Moderator Guidelines

Overview

At MMCC, one of our main priorities is to prevent moderator abuse. We want to ensure that all of our moderators, admins, and other staff members work to make the community as good as it can be instead of satisfying their personal urges for power trips. These moderator guidelines exist both to create a formal process for defence against power-hungry staff members, but also to give staff members a set of guidelines that they can use to ensure that they are moderating well.

How To Enforce

Firstly, these are guidelines -- not hard and fast rules. Staff members have some leeway in both interpretation and application and are allowed to make case-by-case exceptions to them as they see fit. With that being said, however, they should be generally followed and their spirit should always be followed. If you see a moderator breaching these guidelines, to you or others, you should first assume that it is a mistake and privately talk to them to remind them of the specific guideline that they are breaching. If that fails for any reason (ie. it was not a mistake, or the staff member refuses to consider what you are saying), then you should contact MMCC's owners at [email protected] or [email protected]. The owners commit to quickly resolve any problematic breaches of these guidelines. Additionally, if there is a misbehaving staff member who is not technically breaching these guidelines, please feel free to contact the owners anyway. These are guidelines, not rules.

Suggesting Changes

Here at MMCC, we take the advice of our players very seriously. As such, if you have any ideas for improving these guidelines, please contact a staff member.

Guidelines

• Staff members are required to hear all sides of a story before taking any moderator action, and must make a good faith effort to fully understand what happened.
  • Staff members may temporarily ban players from one or more MMCC services while awaiting information in order to prevent further damage. Such bans should be used as a last resort, and should be kept to a minimum length and have plenty of communication.
• Staff members should not issue punishments in any scenario, but instead should take actions to protect MMCC's community. This means that bans, kicks, temporary bans, etc. are to be used to remove someone from the community because they are causing a problem, not to punish that player. For example, if someone joins the server and spouts racist slurs, they should be banned because those racist slurs are damaging to our community, and not as punishment for racist slurs. MMCC is not a governmental organization and, as such, does not aim to punish or discipline.
  • In practice, this generally means that a player should be given a chance to stop what they are doing before being removed from the community, and should generally be given the benefit of the doubt in case of any ambiguity.
• Staff members are still players, and should treat other players accordingly. This means participating in MMCC as a player however much or as little as they want, and ensuring that they don't see themselves or act as if they are on a higher plane of existence.
• Staff members must make a best effort to be consistent in how they respond to rule violations.
• If a player does something that the staff member judges is clearly wrong, but is not forbidden by the server rules or applicable laws, they may not take any action other than requesting that the player stop as a player and talking to other staff members and players about creating a new rule. Although the staff member may be very right in that a certain thing should not be allowed, it is unreasonable to expect players to read their mind and follow unwritten rules.
• All staff members should take appeals seriously, whether or not they are the staff member who issued the original moderator action. This means providing detailed evidence of the infraction, and giving players a chance to tell their story.
  • If practical, staff members should contact the staff member who issued the moderator action originally before processing an appeal. Delaying appeal responses is an acceptable side effect of this process.
• Staff members should, at all times, respect the doctrine of "Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."
• Ex post facto enforcement of rules is strictly forbidden. This means that a rule may not be enforced on actions that happened before the rule was created. The edit log of the wiki is to say when rules were created.