Lack of Staff Transparency

Overview

I’m not usually the one writing long forum posts like this, but in light of recent situations in which users including (myself)
were banned from the discord and main server, I felt it was finally time to raise the issue of a lack of communication from staff in regards to punishments.
This post isn’t and shouldn’t be seen as an attack on staff, I get along with a lot of staff members over the 9 years I’ve been a member of the community, but
instead to raise awareness of the lack of transparency from staff and contradicting statements. Because of staff actions, trust in the entire staff team (especially senior management/admins) has been lost by the player base. If you want an active player base, you need a competent staff team that doesn’t have bias towards one player than another.
Evidently, this post has been rushed and does not go into the details that I would like it to.


Ban Evidence

When banning a player for more than 24 hours, staff members must make a ban topic with evidence for the ban within 24 hours of the ban.
HelloMiners Community Rules - #9 by Luc

This rule has rarely been followed by staff, and currently there is no punishment for staff who do not post a ban topic for users banned
on the server within 24 hours. There are plenty of examples of this, the most recently being Adam_123 (Ban #4247 - HelloMiners)
who has yet to receive a ban topic within 24 hours, despite being banned almost a month ago. Users who do not receive ban evidence should
be unbanned. I’ve bought up this particular ban with Satan multiple times, who said he’d post it in the weekend which has still not been posted - and that was weeks ago.
Another example would be when Oza was jailed without explanation - I could go on all day about these incidents.


Inconsistency

One of the discord server rules is that users may be banned if they are banned from the main server. This is the reason 4K was banned, but I believe it was months before other players like NYC and GBT were banned, and being one of the most active discord users I still see Kidg7 in chat.


Today’s Incident

Context

So those active on the discord server may be aware that myself and Albinary were recently muted (i’m sure he’ll reply with his version of the story, but I believe muting both of us was justified - just the lack of communication wasn’t), and shortly after banned for the duration of our mute (24 hours) on the discord server.

For some context for what happened, binary posted a dumbed down version of instructions for a molotov cocktail that were not entirely accurate, and could be compared to how to make a bomb recipe being “1. have a shell 2. have gunpowder”, as well as redacted screenshot in which ChatGPT explained how to make meth, which was showing only key words that are all in the dictionary and not specially
relevant to the meth production process, as well as saying something along the lines of “the european commission website posts meth recipes”. After a message in which Somthicc asked for the full unredacted image, I then (stupidly) posted a similar image
with a link to the aforementioned Europa website.

Punishment

After being muted, I then created a thread in the forums channel where I pinged both Satan and Luna, and binary followed by creating two threads in the General Channel. Neither staff member responded to the ping, but binary was then banned at around noon BST for evading his mute. This is because permissions on the discord server have been incorrectly configured by the incompetent staff team (sorry for this, but saying ‘you’ll work on it’ isn’t helpful in the slightest.). For the following rest of the day until around 9PM BST I then continued posting in the help channels and department channels, without staff confrontation. I pointed this out in front of thendil on the HM classic server, where he removed my department roles which i then readded, continuing to bypass the mute. Later, I was banned by Thendil, with my ban reason in the discord server not being set. I still have yet to understand why I was banned around 9 hours later than Binary, despite being the one who created the initial thread - a clear representation of Thendil’s bias towards banning Binary.

Lack of staff communication

So far not a single admin has reached out to either of us, instead interacting through Thendil who is only a moderator. I’ve attached my correspondence with Thendil below, which did not occur until after the ban - I received no warning about the mute. I believe I received a message at the initial time of the mute at around 2am, but this message was deleted by the time I got to it.


This is similar to previous server bans, in which friends of mine have been banned from HM but have not been able to reach out to senior management about
their ban reason directly, instead resorting to communicating through Nico - who is amazing, but he’s a tech not a PR spokesperson. This isn’t an attack on Thendil or any other staff, but I’ve decided to include this to show how difficult it is to communicate with staff outside of the server.

I’ve attached a screenshot sent to me by a member of the community in which Binary has requested the reason for his warning, being ignored by staff. The vast majority of the senior management team on HM aren’t even active anymore, and clearly do not have the time commitments required to administrate a server. I would love for these staff members to step down from their roles which is unlikely to happen, but again this isn’t an attack you’re all great players and have heavily contributed to the community. Failure to act on any of this will result in the player base decreasing further, with recently some of the most active players like 4K being banned.

Staff, please step up your game.

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NYCE and Gbt still haven’t been banned yet despite receiving permanent bans. Looking through #punishments, in the server discord, I can’t seem to find any past bannings of people who were temporarily banned from the game server. Looks like 4K606 was the first this rule was applied to “If you’re banned from the Minecraft server, you also may be banned from the Discord at the discretion of staff.”

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Posting a link to a suggestion I made a couple weeks ago, since it’s somewhat relevant.

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perfectly describes my feelings towards this all. literally today i messaged satan to find out why i got muted for “sharing sites that could teach you how to cook meth” (of which i did not do). this was sent nearly 16 hours ago and he has responded to others within that timespan.

thendil did provide me ban reasons in my DMs. i have tried to challenge said reasons, however there is no response, for example thendil claims i was “encouraging a conversation about the sharing of recipes for illegal drugs” - however, the conversation before the incident, people were talking about a racist AI. i was continuing the conversation with a show of how an AI literally can provide instructions on how to make a drug. this was censored heavily. all you can deduct from the recipe is “1. methamphetamine exists 2. it is made into a paste 3. it turns into a powder 4. it is very bad 5. random chemical comes from plants”. its hard to contest this point however, as there is no one to contest to.

i already know admins are not willing to communicate with me about this, it’s been very inconsistent. the difference between me and herd is yes, i publically insulted thendil. between me and herd, i got banned on the HM Discord, the HM Classic Discord, with chances of the nicochulo cult also banning me around 10am BST. herd did not get banned on any of these until 9pm BST.

as herd’s screenshot shows, i was previously warned and have received little communication, but not only that, i have received little communication on a previous mute. that makes 3 incidents with little communication.

in the case where i got muted, oza asked if theo can unpress charges on 4k, of which end said yes. i tagged oza and thomas to ask how much money they have because bribery = humour. both me and oza got muted for a few minutes, and i asked in #help around 3 times as to why i got muted. no response. all 3 of these cases were moderated by thendil, hopefully giving you an idea why i did eventually insult him.

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when challenging 4k’s ban, again, i got told that i shouldn’t challenge it, and that 4k should submit an appeal, and i shouldnt put my effort into discussing it then and there. why? all authority should be questioned. all punishments should be fair and equal,. and if i see another member get punished unfairly and/or unequally, i should question said action, for it can happen to anyone that staff have biases against. this just seems like an attempt to say “we’re right, no further questions”.

just to clarify and i will admit, i absolutely could’ve done with a warn/mute (although being dealt with the same time as herd despite me censoring is pretty absurd) last night, ofc its not good to further develop a discussion like that, and all it couldve taken is a message deletion and a “lets not talk about this” . it wouldve been enough of a deterrent. being provided with 0 opportunity to discuss said action, being ignored for a third time on discord-related punishment, and getting banned off of discords because someones feelings got the best of them, isn’t the best course of action. i must say punishment recently has been just shows of power. punishment is supposed to be a deterrent, especially in smaller cases. 4k did not need 8 weeks to be told not to lowball by 70k~. i did not need 24 hours of not talking on a discord server for the idea of “dont talk about meth n molotovs” to be introduced. staff generally seem to punish before warning (in regards to smaller cases).

i have not spoken to a single HM admin regarding the case. even the HM Classic admins asked for my perspective, however clearly HM Staff couldnt. and if they cant hear my perspective, the punishment system is clearly failing. that’s not an investigation, thats just being yesmen to 1 person’s opinion on things.

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I talked to Luc about my ban, he said he would get back to me about my appeal. Thendil is just a trial moderator, he wouldnt have known i submitted an appeal.

Hi, I do not speak on behalf of the entire staff team, however this is my opinion:

I actually agree with you for a number of points in your post and I feel like the staff team needs more cohesion. I have noticed in the past year or so the staff team has been banning core members of our community, some rightly so, however this can cause a domino effect in terms of player count.

For ban evidence, I would support a: “Ban Topic or No Ban” rule. I have followed up a number of times and annoyed certain staff members who havent made a ban topic as of recently, however I agree, this is a rule that can not be broken. It is unacceptable to ban someone (unless its a stupid burner account from a raid, or an alt) for no reason.

Me personally, I mostly do my own thing, but we need more leadership and consistancy in the staff team.

Honestly I feel the communities opinions on how the staff team goes about bans is actually rooted in fact.

I’ll be honest with you, I dont memorize every single ban topic or know why every single user was banned, but this is honestly why ban topics are so damn important, ESPECIALLY if they are a regular user banned for something on the fence.

I did hear something about the molotov incident in the discord, I kinda agree that there should be some sort of punishment for that, but I would have to look into the context to give more of an opinion on it.

In conclusion we can discuss this further in dms.

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Also if anyone has stuff to bring up, just dm me on discord.

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I also agree with several points in your posts, and many of my points were outlined in another post as linked prior.

You would have not been punished on the nicochulo cult for numerous reasons, the primary reasons being that (apart from one, maybe two, staff members on HelloMiners having moderation powers there), the fact that the server distinctly has a policy, even before I made it clearer in the rules yesterday, that we do not carry punishments over from HelloMiners unless we recieve a report and investigate. We had done the same with Doodle’s ban from nicochulo cult around 1-2 years ago.

I apologize if you felt that you were at risk of being banned from nicochulo cult, however I am able to reassure that unless you are reported for an external offense, and have been found to be breaking that server rules, or break the server rules in the Discord, then you can’t be punished there. If anyone without the moderator or administrator roles has told you that you will be banned there, then ignore them since they do not know what happens behind the scenes.

Again, if an moderator/administrator has punished you for no reason, feel free to appeal using the methods I recently outlined in the server rules.

Once again, if you have any questions, or anyone else, feel free to reach out to me, nico or buga on Discord.

Edit - Elaborated.

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oh yeah for sure, don’t worry, but it’s just the idea that there were attempts to ban me from several HM discords yet not with herd, so it was just pretty inconsistent and ran slightly on bias (because who likes being on the receiving end of insults)

There is sometimes a lot of crossover between what the staff think and what the players think in the way decisions are made and it’s very often that players will be more vocal about popular players who decide to break the rules. Some valid points have been raised and they will be taken on board. It’s also quite rare for a server to share every ban detail and evidence for every player. Sometimes that can leave servers in hot water. Rest assured, those involved on this occasion have been made aware by DM/discord chat why they were muted and then removed temporarily. I would also add that a number of the screenshots posted further up are a little cherry picked and it loses the context. It’s great to see a coherent conversation here though, it’s just a pity the same courtesy wasn’t extended on discord when players want to enjoy their online experience. Probably not a good idea to post recipes to molotov cocktails and crystal meth again and try to root out every way to circumvent a mute or swear at the mods tasked with dealing with some of these issues.

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I was having a productive conversation with the person who reported me for “scamming” and then I get banned off the discord? Also, just my opinion, but if the screenshots above are “cherry picked” the evidence for Adam’s whole ban seems cherry picked. Now I am going off of Adam’s word but it seems the bathroom in question was removed months ago and the screenshot used was not even something he made, it was something he was making fun of on his own discord server? I think the reason we are having a productive conversation on the forums is because staff have attemped/succeeded at banning us on every other place of discourse.

This post has me thinking back to something else.

if you are not bothered to read, please skip to the edit at the end bc thats another point to be made.

regarding all the screenshots of the staff team ignoring us, thats just concrete proof, theres no cherry picking. regarding my screenshot where you said 4k should appeal, you sent that around 3 times in different instances where i was defending 4k. unless herd’s screenshot of the conversation between you two was cherry picked, i dont see how any of them could be? the proof that we’ve been ignored multiple times is on the HM discord too.

the discussion where i was being uncurteous had no signs of stopping “players [wanting] to enjoy their online experience”

CONTENT WARNING: i swear and say negative stuff about another human

unless you’re talking about what happened on hm discord, but even then the discussion was literally about racist AI right before that, neither are particularly enhancing the player experience

thing is it wasnt even a recipe it lit just said:

EDIT: EXTREME CONTENT REMOVED BY STAFF

that isnt a recipe thats just naming components, the thing was titled “how to make cupcakes” so clearly it wasnt saying people should make explosives, if anything you implied its in regards to molotovs. also children are not finding kerosene, and the recipe i got is very much is on the second link on google, but again thats not really that important because i admit a deterrent wouldve been justified in that situation. a method of warning to say “we dont want ppl to talk about molotovs so pls dont post that” is valid. getting the same mute as herd for 24 hours when i actually attempted to censor stuff and stopped myself going into any details, is (imo) not.

to clarify i had personally not liked thendil before this situation, and before he got mod. this situation, however, i decided to say something (hence the “sorry i need ts off my chest”, and hence why i said he played 49 hours a week). this is not to justify, this is to explain. i initially thought satan muted me (and i still think positively of him), so i only swore due to the fact it was a specific person :grin:

still yet to hear from any upper staff though :thinking:

EDIT (if ur not bothered to read the stuff before, read this):

inconsistent punishing??

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inappropriate discussions are a warn. offensive swearing is a warn. now lets look at the punishment system.

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it takes 2 warns for a mute, yet both me and herd got muted for a day right after it happened. if we are not counting me for some unbeknownst reason, why did herd get muted for a day? this seems inconsistent.

furthermore, my messages about thendil should not be a reason to punish on the hm official server, or should at the very least be treated different (a general HM offence, not a discord offence)

image

the procedures listed in the HM discord rules were not followed. if not for me, then herd. herd definitely got incorrectly punished as stated by the very rules set out on the discord.

Staff have now reviewed the post and the extreme content has been removed. In the interest of staff transparency, we’ve decide to re-open the post.

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I have it on good authority that the bathroom situation took place on the server.

Also What’s there to cherry pick? One doesn’t need to post multiple racist dog whistles to be banned under our zero tolerance policy. This one just happened to be the most recent one.

Don’t want to be banned? Don’t do dumb shit, it’s an idea that 95% of our playerbase seems to grasp.

The reason I brought adam up was because at the time he didn’t have the reasons for his ban, and without the basis it’s difficult to write an appeal, which will now be easier for him as he knows the reasons. The evidence doesn’t need to be public, it just needs to exist whether provided on this forum or in DMs, and not be too vague.

This post has been productive, and has resulted in

  • GBT being banned from the discord server as he is permanently banned in game, HOWEVER kidg7 is still in the server even as he is unable to repay his debts, so this hasn’t been fully met, and there could be others around too. NYCEmpire also hasn’t been banned
  • Adam receiving a ban topic which is he is now free to appeal
  • Ongoing discussions with staff, although it seems there still are some unwilling to talk.

However, now more people are annoyed at staff as a result of what has happened with this topic being locked. This has now been resolved thanks to Cheer, and players will hopefully regain trust in staff moderation in the future as this post hopefully results in a change to the rules in receiving ban evidence and staff actions.

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While there was no public ban topic shown, Adam was privately told why he was banned, along with evidence I believe.

To add to this I feel staff did not follow rules correctly with my ban, and I feel the voting system for unbans is ridiculous. I joined the server in 2015, sent one IP logger which was completely wrong, and I’ve now been banned for 3 years.
I wonder if some of the current staff even know the details of why I was banned, with me having no ban topic, and half the current staff team being promoted long after my ban. There was very little transparency around my entire ban and the time since then.

nice to see you’re still around
don’t take this as an official staff comment, but nico posted the following about it:










}

(literally didn’t even realise mine and eric’s arguments were the same 2 years apart lol)
sorry for the mass of screenshots, most of the messages are spread apart with irrelevant conversation between them.

EDIT: Your ban also seems to involve some sort of harassment see this and this

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Sometimes we have to be vague in our ban topics.

This community can sometimes feel entitled to know every single detail about a ban but more than often the details of such a ban are more than justified to be hidden from the public.

While there are a lot of adults amongst this playerbase, we’re still frequented by minors and supposed to be a safe space for minors.

A lot of bans deal with shit that minors genuinely shouldn’t be seeing. Like yeah maybe a ban topic is restricted in its information or evidence but that’s because the shit causing the ban often contains content that shouldn’t be seen by minors, while ban topics are public to anyone, including minors.

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