User:Studenterhue/Adminhelp

What to Adminhelp

• Grief
• Custom AI Law Interpretation
• Bugs
• Security Punishments

What Not to Adminhelp

• Gift Requests - Don't use adminhelp to ask to be given superpowers or special items. Don't use adminhelp to be made a certain antagonist. These are better suited for the prayer command, which should in your Commands tab on your right above the chat. Note that praying for something is considered permission for the admins to screw with you in a way that according to 4 out of 5 doctors will probably result in your demise.
• Revivals & Respawns - If you get killed by a Traitor rampage, blow yourself up in a experiment, or just slip in Space and die. 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.
  • 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.
• Requests to Ban Someone - While 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", demanding people be banned from the game or banned from a job is a no-no. You're not an admin; you don't have access to logs, people's admin notes, or other moderation tools, and who knows, a ban might not even be the correct course of action. Don't make "deals" either, like "if you don't ban this person I'll grief everyone until they get banned", because that likely get you banned.
• Syndicate Currency Trades

Need a fact check on that last one, only ever heard of one admin (Cirrial) say they do TC trades, never have seen them actually do them

Four 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! Admins are here to handle all violations of the rules, big and small, from the dweeb writing penis on the floors over and over to the ban-evading meta-grief-gang that spams slurs over radio, adminhelp even if it's something "light" or if it might be within the rules. In fact, statistically, most people ahelp less than they should.

Consider: if you do adminhelp, the worst then can happen is that nothing comes from it. If it turns out they were an antagonist or otherwise acted within the rules, you won't get punished for the mistake. Since it takes just a few seconds to check someone's antag status, you're hardly "wasting" the admin's time, and they'll usually move on to something else quickly once they notice their antag status. If it turns out they weren't 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.

Don't assume someone else has already adminhelped it. Nine times out of ten, it'll turn out everyone else assumed the same thing and thus no one actually ahelped, and then you'll be kicking yourself. Likewise, don't assume the admins are already looking into it. With typical numbers, you often have one admin to every ten to twenty players, each doing their own things, often in completely different areas of the map. There's simply so much going on, it's impossible for one person or a handful of people to keep track of everything they're doing and saying. That's why adminhelp exists: so instead of just two or three pairs of eyes watching, it's ten, twenty, and more!

The Earlier the Better

Don't wait until the end of the round to adminhelp. The admin investigating your adminhelp might have to delay round end, and that tends to make conversations (more) unnecessarily tense since both sides often feel a need to rush things through to get the round over with, leading to mistakes, and it sometimes gives trolls the wrong kind of attention. Alternatively, if they don't, they might need to sift through the admin log server, and while the logs are comprehensive, it can be difficult to pierce together the whole picture without actually being in the round it happened, which is made harder by the fact the people involved in the matter might have left the server by then. Basically, adminhelp sooner rather than later to make the admin's job easier!

Besides, would you rather have someone stop griefing or saying slurs right now or in a hour? If you wait, the problem could fester, because the offender might continue or even do something worse. Who knows what will happen then? Why not stop it now? Don't forget, you don't need for the offenses to "worsen" to adminhelp either.

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. 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. Again, though, 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 like 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.

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. It's fine to mention it, e.g. "what do I do with this greytider who's been trying to break into Sec for 20 minutes straight?", 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.

After the Adminhelp

Once you've sent your ahelp, hopefully an admin will see it! Hopefully an admin will 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.

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 what the admins are: they're people, and more importantly, players, just like you, who want everyone to have a good time. Like everyone else, they sometimes need help stopping people who break the rules and do things most people find unfun, because they really can't see/know everything at once. If there's nothing else you gain from this guide, it's that when you ask an admin to intervene through ahelp, you're really looking out for everyone's fun.