TOPIC: [ALL SERVERS] Chat Punishment System

this was a thing on the murder server, wonder why its not everywhere else

maybe if it notified staff or took an anti-cheat screenshot whenever someone drops a hard r or summit

would be nice to have this or even a censor system it will still stop some people being offensive, even though you can say it in voice it will still lower it...

also why is this pinned?

the thrill of getting away with it will be gone

yeah

We've considered this in the past but unfortunately all it does it lead to a huge influx of people trying to loophole, which can end up being more of a problem

CEO of Business wrote:
There are plenty of good reasons as to why it would be a bad idea (one of the major ones was just outlined by Xnator).

At the time of implementation, Xnator gave many points as to why it shouldn't be added and why it wasn't a good idea (and all points were fair and valid) - However Joshua and I went against it and decided to add it to Murder regardless.

The results were both positive and negative - Positive in a sense that people would have a very tough time making discriminatory remarks in chat, but negative in a sense that they would try to loophole like crazy using symbols such as @, !, or adding additional letters, etc... And would be more prone to using voice chat and shouting all sorts of naughty things there instead.

This is on pointshop but people can just loophole so I see no reason for anyone to put too much effort into something like this.

callumok2004 wrote: there is no punishment for saying racist things on pointshop unless its been added in the last like week

Nogtog wrote: There is no punishment but it censors it out.

Is it really Zarp without offensive words though

Mr. Richard wrote: The point about using voice chat instead is valid, but I don't understand how using symbols is really a negative. If there is staff online, then they'd just do their job as usual and punish the user, except it would only be if the user loopholes, as they would be punished by the system automatically otherwise. However if there isn't staff online, surely the result can only really be positive, since, without the system, they would just say the words anyways, only they won't even have to use symbols or loophole the system in any way and still get away with it

Plus, couldn't they just add some of the loophole words to the blacklisted words over time to further increase the difficulty of using discriminatory remarks in text chat?

I don't really care if this gets implemented or not but I genuinely just fail to see how its a negative for users to have to loophole being racist instead of just... being racist

I remember when Bhop and Surf had this. There are many factors to take into consideration here;

- Who will hold the job of maintaining the blacklist (how can we formulate a list of offensive words when there are countless amounts of them, taking a list will not solve everything)

- Significantly less offensive words becoming blacklisted (no one is going to formulate a list from scratch, that’s tedious and time consuming)

- How can this tackle loophole (not only symbols but foreign characters can also be used) if blatant offensive and discriminatory terms are filtered out

- People resorting it to voice chat instead which can be extremely obnoxious compared to a chat message

In conclusion, this shouldn’t exist BUT it would be a much better idea to resort to more modern ways of moderating this behaviour such as chat log access to all staff that you can access at any time, anywhere by overhauling how ZARP log access works instead of relying on the Community Team to download multiple log files to find such terms being used. Relying on the Community Team to tackle the discriminatory language is simply too much and the increased supervision will probably soon be forgotten about (it’s happened before) which is where we end up in the vicious loop of mass discrimination language being spread. Stronger punishments may be effective such as longer bans but I have my reasons as to why I think this is a good idea but also a bad idea putting other factors into mind such as decreased server activity, which CAN have a knock-on effect if players start to see less people online and/or their friend is banned. to keep a consistent supervision from much more staff rather than just five people (some of which who simply cannot facilitate time into this) across multiple Gmod servers makes me believe that this would drastically reduce this behaviour.

Another solution to this is to introduce saving lengths of a chat/voice blacklist, meaning a staff member can revoke that person’s form of communication for not only much longer periods but also not having to worry about people reconnecting to avoid the punishment. This has proven to work effectively in the ZARP discord but of course that’s very different to a game server.

Edit: wrote this on a phone, I apologise for the somewhat off grammar