User:Studenterhue/Adminhelp

WarningWarning

This guide is a work-in-progress and should not be taken as official policy.

Adminhelp, or just ahelp, is basically the main means for contacting admins to resolve issues in-game. It's a bit like the "Report" button in other games, but it's much broader than that. There are three ways to use

Press F1 on your keyboard. Depending on your keyboard, you may have to press a button named Fn or some such while doing so.
Click Help dropdown menu in the top left corner (it's beside other menus like "Game" and "Audio") and click AdminAhelp.
Go to your Commands tab above your chat, and click adminhelp.

All these give you a textbox where you can send your message to the admins.

Adminhelp is vital to maintaining Goonstation's community, yet for one or reason or another, a lot of people are afraid to use it. Often, it's because they can't decide whether or not to use adminhelp in a situation. Or, they don't know what to say in their ahelp. Others might avoid it because they fear they'll mess up and get punished for it, so they decide to just play it safe and not use it at all. This guide will attempt to address these issues.

When to Use Adminhelp

Reporting Incidents of the Rules Being Broken - Adminhelp is where you report someone breaking the rules in-game. This includes the general game rules, role-specific rule-sets (such as AI Laws and Mindhack Rules), and, if you're on the Roleplay servers, the RP Rules. Read on for some advice on making your reports as useful as possible.
Asking Questions about the Rules - Adminhelp isn't just a Report button. It's for asking questions too! In particular, this, rather than mentorhelp, is where you send questions about the role-specific rule-sets:
- AI/Cyborg Law Interpretation - Are you unsure how to interpret a new law you just received? Want to know what you can do and can't do under your lawset? Just plain confused? Adminhelp is where you can get answers.
- Security Executions - If you're playing a Security role and you're unsure if it's appropriate to execute someone, it's a good idea to ask about it in adminhelp, or at least notify the admins you're going to execute someone.
Getting Help with Bugs - Adminhelp if you've encountered a bug or glitch, and it's impeding gameplay. If for example you wire a new bar you built yourself to the power grid, and suddenly every wire has no power in it for some reason, that'd be a perfect time to send an adminhelp. It can be difficult to tell what is or isn't a bug in SS13, but don't afraid to ask. If it turns out to not be a bug at all, you usually won't get punished for the mistake.
- If you just want to report a bug, you can use the Bug Report button in the very top right, above your chat and status windows. You don't need a GitHub account to use it, and there are options for privately reporting exploits and bugs related to secret content if you're having those particular issues.
Removing Your Antagonist Status - Are you just not in the mood to play Traitor today or whatever? Did you make a new profile and accidentally enable some antagonist preferences by mistake, resulting in you getting assigned antag when you didn't want to? You can use adminhelp to ask an admin to remove it.
Asking If You Are an Antagonist - If you're not sure whether you're an antagonist or not, you can just ask the admins about it via adminhelp. You might feel dumb, but it doesn't have to be that way. Every now and then, admins get people who crash on roundstart, don't see a antag popup (you might be in this exact scenario), and ask about it in adminhelp, so your question is actually more common that you might think. Plus, it takes less than a minute for an admin to check, so it's not a major inconvenience.
Requesting an Antag Token - Did the server crash during a round where you had an antagonist role? Did you encounter a game-breaking bug that significantly hampered your antag play? Did some admin fookery seriously fook you up as antag? Call adminhelp and you might be entitled to compensation, in the form of an antag token. It's basically compensation for a "defective" round as antag. Note that having an antag round go wrong or end early is usually not enough to warrant a token.
Notifying the Admins You're Logging Out as a Head of Staff, AI, or Antagonist Role - You're not required to do this, and you can leave without notifying the admins without getting punished, but if you want the admins to give the role to someone else after you leave, you can request such through adminhelp. It's still up to admin's digression as to whether to go through with it, e.g. if there are already plenty of antags, the admin might opt not to replace you.
Divulging Your New Account - Per the the "Don't use multiple accounts" rule, if you've made a new account, you should adminhelp to notify the admins about it. You don't need to specify why you made a new one, but you do need to include the name of both your old account and your new one. Under special circumstances (e.g. you've lost the login details and recovery email for your old account), you may also have medals and cloud saves (i.e. your old characters, or at least the ones you saved in the cloud) transferred to your new account. Only developers have the tools to move your data, so it might take a while.

What Not to Use Adminhelp (And What to Do Instead)

Asking about Game Mechanics - While on some servers you might indeed use adminhelp to ask questions about how to play a job or what an item does or whatever, it's not so on Goonstation. This is basically considered a non-offense; you generally won't be punished for this unless you keep doing it even when told not to, and some admins might decide to answer your question anyway.
- Instead: Use Mentorhelp. Not only are the Mentors friendly and understanding, but there are often more admins than mentors online, and plenty more in the Goonstation Discord. As with adminhelps, please be patient when waiting for responses; don't try to ask in adminhelp because you didn't get a response when using mentorhelp.
Begging for Gifts - Don't use adminhelp to ask to be given superpowers or special items. Don't use adminhelp to be made a certain antagonist.
- Instead: Use prayer.
Begging to be Revived or Respawned - Got killed by a Traitor rampage? Blew yourself up in a experiment? Slipped in Space and died like a clumsy oaf? Tough luck, pal, it's sad you're dead, but that's the way SS13 works for ya. Why don't you try exploring life as a Ghost? Heck, someone else might revive you anyways.
- Instead: Use prayer.
- However, as previously mentioned, if you are killed by a bug (e.g. you tried to use the Teleport spell and it teleported you to a zone with instakill barrier when you meant to go back to the Wizard's Den) or a non-antag killed you, it is considered alright to ask for a revive or respawn.
Demanding Someone Be Banned - It's okay to phrase your adminhelps as polite suggestions to talk to people, e.g. "You might want to talk to Oscar Wilde about not calling people faggots". It's not okay to clamor for people to be banned from the game or banned from a job, e.g. "if you don't ban this person I'll grief everyone until they get banned" or "ban this doc, he fucked up the surgery". Not only are you kinda being a jerk by backseat adminning, but actual admins are unlikely to listen to your request for practical reasons. You don't have access to logs, people's admin notes, or other moderation tools, so you're basically making a judgement without having a full picture of what's going on.
- Instead: Actually, don't do this. It's unnecessary and rarely ever works anyways.

Three Key Principles

Better to Adminhelp Than to Not

Say you're roaming through the halls and someone walks up to you and tries to punch you out. You're thinking of adminhelping, but you know, they might be an antag, and besides they're not doing a good job at beating you up, so it's not that serious. Should you adminhelp? Yes!

Consider: if you do adminhelp, the worst then can happen is that nothing comes from it. If it turns out they were an antagonist, you won't get punished for the mistake, and since it takes just a few seconds to check someone's antag status, it's not too much of a major inconvenience. And if it turns out they were not an antag, then the admin will take action, and hopefully the perpetrator will learn their lesson.

But, if you don't adminhelp, the best that can happen is that nothing comes from it. If it turns out they were an antagonist, then it's a lucky break, nothing had to be done, and you didn't have to take the minute or so it takes to write an adminhelp. But if it turns out they were not, then they might do it again, and who knows, it might be worse next time. Someone who doesn't know any better might see them grief, think it's okay, and grief too, and then that perpetuates the self-antagging.

While the above examples are about griefing, this applies to all offenses! Metagaming, hacking, spoiling secret content, you name it, it'd be better to adminhelp it than to not. Slurs and bigotry should always be adminhelped.

Common Concerns

What if someone already adminhelped it?: If you ahelp about something someone already ahelped, you won't get punished for "spamming" (and it can hardly be called that), and you're barely adding anything to their workload. Heck, you might provide some details or context the other person/people did not―you never know. Plus, if there are multiple ahelps about something, the admin(s) will often take that as a sign it's something urgent that needs to be tended to.

Plus, nine times out of ten, if you opt not to adminhelp on the presumption that someone else already adminhelped it, it'll turn out everyone else did the same thing and thus no one actually ahelped. If you say "Someone else probably ahelped this, but..." in your ahelp, you're often actually the first one to ahelp it!

What if it's already being looked into/has been resolved?: Again, there's no penalty for doing this, and you aren't really impeding the admin(s) much. Plus, admins are only human, and there's simply so much going on that it's impossible for one person or a handful of people to keep track of what every player's doing and saying. Maybe you've caught something they missed!

I'm probably just annoying the admin(s) by ahelping.: You're not annoying them at all! Admins don't have any quotas of adminhelps to answer or shifts where they're required to handle any ahelps, so if they're out answering ahelps, it's because they want to, not because they have to. Besides, admins are often more annoyed if people do not adminhelp an issue, especially if it's something that could have been resolved relatively easily or if tons of people complain but don't ahelp.

It seems too minor for adminhelp./It doesn't seem serious enough for admins to be involved.: Even if you think it's minor, ahelping puts things on record, so if it happens again, admins know there have been previous incidents. In fact, statistically, most people ahelp less than they should. And who knows, it might be minor to you, but it might not be so minor to someone else.

And if it turns out it actually is minor, and the admin tells you to handle it through in-game means (e.g. calling for Security over radio), then that's all. You won't get banned for it or anything.

Can't I just do it myself?: To some extent, you can. Some situations, like people trespassing or stealing unimportant items, don't really require admin intervention, so it is alright to deal with it on your own. It takes some time to be able to recognize this though, so if you're new or otherwise unsure, it's often a good idea to adminhelp anyways, if only to ask.

In addition, politely suggesting people following the rules (e.g. "hey mate, please don't say that. Read the rules!") are fine, but if you go beyond that and try to enforce the rules yourself, you'll run into a few issues. For one, you don't have access to logs or admin notes/records on players, so you're going on limited information. Who knows, maybe the "shitter" who punched you a bunch learned about SS13 literally an hour ago and has no idea about what intents do. They might not even realize that this is a multiplayer game and mistake the other players for bots or NPCs.

There's a certain nuance to adminning too. Besides an offender's experience level, admins also need to consider the person's history of prior offenses, if applicable, and adjust their responses accordingly. This is why admins keep records of people's bans and warnings. There are other factors as well: sometimes people respond best to politeness, while others need a stern hand to fix their ways, and there are different degrees of both. Without logs, admin notes, or any of the dedicated moderation tools, you can't really make the proper judgement. Instead of being blindfolded and impartial like Lady Justice, you're just plain blindfolded.

Also, you lack the ability to ban or kick people, so you can't effectively remove trouble-makers from the server. Sure, you can try to harass the person into disconnecting, but aside from being seriously rude, this rarely ever works. They'll often stay online and retaliate with even more hostility, and things usually only escalate from there. Moreover, publicly confronting the person often results in other people joining in to admonish them further, which tends to either piss the person off, perpetuating the drama, or overwhelm them so much that they become numb to any actual attempts to help them learn the error of their ways. You might think that more's the merrier, but it's really too many cooks spoil the broth.

Give as Many Details as Possible

You don't need to recall every single detail like you're being screened by police, but "someone is griefing me" is more useful than "admins help" and "barman is beating me with extinguisher" is more useful still. Asking if admins are around, e.g. "is there an admin around?", is not very useful, especially to any admins trying to investigate things after roundend; at least include some info for them! In general, try to give as many useful details as possible, like what the person's name is and what they did. That said, you usually won't be punished for sending little info, or for that matter, too much info.

Essential Details

It's very useful to mention these things in your adminhelp, but if you honestly forget some of them, you generally will not be punished for it.

Action Being Reported: What did they do? Try to be specific, so the admin has a better grasp of what to look for. "There's a group of assistants with the same last name following each other around, and one of them mentioned a Discord call, do you think there's metagaming going on?" for example is better than than "I think there's a metagaming group" or "Some people are breaking metagaming rules".
Either Name or Job: If you can get the name of the person you're adminhelping about, that narrows things down immensely and makes the admin's investigation much easier. Just try your best to spell it. If you don't know, try to recall their job, though be aware this might be a little tricky if there are multiple people with that job. You don't need to figure out account name of the person for in-game matters; admins have lots of tools to link a name or job to an account. If you're reporting something in OOC chat though, it is of course alright to mention account name.

You don't necessarily need to format these details into a formal report in your adminhelp. Copying and pasting from your chat is sometimes just as good as a write-up, such as when ahelping people saying slurs.

If you're ahelping about something from a previous round, be sure to mention that! If you don't, the investigating admin will probably assume you're adminhelping about something from the current round, and when they look through the logs, then they'll be very confused!

Non-Essential Details

These are not as important to include, but you're not really breaking the rules by incorporating them.

Time: It's usually not necessary to include time something happened. If you want to mention duration, e.g. "what do I do with this greytider who's been trying to break into Sec for 20 minutes straight?", that's fine, but it's usually not an essential detail.
Appearance: Not too useful, since like in-game, those searching by appearance can be beguiled by disguises, and trying to find someone by appearance is a lot slower than name or job. That said, if you saw a bunch of people with the same appearance that joined at similar times and think they might be metagaming or raiding, or see someone who resembles a racist caricature, then by all means, mention that!
Server: Unless for some reason you're reporting something someone did on another server, you don't need to mention you're reporting from Goonstation 1 Classic or whatever. The bot that relays adminhelps to the admins' Discord channel also includes server it was sent from, and admins on one server don't get adminhelps from other servers, so if they see an ahelp while on that server, they can pretty much assume it's for the server they're on.
Your Character or BYOND Account Name: Every adminhelp name has your username and, if applicable, the name of the character you're playing as, so you don't need to provide it.

Act in Good Faith

A lot of people are really scared of admins and avoid using adminhelp because they're afraid they'll get banned or yelled at if they do something wrong. The fact is, though, so long as you make an earnest attempt and aren't acting like a jerk, the admins generally won't punish you over an adminhelp. It is perfectly fine if you:

Report someone for griefing and it turns out they were an antagonist or otherwise justified.
Misspell someone's name.
Identify the wrong person.
Get the situation you're reporting wrong.
Use adminhelp when it would have been more appropriate to use prayer or mentorhelp.
Adminhelp something that would be better handled yourself or by in-game means.
Forget some details.
Adminhelp someone/something and you adminhelp again because something new has developed or you forgot something. This isn't really spam, because you actually are sending over useful information.
Send an adminhelp and then send another one, say, ten minutes later because you didn't get a response during that time. Again, the admins don't consider this "spam"; you're not flooding the admins' screen with messages, and they're paced out over a reasonable timeframe.
Adminhelp someone/something when someone already has adminhelped.

The list can go on, but the take-away is that the admins will generally see no reason to punish you for an error or misstep. After all, it's not against the rules to make a mistake in ahelp. Besides, if admins were excessively punitive over mistakes in adminhelp, it would discourage people from ahelping, which means moderating the game harder, so there's a practical reason for leniency too.

Conversely, if you try to deceive the admins, manipulate them into banning people you don't like, or otherwise act with malicious intent, that is grounds for punishment. This can include but is not limited to:

Claiming someone killed you for no reason and intentionally leaving out that you in fact you tried to throw them into a death trap multiple times.
Insulting people or smugly mocking them over adminhelp (e.g. "lol ban that doctor, what a fucking incompetent loser")
Making threats, whether to do something within the game (e.g. "If you don't answer, I will kill everyone on the station") or outside of it (e.g. "I will shoot up a school if they don't get banned").
Sending several ahelps in the span of a few seconds that are all just random characters. This is considered spamming adminhelp.

After the Adminhelp

Once you've sent your ahelp, hopefully an admin will see it! Maybe they'll even send a reply PM saying they're looking into it. This isn't required though, so it won't always happen, but responses are usually common enough regardless. With regards to grief specifically, the admins usually do not reveal if someone is an antag or not, because it opens up potential metagaming issues, so shape expectations accordingly.

It might not look like the admin is actually doing much, but behind the scenes, they're hard at work. The investigating admin will probe the game logs, examine any notes on a player other admins have regarding past behaviors, question and talk to the relevant people, consult other admins, and generally try to do whatever they need to do to investigate matters. Things might be easy and simple, things might be difficult and complicated, but due diligence will be applied. Rest assured, things are getting investigated!

What happens to the player who was reported? Many people expect a ban, but in reality, it depends highly on context, and because of that, it's difficult to give specifics. If someone seems very new for example, an admin might try to properly explain the rules to them instead of giving a ban. On the other hand, repeat and/or egregious offenders are likely to get harsher punishments. Moreover, there is no rulebook that prescribes specific punishments for specific crimes, line by line (it'd be very impractical anyways); it's all up to the judgement of the admin investigating. That is why it is important for admins to put in due diligence, so they can use the information gathered to craft an appropriate response.

I got no response!

What should you do if you don't get a response to your adminhelp? While it might be easy to assume the admins are ignoring you, especially if you're angry or frustrated, there are a lot of legitimate reasons they might not be responding:

They might be busy with other admin matters, e.g. looking into previous adminhelps from earlier in the round or debugging and testing things.
They might be AFK. Some admins are also parents and/or pet owners, and real life matters are much more important than in-game ones.
They could have adminhelps/admin mode off so they can safely stream or enjoy the game as a normal player,
They might actually looking into it after all but have simply forgotten to send a response.
The admin might just prefer not giving response PMs. This is a little rare, but not unheard of.

If you're not getting a response, it's usually safe to ahelp again once a reasonable amount of time (say, 5 minutes) has passed.

Unlike other servers, Goonstation does not have a ticket system. It's less that there's opposition to a ticket system and more that simply no one has created such a thing yet for in-game adminhelps. Thus, you should set your expectations accordingly. Asking to check if your ticket has been sent or remarking that no one has looked into your ticket is likely to get some very confused responses.

Parting Thoughts

Notice how the Admin page depicts the administration team as a bunch of weirdos with odd but charming tastes in music and funny powers, rather than omniscient, eldritch overlords or iron-fisted authoritarians? Because that's really what the admins are: they're people, and more importantly, players, just like you, who want everyone to have a good time. Sometimes, they need help from others, because they're only human and can't possibly see and know everything at once. After all, there's a reason it's called adminhelp. If there's nothing else you gain from this guide, it's that when you use ahelp, you're really looking out for everyone's fun.

Appendix: Can I use MedicalAssistant reports in place of adminhelp?

If you've been hanging around the Goonstation Discord, you might know that you can type /report in chat or message MedicalAssistant either ]report or ]reportanon to, well, file a report, which is relayed to the admin staff an admin-only Discord channel. You might be wondering if you can use this to adminhelp. The short answer is, use ahelp for in-game events, and use discord report for out of game ones.

If one of the servers has crashed, it'd be fine to let the admins know about it through MedicalAssistant reports. Same if you want to ask questions about the rules. And of course, if there's a spat going on in the Discord, like people getting into a heated argument or a group of trolls spamming the channels with slurs, you obviously should use MedicalAssistant reports for that--that's exactly what the feature was designed for.

If you're trying to report someone breaking the rules in-game or want help with a bug with a round that's currently in progress, though, it's not your best option. See, MedicalAssistant relays adminhelps from the Goonstation servers to a dedicated admin channel, but it doesn't just straight-up copy ahelps. It also lists which server the ahelp came from and who made it (and due to the nature of the platform, each ahelp has a timestamp too), and attaches a link to the relevant admin log for the round. It might not sound like much, but these little conveniences make an admin's life just a little bit easier. Meanwhile, if you send a report through MedicalAssistant about something that happened in-game, it...does not come with any of these features. The admins can still look into the matter, mind you, but there are just a couple more hoops to jump through.

That said, if you use MedicalAssistant reports when you should have used adminhelp, it's no biggie. The most that'll happen is that you'll be politely told to use adminhelp instead.