PRE-FINALIZED DISCUSSION: Playerworld Rules
 

These rules are not finalized and some are not in effect yet. Any problems reported that may or may not be against the rules in effect will have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis because they aren't written down anywhere.

I am posting these here as a VERY ROUGH DRAFT of the soon-to-be official posted PW rules for CLASSIC and HOSTED servers only. Basically we have much higher standards for "visible" worlds that we don't hold for hidden projects that anybody can rent out a server and work on.

Any non-constructive or off-topic posts will be deleted, so if you have a tangent please make a new thread.

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Rules for Classic and Hosted Servers

Managers Role:

• All Managers are required to enforce these rules on their Playerworld.
• Managers should point any new/current staff toward this thread to make them aware of the rules in detail.
• All Managers are also required to enforce and comply with the GraalOnline User Agreement. This means if there is a player breaching the User Agreement, they should be warned/punished accordingly.
• All Managers are required to govern their staff. Nobody is above the rules; staff are no exception.
• Managers are responsible for all content on their server and should monitor uploading closely.

File Browser:

• You are not permitted to upload inappropriate or copyrighted material into the File Browser. If you are unsure if your content is "inappropriate" seek PWA approval before uploading at http://support.graalonline.com
  
• You are not permitted to upload content that you did not create, without first getting permission from the creator of the content, and the Manager of the Playerworld it comes from.
  
• You are not permitted to upload music to the File Browser. All music must be hosted on a webhost and played from the webserver directly.
  
• You are not permitted to use the File Browser for any non-Graal-related files.
  
• All files uploaded into the File Browser become the sole property of GraalOnline. Usage rights are automatically granted to the server where the files were originally uploaded.
  
• Once you upload a file into the File Browser you may not remove it if you decide to quit. Content you submit belongs to the server and is theirs to use except under special circumstances (e.g. Manager hires you, you upload whole town of levels, Manager fires you for no reason immediately afterward).
  
• All data held within the File Browser is subject to loss at any time. Managers should backup all files frequently to avoid any problems that may occur due to data loss (accidental or purposely). GraalOnline does not guarantee a backup of your work will be available or accessible in a timely manner if you should suffer data loss.

Staff:

• Recognized staff heirachy:
  Manager
  Server Administrator
  Department Chief
  Department Staff
  Department Trainee
  
• All staff positions should be genuine and with an exclusive purpose. E.g. You do not need someone to upload heads when the manager or graphics admin could do that.
  
• Staff should be given briefing and training so they know what their roles and responsibilities are. Staff may not be assigned rights they do not know how to use. It is the Manager's responsibility to make sure staff know how to use all the rights they are assigned.
  
• A staff member's role and responsibilities dictate their level of rights on the server. Staff should have the rights required by their position, no more and no fewer.
  
• Only Managers and Server Administrators should have high level RC rights. The Manager should be active to perform certain task that can't be done without a Level 4 RC. A second Level 4 RC may be granted to the ranking Administrator, but only if necessary.
  
• All RC’s should be placed under an IP or PCID lock to limit unauthorised access to the RC account. See Security.
  
• Only Managers and Server Administrators are allowed to set up new RCs and give out new rights.
  
• Staff should never PM or Mass Message offensive material. Staff should also not have offensive material in their profile.
  
• Staff should limit mass messages to important server announcements because (on or off tag) Staff mass messages override the "ignore mass messages" option in the Graal client.

Server-specific Rules:

• All servers should have an outline of what is and what is and isn’t tolerated on their Playerworld.
  
• These rules should comply with the GraalOnline agreement.
  
• These rules should be posted in a highly-visible fashion on the playerworld.

RCs:

• All RCs listed in the staff= server option should be active staff members. No "honorary" or "founder" RCs are allowed.
  
• RC should ONLY be given to those who need it for their jobs.

Security:

• Only managers and server admins should have a “Full Rights” RC for security reasons.
  
• Do not give out rights if they are not needed. If a staff member doesn’t use a right, they don’t need the right.
  
• Nobody other than the Manager should have rw access to any important logs such as rclog.txt. This is best achieved by only granting r access to the logs/ folder to staff who need to read logs.
  
• NPCs may be used to substitute RC actions (e.g. warpto) where possible. These should be secure (e.g. account and guild checking on the serverside). NPCs should not be used to substitute RC rights if they can’t be made secure.
  
• ALL RCs need an IP range or PCID lock. A PC ID can be used in the “IP Range(s):” field. When setting an IP range it needs to be at least 2 octets, or more if possible (e.g: 123.456.*.*). To set a PC ID as the IP Range, use /openaccess Account (while that person is online) you will see the PC ID in the title of the dialog. Enter the PCID in the IP Range field (e.g: pc:12345).
  
• Managers should limit the amount of people who have ‘rw’ (read-write) rights. This is a security risk. It is suggested that Department Chiefs transfer files into main folders from a temporary folder, and check for malicious scripts before uploading it to a “live” folder.

NPCs:

• NO staff tool should be abusable. (e.g. If you have a tool to change bad nicknames, the tool can set the offending nickname to the user's account instead of anything entered by the staff member using it.)
  
• All NPCs should be created by server staff or freely distributed. Stealing ideas from other servers will prevent the server from being Hosted or Classic status. Stealing actual code from other servers will result in removal of the npc.

Bans:

• All bans must be for a clear reason. You can not just ban someone because you dislike them.
  
• Players should be warned and go through some sort of punishment system before a ban, such as warning then jail. Big offences such as trainer usage and disruptive behaviour affecting the whole playerworld do not need a warning first. Jail should always be used before ban when possible.
  
• Bans that have invalid reasons, or a lack of a reason, can be overturned by the PWA if the banned player files a support ticket.
  
• Bans should also be documented in detail in the comments of a player's account. To record comments use /opencomments PlayerAccountHere
  
• Ban rights should only be given to responsible staff members who may need to ban players as part of their job. Ban rights can also be given to Department Chiefs and higher to assist when urgently necessary, however they should not be banning players if another staff member who is online can do it. (e.g. The LAT Chief does not need to ban a cheater if a GP is online and can do it)
  
• Jail rights can be given to trusted staff of any position.
  
• Sometimes a player ban warrants a PC ID ban as well. A PC ID ban will not allow any account from that computer to log on to the server. This is helpful when a player has many accounts.
  
• Should a PC ID be banned, record the PC ID in the comments of all known accounts for that player. This will help any Playerworld Administrator who may be responding to a support ticket submitted by the banned player.

Guilds:

• Do not make guilds that mimic any special of global staff guilds (e.g.: Playerworld Administration, VIP)
  
• Do not make local guilds that are the same as global guild names.
  
• No guilds should be offensive or have copyrighted names.
  
• No guilds should allow players to be in the staff list

Playerworld Websites:

• If you link to your server's website please make sure that all content found within your website follows Graal's rules and there is no offensive or illegal material. This includes any websites your website links to.

System Abuse:

• NO NPC should be able to change the nickname of a player to imitate an account name (e.g. *Accoutname)
  
• NO NPC should interfere with, or stop, the automatic disconnection for not moving.
  
• NO one should abuse staff tools by repeatedly disconnecting players, changing players' looks, etc.

GraalOnline reserves the right to make special-case amendments and additions to its rules and policies and the steps it takes concerning violation of these policies and rules. Players are required to keep up-to-date with any changes to Graal policy concerning rules and gameplay by checking them frequently. To keep users aware of any amendments they will be posted in the GraalOnline communication center forums, under the section 'PlayerWorlds Main Forum'.

very nice but uploading heads are for noob staff not the glorious manager or gfx admin.

Yeah, it's become a norm to have a team responsible for all uploads.

Any developer can upload heads, you don't need a team to cover for their laziness.

From what I've seen it's quite efficient. You have a dedicated team uploading around the clock. Seems to work really well on UN.

No no no no no!

The RC functionality is more than sufficient; there is no need to waste time reinventing these things because it just makes it more complicated when globals are called in to look at staff or security situations. I can't tell you how annoying it is when people reinvent the warpto and it either stops the global warpto working or people who are not removed from RC properly end up with warpto rights they shouldn't have.

Servers should be prevented from reinventing these things wherever possible, not encouraged.

Agreed. Can you link to a source for the scripted RC or does that come with new servers?

How would suggest giving non-RC staff warpto?

Scripted RC is added to players centrally from the login server and is therefore available on all servers.
Non-RC staff should not have warpto. They should have very specific scripted warps that take them into necessary event rooms and locations (for instance), but if they are important enough to have unrestricted warping on the server, they are probably RC staff anyway.

Looks good to me, except I do agree having at least 1-2 uploaders for content, because a GFX Admin or someone of development staff could be busy.

What about the typical "temp" folder? For example to show your new GAT an example of something if you can't explain it very well or whatever.

Uhh...midis? They are small, and self-made, which can be proven in my case. I think the latter one was the problem with music being uploaded?

Not even ones in the "temp" folder that are in there for like 2-3 minutes or something?

Eh, I don't even think thats legally possible. If I made something, I own the copyright. Usage rights, yea, but nothing more. My opinion at least..

Don't really get it..

The developers can focus on something else while the people who have to upload heads upload the players heads.

That's an automatic process already, no?

I hope something is done about that problem.

They look good to me.

Uh, that's the way it should be, so that when staff have to make important announcements that affect all players, the players cannot turn around and say "well I didn't get a PM so I didn't know" if a player loses or breaks something as a result of not knowing that something had changed/happened.

Long may it stay that way.

I agree. Staff should just learn to limit their massing if they want to be staff.

But it shouldn't override that option if the staff member is off tag, it's just stupid.

This is exactly right, and the exact point I try to get accross to the staff who have a passion for massing out (especially stupid) information that doesn't help anyone, or links to sites that have nothing to do with anything on a 5 minute interval basis.

Legally, Graal can't be hosting any copyrighted files on their servers. Technically having it there for a few minutes wont do harm, but its best to just use imageshack or another similar site for those kind of things.

midis are fine as long as they are not copyrighted. The rules is more in place to prevent people from uploading their whole music collection and using it for a radio. By streaming it, legal issues are avoided.

Again, technically it wont do harm if its only there for a few minutes, but it avoids issues with copyrights when other applications are used to transfer non Graal-related files....although, it's not like anyone would notice if its only there for a few minutes anyways ;]

I think the main problem is that you get staff members who are actually playing the game without a staff tag on and when they send a mass message about selling/trading items, a player ignoring masses will still get that PM. It would be nice if only masses from a staff tag were able to override the mass messages ignored option.

I'm not one who pushes for change, specially when its breaking old tradition and what not, but I think a simple fix to this mass problem would for the mass override feature to only be activated when a staff member is massing on his or her staff tag, or from his or her RC.

If someone uploads something bad its the uploader's fault.

Also, the staff position of RP Admin (the RP Admins being a team of 4-5 people) has long exist on Valikorlia and that will not change anytime soon.

Good re-write, in my opinion. I don't see anything wrong... except for staff massing. Valikorlia is 90 percent massing, 10 percent everything else, and staff mass through RC all the time. >_< Certain things, such as staff positions (like Inverness mentioned) should be on a server-by-server basis. Some servers have a unique set-up, like Valikorlia for instance.

Also, upload teams are almost a necessity for Valikorlia, with the amount of graphics submitted each day. We'd rather have our GAT team making graphics than being bugged on AIM all day.

I don't think staff weapons are that bad. I understand if they interfere with built-in commands (warpto, etc). But, for instance, Valikorlia has commands like /editplayer, /warpother, /summon, /setguild, etc. What's so bad about things like this, as long as everything is logged (as it is on Valikorlia)?

These don't really give a player any advantages at all on Valikorlia to begin with so it'll probably be an exception.

Valikorlia isn't like other servers so you're going to have to make some special changes just for us.

All these rules sound very familiar. Hasn't this been posted somewhere before?

Spark's old PWA rules write up.
http://forums.graalonline.com/forums...ad.php?t=49824

Other than /editPlayer (RC right: Set Others Attributes) and /warpOther (RC right: Warp Players), most commands that can be created aren't even in RC functionality, anyway. Things such as /summon, /setguild and so on are not rights that can be assigned by RC, thus cannot be a mimic or recreation of an RC right, so I wouldn't say such things would be on Skyld's list of things he'd rather not see be recreated.

Is this just for blatant clones of large portions of other servers or will subtle similarities suffice?

I hope this means trademarked.

Unless you're willing to cite some examples of why servers should not have a PR team to handle uploads, I don't see what's wrong with it. It's very convenient to have people in charge of these things this way other staff who probably have better things to do are not bothered with messages to upload heads. PRs also eliminate the need for an FAQ admin and a FAQ team because they are also there to handle player questions. It's Player Relations, not Head Uploader.

If it's really a problem, Era has a pretty good system of uploading heads. Our GPs that have an RC are basically labeled as PRs and they handle all the uploading. Each GP has their own day scheduled to them to upload. Heads are always being uploaded and I haven't had too many complaints on slow uploading (the ones I do get are just because players are mad their heads aren't uploaded as soon as they send them in)

Even so, that's just a last resort. I really don't think it's necessary to outlaw managers from hiring a PR team. Managers in no way should be responsible for uploading heads, nor should GAT admins. Era doesn't even have a GAT admin.

PRs have been around for a while and I've never seen a problem with it. I don't see what you see so please, explain to me and everyone else why you think there shouldn't be a PR team because I fail to see any negative things that have come out of it.

The point in that rule is to say "Dont make a Staff Position named 'Head Uploader' " in general. PRs and GPs handling head uploading doesn't mean their job revolves around doing just head uploading, just that it involves it, and wouldn't be considered a job that doesn't have an exclusive purpose or isn't genuine.

Naturally if one server has something another does, and blatancy is an issue, it will definitely be frowned at - pretty obvious, but subtle similarities in certain things would of course be easily overlooked. Especially if it's simple stuff like "Oh, let's make OSL an outside level". Just because Era's Unstick Me level is an outside one, doesn't mean the server will be penalised for it.

Most trademarked brands and names carry a copyright as it is.

If anything as short as a guild name doesn't fall under fair use, your government is probably broken.

I'd like to know how strictly these rules will be enforced? I know the last set of rules was loosely enforced and served little purpose(s). I hope this is enforced well enough to keep a little order on the playerworlds. I also think PWAs should make it a point to refer everyone to this thread who has been caught breaking one of the rules. "You broke this rule, see here," this sort of approach could spread the rules to a further, stronger audience. It could also catch on with some server administrators if it's shown by example.

I second that.

The managers can't be held responsible for what is uploaded; so long as they handle the situation as it should be.

Does this include temp folder?
Complete disagree. On Vesporia, our staff ranks are like this:

Staff (development staff; rights are given based on what is needed)
PR (player relations)
That's crazy. Why shouldn't Player Relations staff be able to upload heads, etc? All it does is allow the developers to create a better server.
It's been locked like that for years :p

Yes, instead of fixing this, let's just tell staff to not mass message :)
Can we just link to the Graal rules?
Like what?
I agree, however, rclog.txt is always read-only.
Why? x_x
If someone isn't important enough to the server to have RC, they don't need to warp. Like Skyld said, perhaps being able to warp to certain locations such as events.

Is this a rule, or a guide? You can't log onto Graal if you don't have IP ranges (or PCID) set.
lol ... there aren't many staff tools that aren't abusable, but can still be used to get the job done, always.
Ork is gonna take this one really hard.
I disagree; it's a waste of time to make a jail, and it can even potentially hurt your server by causing un-needed lag (mainly if you suck at scripting).
What are ban reasons for, again?
Even if you follow all these rules, we can still globally ban you, just because we feel like it.

A guide for what globals believe to be a fair ban time for common rule violations.

I meant the ban reason you put in, not the predefined ones. It seems rather pointless to put every single thing in comments.

I agree. Why put it in comments when you can just put it in the ban reason? This also can be looked at globally by all servers(at least, I'm pretty sure it can be) to get an idea of the player, when comments are local to the server, so really serve no purpose beyond the server.

Agreed.

I don't think he's so much against PR staff being able to upload heads. I think he's more against a staff position created with the sole purpose of uploading heads.

I can relate to that >_<.

This is correct. I covered the meaning of that rule, above (in response to Frankie):

Basically put - People shouldn't be in a staff position that was created for the sole purpose of uploading people's heads. Uploading heads should really only be a side-job for a staff position that can handle the time management.

No, but they are responsible for making sure that what is on their server is not stolen or otherwise illegal and will be held responsible if they allow that sort of thing to happen. However, a rogue staff member stealing GFX or otherwise uploading illegal things without the manager knowing will not get the manager in trouble.

Yes.

I agree with you here. I'm don't think that the rules should dictate how the server's staff team is organized.

Again, I agree with the idea of a PR staff member acting as an FAQ/Uploader/GP, but the rule is to prevent certain servers from always having five people on RC at a time whose job is to merely upload heads/bodies/shields.

I agree, this needs to be fixed.

Sure, but a lot of servers need rules that aren't in the normal Graal rules. For example, I'm sure that with Vesporia's unique gameplay, there will need to be rules especially for Vesporia.

A welcome screen for players that displays news, rules, etc. A PM from the NPC-Server upon login. An NPC that when grabbed links/displays rules. Something is needed so that a player can't say "Oh, I didn't know it wasn't a rule" and at the same time a staff member can't say "Oh, that's against the rules" with no basis.

I agree.

I agree...the rule should really be something like "No staff tools should exist for the sole purpose of abuse. (ie: /kill HoudiniMan)"

It's not very hard to make a very simple jail. There is a server option jaillevels= that can be used for individuals who "suck at scripting". Additionally, GPs can even follow a warning system where three warnings = ban instead of first offense = ban.

Seeing that a player has been banned for "Cheating" is often not enough when we have to go and look in to a ban complaint that we get on the support center. Its much easier for us to know what's going on and provide faster support for people when the comments have details on the incident. This way we don't have to look through logs or wait for a staff member to log on.

Good to see that you understand. :D

When I ban someone I keep the reason short and to the point. I put the greater details and evidence and such in the comments.

The ban reason is displayed to the client when they try to log on. It's a short and sweet answer to the question "Why am I banned?!"

Comments are a record of a client's good or bad behavior and evidence for or against them. Comments don't need to be globally accessible because if Johnny was banned on UN for reason "Using trainer in spar" you really don't need to know which trainer or how many times to know he's a cheater, and maybe not the best hire.

I should reword this.

This is meant as "for the purposes of this guide these are the names of positions". Not "You must use these ranks".

On every server there is a top level of staff who manage the rest, and there needs to be one chief in charge of the management who is accountable to the PWA and other global administrators for the state of the server.

For the purposes of these rules, that chief admin is called Manager, and the rest of the admins are called Server Administrators.

Under them then exists the different branches of staff teams. They have chiefs who control the branch but not other branches. Ie, the "PR Admin" of Valikorlia does not hire and fire NATs or GATs (one would assume).

So to review, and I will make this more specific:

For this document, staff are organized as follows:

• Manager - Chief admin of the server who speaks for the entire staff team. Reports to global administrators.
  
• Server Administrator - admin of the server who governs multiple/all staff departments, can generally add/remove staff and rights to enable other staff to do their jobs.
  
• Department Chief - Head of a department of staff. Examples include: GP Chief, LAT Chief, PR Chief, ET Chief, and standalone admins such as PR Admin or Business Admin. These admins oversee their area of expertise and do not control other departments.
  
• Department Staff - Specialist in some area of server staff duties. Examples includE: GP, FAQ, PR, ET, NAT, GAT, LAT, Ganis, SFX, etc.
  
• Department Trainee - Staff in training, who may report to Department Staff with more experience, or the Department Chief directly. Might not have full rights and/or responsibilities associated with their position.

I think this is much more clear now? :D