please don't misunderstand me.
i love this site and i am very thankful to the mods and kestas.
I just wanted to complain for the mistake done and for silencing me when i was totally right.

You sound grateful. /s