Adding a /report feature: suggestons to help and prevent abuse

Suggestions
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1. Introduction

Many servers (not even just terraria, many multiplayer games do) have a /report feature in place to report chat messages and such. Dark gaming, at this moment, has no feature in place. Rather, it uses the report on the forums, which is long and tedious, and by the time the report is up, the person that is being reported usually is either gone or turned off their hacks. A simpler way to do this would to be a /report feature, and automatically fill reports to staff. However, this can lead to abuse, such as getting bots to report people (DG has many anti-bot measures already, which is not much of an issue compared to others), and spamming reports to staff, to name a few. I propose some solutions to prevent abuse.

2. Problems and Counter-measures

As previously mentioned, people can spam reports to ping the staff members. To counter this, certain ranks(?) will get certain priority, such as having more playtime/being crew does. Here is a list of suggested priority (and report cooldown):

  1. Staff (0-second cooldown, can ban and kick people, so that is not really necessary.)
  2. Patreon members/Discord Boosters (10-second cooldown, highest priority aside from staff/moderators)
  3. Crew members w/many server hours/trusted (15-second cooldown, 2nd highest priority)
  4. Newer Crew members (have not obtained it until recently, low server hours outside of PvE) (20-second priority, high priority)
  5. Members (no crew) (30-second cooldown, medium priority)
  6. Guest (can login but is not) (1-minute cooldown, low priority)
  7. Guest (w/out chat privileges) (3-minutes, lowest priority)

In addition, if certain key phrases or words are used (excluding common words such as “the”, “and”, “it”, etc.), by multiple users, more attention will be given. However, abusing /report will result in a warning, which can lower priority or outright disable their ability to /report for a certain time or indefinitely. If more issues persist, an outright ban can occur for that user.

3. More arguments for this feature

The addition of a /report feature would be beneficial for basically everyone, as it would allow many more users who would have previously not known how to report players for hacking, griefing, or anything else that were to happen.
Also, if /report were to be added, a /rules would need to be added (which leads to a link with the server rules on the forums) , and must comply with the rules before chatting, and must verify with a random question in order to get in. I know many of these are strict, but this is DG, I have seen many toxic players curse and use inappropriate names and use cheats to ruin the enjoyment of others.

4. Conclusion

In short, adding a /report command would be heavily beneficial for the community, allowing others to quickly report players that are in-game and breaking the rules. Any thoughts or changes to this suggestion and other things I missed or other issues that may happen? Please share feedback in the comments.

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id say that you can still spam reports with a 3 minute cooldown. and also, there is almost never more then one hacker at a time, so the cooldown only reduces spam. but yeah this has my vote

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3

It would be useful, especially to corroborate a proper report (with evidence). I’m not so sure that it would help getting someone before they leave in comparison to a normal report. A staff member still needs to be notified and then available to join. I did also consider having a way to report someone that would save a replay of some amount of minutes of them on the server, for evidence. But the problem with all this is it is time consuming to make.

That’s really why the current system is still in place, it requires no maintenance and is effective in producing evidence in most cases and also allows staff to follow up with a user on the report.

Not accepting/rejecting, just stating.

8 Likes
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The only real “time-consuming” part of filing a report is trimming your video evidence and compressing the file to under 8 mbs so it can be uploaded. Everything else only takes a matter of seconds to fill out or obtain. Reporting in general can seem inconvenient, which is why most player choose not to, but it is necessary to have the report format followed so the details are nice and orderly, and staff can easily understand what is going on in each report. One way to somewhat bypass this process, as stupid as it may sound, is to become a staff member yourself. In the time before your moderator application is accepted and during your trial mod phase you will need to become adept at filing reports and collecting evidence, but once you are accepted you are pretty much free to handle things quickly and efficiently. Evidence will still need to be collected so it can be provided in an appeal, but I’ve found becoming a moderator has really helped in getting incidents resolved quicker. I became tired of having to wait for staff to respond after filing out endless reports, so I just became staff to make things more convenient on myself. Not sure if this helps any, but I thought I’d mention what I did when I was frustrated about having to constantly make reports.

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that is a good point
i actually am mildly interested in being staff in-game, but rn have too much on my plate, so maybe when i get time off in the summer before my next semester of college lmao

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The problem with the forum report feature is that you have to compress your video. It is even worse on iPads because you have to convert the .MOV file to .MP4 (why Apple), so reporting using a command will save precious minutes of time. This feature sounds like a very useful feature. In fact, this feature is supported on the Penguin Games server, so why not add a feature here? (Discord/forum report feature is annoying, I would say this feature is very useful.)

If report is spammed repeatively, simply ratelimit them and make the wait time like up to thrice as long, a 10 minute pause. However, the problem with this is that there are many hackers on the server, so reporting several at a time would be hard. Instead, give description and report them all in one report.
Command syntax idea: /report <player> <reason> <dimension>
That is all I have to say.

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7

50% why i want this to be added lmao
i just post em on YT and put link here, they are usually gone by the time i finish it

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8

But how does that solve the issue? If you use /report without evidence, they won’t be banned if they leave before a staff member arrives. It’s exactly the same with a forum report, if you don’t provide evidence.

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9

I am not sure if Terraria is capable of supporting video/picture evidence, but we can use text evidence instead. Maybe make the report format /report <player> <reason> <dimension> <evidence> instead.
Edit:

Perhaps <evidence> can be a YT link?

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I suggested to raise the forum file limit to 50 MB if possible in Increase max upload limit on forum to 50 MB

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