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KGS Issues Discussion
    Keywords: Tesuji, Ko, Online Go

Discussion moved from KGS Wishlist - Social: How many assistants, and how much/how often should admins and assistants police room chat

Hu: As it stands now, three peoples comments have been removed by two people. I am on the point of restoring them all so that the guts of the conversation is not ripped out, but I entertain some discussion.

wms: Assistants can throw a user off of the server for up to 48 hours. When they do this all recent chatter from the assistant or the troublemaker is logged and sent to the admins. The idea here is that admins will very quickly spot if an assistant isn't acting in the best interests of the server, so it is OK to make lots of people assistants.

Neil: Why does that make it OK to make lots of people assistants? Admins are volunteers, as has been said repeatedly. There's no guarantee that they will be responsive to a case of abuse, and in some cases an abuse might have context that can't be seen in the logged snippet.

Zarlan: Good point. After reading this I'd like to add that an Admin shouldn't make all too many assistants or he will be overwhelmed by logs.

Anon: That is a specious statement. Assistants will (should) only use their powers on users who are abusing the system. The number of abusers is independent of how many assistants there are. Therefore, the number of assistants will (should) not increase the amount of logs.

Neil: The difference between "will" and "(should)" is the entire reason that the logs of the kicks are made in the first place, and in fact is the reason kicks are needed in the first place. People don't always do what they should do, so accountability is needed. So if Mr. Shubert is giving just any flooder Assistant powers, then KGS has a problem.

TJ: This seems to be a tempest in a teapot; is it? In other words, has there been a problem with there being assisstants acting badly because Mr. Shubert is giving just any flooder Assistant powers? As long as Assistants are people who can help keep abusive people out of our faces while being reasonably tolerant (in my experience, the usual state of things with KGS assistants), the more assistants the merrier! If they become abusive, any of them, then worry about it and bring it to wms's and the admins' attentions.

TJ: Me again. Perhaps there is more of a problem than I thought. Some newer assistants (I think they're newer) do seem to jump rather fast and hard to give friendly reminders to people to not be obscene in even questionable cases. It's not any one assisstant or event I'm talking about; several times I seem to have found myself telling an assisstant to ease off with the jack-booted behaviour in the last little while. Might I suggest that assisstants be told to only speak up when they would have if they weren't assisstants to begin with, or if someone else complains or seems offended? After a while, hopefully any decent assisstant will start to know that most small problems will take care of themselves and vanish if left alone, while they may blow into a gale if you try to crush them immediately. I find a crushing environment much more offensive than an occasional "hell" or "damn" (hope that's okay HERE, but feel free to censor it if you can figure out how to keep the meaning without it), myself; I hope the admins of KGS feel similar and will steer things away from the shoals we seem to be turning slightly towards.

Lastly, this discussion doesn't really belong here. Where can we move it to, KGSWishList?

geno: Maybe the admins are supposed to crush the 'occasional "hell" or "damn"', or just don't know one way or the other. Are there written standards of required admin behavior?

wms: Admins and assistants are asked to enforce the [ext] KGS terms of service. And I agree, this long discussion doesn't belong here.

geno: The relevant passage seems to be: "... there are certain behaviors that are absolutely not tolerated at KGS... Swearing..." I think most people would consider "hell" or "damn" to be swearing, so it seems the admins are supposed to stop this behavior.

Notochord: I might disagree on that. There is a broad range of profanity. Even if the vastest vast majority of people agreed that "hell" or "damn" constitutes swearing (in the context of kgs), I doubt that many would put it in the same category of offensiveness as other choice words. Putting a lot of people in the role of assistant will naturally make for a lot of variability in implementation of policy, and, given the current formulation, there is a wide field for that variability to roam. I would not want to see a "SUCH OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE IS ABSOLUTELY UNNACEPTABLE HERE. STOP IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL BE FORCED TO TAKE DRASTIC MEASURES" when most of the time one would see (for a single "hell") either an amicable chiding or nothing at all (save for an admin turning a more watchful/stern eye to what indescretions may follow...) If anyone were booted for saying 'dammit' twice I think that there would be many people ten times more incensed at the booting than the words.

Not to say that I don't think the assistants should be there. They absolutely should, and I agree with the why. Things can (and on many an occasion, have) easily get out of hand in that little english room chat box. I'd hate to see them get out of hand the other way, though. Some sort of codification/collaberation on the 'assistant method' might do well to ensure a tactful (and appropriately measured) use of power. I hate to speak like an activist, but I can see how a two-worded formulation "no swearing" could easily get things more toward black and white than they are in reality. 'hell' is by no stretch equivalent to even 'slight' racial slander, but racial slander can make a Hell on Earth. Assistants can't adequately play by the rulebook as it stands, nor would I want them to look always at the letter of the law, in any case; I'd hate to see an authoritative ambience blossom on this server. Assistants should have a 'feel' for how to enforce as surely as normal clients should for how to behave, and that feel should be more or less consistent throughout the assistant body. If you make everyone an assistant, then the most stringent standards will tend to prevail, even if they begin to lose grip on a reality that is necessarily not rigid.

The assistants, as they currently are, have changed the server much for the better, but thats not to say that the way in which some might sometimes operate would be wholly good. I'd hate to see animosity grow, and spiral things into a situation at the other extreme of the spectrum (open/offensive->'closed'/inoffensive) that no one really wants, either.

TJ: It was pretty much my point that assisstants maybe need to be warned about the dangers of "jumping the gun", that assisstants need to know when/how much to enforce, and that they need to not enjoy enforcing (or feel bound to enforce) every possible questionable thing. More rules aren't needed, just guidelines for assisstants who've never been in such a role before, to help them find the necessary balance both going in and while figuring out their roles.

ilanpi: Hey guys, don't forget that this is all taking place in the context of the game of go, which can be considered as a way to resolve conflict in as precise a venue as possible (I pretty much agree with Emanuel Lasker in this sense, modulo the choice of game). So, to all the people who believe that "go is like life" if not "go is life", I say that I find the arbitrary nature of the new KGS rules to be completely contrary to the spirit of the game (though all the bitter aguments concerning it are perfectly consistent with the fighting aspect of the game).

The old censoring rules could be applied in a somewhat objective fashion, since offensive language can be more or less identified through a list of keywords, while flooding can also be defined fairly rigorously, e.g., by contribution of more than a given amount of text. However, the new rules entail a subjective interpretation of content of conversations, and I believe that this cannot possibly be done in a fair or consistent way. Case in point, an administrator recently warned a user that he would be banned if he again used the word "ass", when that word was used in an official KGS error message banning a user (by head administrator WMS). Such inconsistency is the rule rather than the exception with many warnings by administrators unqualified by any term of politeness, contrary to the KGS terms of service which encourage friendliness and tolerance in the face of conflict. I believe that such generalised misbehavior on the part of the administrators must be attributed to their leader, who has revealed himself combative and intransigent in the face of conflict and criticism. The final straw was his defense of the indefensible banning of a professional player whose supposed offence was completely innocuous. This professional player, by definition, should have been given every professional courtesy, not to mention his previous goodwill in helping and teaching users. Moreover, the language and culture barrier made it difficult for him to understand what the problem was (even without any such barrier this might present a challenge) while every convention of polite conduct points to the obligation of the host to make his honored guest as welcome as possible.

I believe that this last point gets to the heart of the problem: The KGS administration and their defenders adhere to a "my house my rules" attitude, while most of the rest of the civilized world believes in hospitality with the host taking responsibility for making guests feel at home. Indeed, hospitality and politeness are fundamental principles of the cultures where go has developed, so the new KGS policy has the distasteful effect of presenting lack of manners to these cultures.

But all of this is quite useless -- once one witnesses a professional player banned for no good reason, one realises that it is impossible to reason with KGS administration.

Cheyenne: Yes a host is responsible for making guests feel at home, in the same vein however the guests should also respect the home. I doubt that you would be telling a host that it is your right to be able to walk through their home with muddy shoes on. Swearing and inuendo because it's cute, holding major conversations that are not related on hot topics (politics, religon, etc.), are not things a polite guest should be doing. All that has really been asked is to move the conversations elsewhere and respect other people. There are kids on KGS. Some people are offended by swearing. Some people would really like to not see discussions that are basically ment to ruffle feathers. Yes -- it's all about respect and manners, but it is a two way street.

ilanpi: Thanks for you comments, Cheyenne, since they are a good exposition of the other point of view. However, they do not explain nor excuse what I believe was the most egregious fault, the banning of a professional player. If you read the reasons given for this action, you will note that there was no offensive language and the content was go related, it was about KGS (Korean Go Servers, that is). The reason given for banning was "flooding", in fact, a refusal to stop repeating the same information. As has been pointed already, it is natural to give the professional the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he simply did not understand what was being told to him by administrators. As I said before, giving the benefit of the doubt would have shown professional courtesy and would have been the polite thing to do. (DrStraw - no, the reason was not "flooding", it was "spamming".)

Hu: If I understand it correctly, the pro was given about 15 lines worth of benefit of doubt, and then another 15 lines of continuation, whereas most users are warned after about four lines. Seems like professional courtesy was extended. (DrStraw: plus far more requests to stop it than would have been extended to anyone else.)

ilanpi: Thank you, DrStraw for directly confirming here what I wrote above: The KGS administration is completely inconsistent. In particular, WMS wrote in KGSEnglishChatRoom: "This was not an English Room "new rules" boot, it was a clearcut case of the player flooding the room with essentially the same information over & over" while you just wrote: "no, the reason was not flooding."

Notochord: ilanpi, That's precisely what spamming is (the player flooding the room with essentially the same information over & over) in the context of a chat room. Or maybe my understanding of the term is from the planet Zombax, dunno.

Hu: You have just proved that the pro, wms and Dr Straw are human. Congratulations on your insight, ilanpi.

"This is all taking place in the context of the game of Go", sayeth ilanpi above. KGS excels at its primary purpose: providing a great place for playing Go. Chat is secondary. One hundred percent perfection in administering a chat policy is tertiary. I suspect that neither wms nor Dr Straw were there at the time, or perhaps only one was. Some minor inconsistency over one incident does not mean that the "KGS administration is completely inconsistent", as you write more than once above.

Give it a rest and relax, ilanpi.

ilanpi: Man, once again you prove that you are Hu. I will therefore take your advice and tenuki.

ethanb: Personally, I feel the same as ilanpi does, I just felt that he was making the case strongly, so I didn't feel it necessary to interject. Perhaps I was incorrect in doing so, seeing the number of contrary responses he received over the course of the conversation. My recommendation is that if you want to keep chat out of the room where everybody congregates to play go, remove the chat functionality from the client in the special case that a person is in that room. As people gather in any place, the background volume from conversations will rise, no matter how quiet you tell them to be. That is a simple fact, and no amount of (non-technically enforced) censorship will change it for long. I also would like to see an apology issued to KGS users for being made to feel that they are unwanted, but I understand that may be a little too much to ask for. If you don't want people to talk, just make it so they can't. Simpler for everybody.

ilanpi OK, I guess this is partly intended to show that I am human too because I can't resist a couple of further comments. ethanb, KGS did apologize to users for any inconvenience their new policy might provoke, but this message was removed after a few days. Hu, you correctly pointed out that I overstated my case, but I feel that there is continued misconduct on the part of some KGS administrators. In particular, on this very page DrStraw emended his reason for banning a professional player after I pointed out an inconsistency, but he did not follow the temporal order of the discussion. The actual order of edits can be seen by looking at versions 46, 47, and 48 of this page. This covert action already served to give Notochord an incorrect impression of my criticism, as can be seen in his message above. I believe that the correct approach on the part of KGS administrator DrStraw would have been to first admit the inconsistency and then resolve it.

Discussion moved from KGS Wishlist - Social: Privacy issues

domi: Since a few months, the admin are able to read private chats. I wish a technical system to avoid possible abuses. wms and I exchanged about it, I also talked with some admin. It seems it would be easy to set up a system : people whose private chat needs to be read, get a window to tell them. + I wonder why though wms seemed to be concerned by the problem,nothing has been done yet.

DrStraw As one of the admins who has been granted access to the private chats I would like to make a comment. This access has been proctected now for many months (today is 12th May 2004) and if a privileged admin does access the private chats the fact is logged and the admin has to justify it. I have never had to do it and because of this I cannot even remember how to do so (it is a special command which logs everything done). I think it is highly likely that if an admin did access the logs without good reason then that person would have their admin status questioned. Remember, also, that not all admins even have this access. In short, no one will ever have their chats looked at unless either they complain to an admin or someone complains about them.

  • wms: I'd just like to say, the system that DrStraw mentioned here was discussed among the admins, and we decided that it would be a good thing to implement, but I simply haven't yet had time to do so! So, while I do hope to add it, at the moment admins with access to the KGS logs can read all chats with no record left.
    • DrStraw: See, told you I could not remember how to do it:). I am not the only admin who thought you had actually implemented it.

rubilia: Perhaps all these kibitzing actions by admins should be logged to a publicly readable file.

[helger replied here and then was replied to, but helger later removed the reply. helger's reply should be restored here so the flow makes sense. -- Hu]

[Ian Davis replied here and then was replied to, but he later removed the reply. His reply should be restored here so the flow makes sense. -- Hu]

wms: Helger, a) censoring doesn't work against people who keep logging in as guests with different names (and yes, troublemakers *have* done this just to torture people who were censoring them), and b) what you describe as a way to handle this is almost *exactly* the way it works now. The only difference is that instead of being automated, all the people with chat log access have been explicitly told to only look at the private logs when necessary because of a case like this. True, an admin could decide "what the hell I'll look at all of helger's chats whether I get complaints about him or not," but I trust the people with chat log access to be responsible enough not to do that. If I can't trust people enough to treat the chat logs responsibly, then I wouldn't have given them access in the first place.

tasuki: privacy is nice thing, I agree with domi, and especially with helger :)

JuhoP: What wms says sounds pretty reasonable to me. Anyone who needs to chat with perfect privacy can (and should) find some better tools than a go server anyway.

rubilia: Afaik, the "basic democratic principle" Helger mentioned above, mainly has to be applied by courts of criminal assize. I canīt see why permitting those snooping actions should judge kgs users to be "guilty". If feasable, an admin has to intervene in severe situations like the mentioned one, and auto-logs provide a suitable basis to do so. However, like wms has pointed out, Helgerīs suggestion would work alike. Supposingly, there are different cultures about dealing with the privacy vs. monitoring question. I am european, and I donīt feel quite comfortable to know that my private chats are recorded and various people may read the records even without me being able to notice this. - wms, what makes you trust a person enough to give him/her access to these chatlogs? People can constantly behave very well - and have some "very special interest", too. The "auto-log" way lets those trusted persons decide wether or not they read a chat, instead of the afflicted ones. It hardly increases userīs security (compared to the logging-initiated-by-users-way), while it multiplies privacy vulnerability. To discover the fact of hidden readers by accident only (at SL) doesnīt seem to be the best way to me, either.

[helger replied here and then was replied to, but helger later removed the reply. helger's reply should be restored here so the flow makes sense. -- Hu]

Cheyenne: Just a couple of comments. First I would not assume that KGS is a place to have a private conversation. View it as a fully public forum with some ability to have a closed conversation with someone else. If you want a private method of conversing with someone use another facility (email, IRC, IM, phone, FAX, etc.) Second, as a possible suggestion, have a "reverse censor" flag that basically means that "I will allow a private unlogged chat with this person." In addition, I would put some restrictions on this type of chat.

  • Both parties must have "authorized" the other person in order to have an unlogged chat
  • You may not have an unlogged chat with anyone actively playing a game (any active unlogged chat would be suspended with that person until the game reaches "done" state).
  • You may not have an unlogged chat if you yourself are playing a game (any active unlogged chat would be suspended while the game is active until the game reaches "done" state).

DnF: I find this discussion a bit weird. Obviously, some people seem to assume that if you communicate unencrypted over a server, there might be privacy. It is obvious that you have at least to trust wms not to read your chat; and here it doesn't matter if it's logged or not. If you want real privacy, you must use a different form of communication anyhow. By the way, there are many more people than just some admins on kgs which can read your private chat.

rubilia: Thatīs quite true. The only point I strongly disagree with is that it doesnīt matter if there`s even another (compared to snooping by anyone without official chatlog access, not less likely to happen) risk uselessly beeing added or not. (Btw, Helger, I think your comparision with USSR, not to speak of Nazi Germany, is far too far away.)

Fwiffo: Have we reached [ext] Godwin's Law so quickly? The suggestion of only allowing admin access to recent conversations doesn't really solve the problem - if an admin really wanted to snoop on a user, they could just copy the logs to their own computer every 30 minutes or whatever (it could certainly be automated if somebody really wanted to put in the effort). Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy here? Are communciations with the KGS server even encrypted? While it's good to maintain a healthy level of paranoia when it comes to privacy, if you're really concerned it might be better to choose a different means for private conversations.

Rich: What a fantastic example of a minor matter reaching a state of hysterical hyperbole. KGS is a games server: the chat is an additional feature unrelated to playing the game - there are already rooms and you can chat in-game. Games are publically recorded; is that also an invasion of privacy? Personally, I find the comparison of allowing server admins access to an additional feature like this with Nazi/Stalinist politics revoltingly self-indulgent, and in very bad taste. If you want private chat, use a chat server, not a games server.

domi: as I initiated the conversation; I hope you will forgive me for not understanding everything 100%, my english is quite poor. Well WHY should we assume that no privacy is possible on a server ? Cause this is just the way it is ? As the spring comes after the winter ? I am totally confident in wms. Admin are human beings so as it seems easy to implement something to avoid abuses, why not do it ? KGS is a very special place which doesn't look as the others. I like the idea KGS owners and wms are concerned about privacy as they were to create such a nice server.

DnF: You need to trust wms anyhow that he doesn't read the log (he could just keep them without telling us -- this cannot be changed). Furthermore, the communication between KGS and your computer is not encrypted, meaning that many more people can read the chat also (changing this would make a lot of work which is by no way reasonable). Thus, I think it does not make much of a difference if a few admins picked by wms can read the logs as well.

ilanpi: Helger, if you want more privacy in KGS chat xju fp,(y upi idr upit ^tpgrddop,zm dlommd yp dpmbr yjr ^tpnmrų !=

mafi: Rich, your commentary is not helpful in any way. There are people, who have other priorities than only playing online games when meeting with friends on a Go server. One of these is to talk privately. I would never have the idea to use another chat system to talk with a close friend and Go player, when I can do it at the Go server as well, with the additional feature of playing a game with him or her. What I want to point out is, that the possibility of admins to access private games belongs in the same issue like the discussed points above. Admins should only be allowed in special cases to access them. Otherwise private games should be renamed to something like 'non public' to make clear that they are not private within the Go community. And generally speaking, it is a big difference, whether something is not private in the internet (not encrypted while transmitted for example) or not private within the Go community (where admins who know who you are in real life may abuse this knowledge).


Hu: helger removed several of his or her replies here and suggests that we should remove the replies to his replies. Ripping the guts out of the discussion as suggested only makes the problem worse. I think helger's remarks should be restored.



This is a copy of the living page "KGS Issues Discussion" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.