Cy's Dragons

oh hey a dragon

But I have two thoughts about the “banwave”

For background I work for a large social site and although I am not a moderator (I am on the art staff) there I have several friends who are or were at some point (mostly back in the site’s heyday).

The first thought is that several times we were accused of something like “banwaves” on that site–there was this impression that suddenly a great many more accounts were being handled than average, all at once. This was almost never true, and when it was, it was during times of peak activity when more people were playing so we had more reports to handle–during events, for example. Things like NotN. The actual percentage never really fluctuated much, aside from sometimes brief spikes when we hired new mods to plow through a backlog or something.

The second thought is that every single time, without fail, that I ever saw anyone loudly complaining about their ban–not just sending in an appeal, but going out in public loudly lamenting how unfair and incorrect their ban was–it turned out to be that the ban was in fact deserved; sometimes they even have a history of warnings and several other banned accounts (as the site I’m talking about allows multi-accounting). Sometimes the people sending in an appeal and maybe making one or two posts on a new account to tell their friends where they’d gone off to were in fact wrongly banned and the ban was overturned and we never heard anything about it again, but literally without fail every time there was a “public outcry” over an unfair banning it turned out to be deserved. This is true on several sites–a Runescape drama thread about exactly this recently went /r/bestof on Reddit, lol–and I just have to raise an eyebrow. And often the mods aren’t allowed to refute this publicly because we have privacy rules in place to protect our users where we’re not allowed to air their history unless they start posting specifics first.

I am not going to sit here and say that no one has been wrongfully banned because I frankly have no idea and to be honest any moderator who’s been around for a while, especially during a high-traffic time, has accidentally handed out a wrongful ban and had to reverse it. I was once banned on /r/ladyboners on Reddit because someone misread the comment above mine as having been posted by me! It was overturned.

I haven’t seen any posts by anyone banned so I don’t know what’s going on here; I don’t know who has been banned or why or usernames or any specifics. I only follow a couple of FR blogs directly to avoid flooding my dash as this is my non-FR account as well; the rest I visit the tag for and occasionally click over to that blog to read it. So I’m not trying to actively discredit anything that’s happening. I’d just say that before you leap to the conclusion that a “banwave” is happening that you consider that maybe the bans aren’t escalating: maybe it just seems that way because there are more active users and more botters afoot in the wake of NotN.

I should also add that last time there was a “banwave” scare I messaged the mods about the fact that three people in my household played FR actively (I’ve since moved so now it’s two in that house and me by my lonesome) and they sent me a very nice personalized message about it and I was never banned even though my step-dad and I traded his coli team back and forth on the regular. And then, a week or so later, it turned out there hadn’t been a “banwave” at all, it’s just that it so happened that two of the routine bans had been people who were especially active on Tumblr and therefore had a platform to publicly discuss their bans, totally by coincidence.

I’ve witnessed my employer issue widespread account locks (on various platforms) for security reasons, tied to all manner of possible cause. Social engineering, fraud, etc etc. We’ve also, on a far more individual basis, locked accounts due to suspicious activity.

We weren’t always correct in doing so.

None of these bans were irreversible. None of these bans, if they were contested, were handled with “just rejoin with a new account at the next window.” They were investigated fully.

If we were found to be in error for issuing the account lock, we’d get that promptly unlocked for the customer.

Equally, if accounts received locks, we knew precisely why we were doing so (and so did the account owners; they’d receive an email with a list of fully viable actions to take in the event of their accounts getting locked).

Some were guilty of wrongdoings.

Many, however, were not.

By and large, our client base has confidence that–as a company–we’ll handle the matter with integrity. We have multiple articles regarding our policies that are, if I may say so, very clear on matters of what’s allowed, what might result in a locked account, etc.

Flight Rising–evidenced by the number of people panicking and reblogging rumors of bans–over 80 individual reblogs of a post on my blog within two hours, for the record, shows me one thing: the userbase, by and large, isn’t clear on the methods the admin use to assess instances of possible cheating, botting, etc. They’re also lacking in confidence regarding whether or not such a thing will be handled fairly, should they be innocent of such.

chest:

INTO THE POT YOU GO

New to Tumblr and looking for Flight Rising blogs to follow! Please reblog and I’ll take a look c:

Long overdue commission finally completed (in a 12 hours long livestream marathon) of this amazing dragon here !