Thursday, February 05, 2009

Demoting Rodlen

For anyone who hasn’t been following this post; Clucky made a post, someone edited it to include a RODLEN WAZ HEAR comment, Clucky told Rodlen to cut it out, and Rodlen said it wasn’t him (“It was not me who put it there, however.” ... “I don’t think it is possible to check.”). Access logs show that the RODLEN WAZ HEAR edit was made from Rodlen’s account and machine. When challenged, Rodlen said “Don’t remember that.  Maybe someone else accessed one of my computers.”

If we’re in a situation where someone is accessing a player’s computer to deliberately stir up trouble, we probably don’t want that user also having full admin privileges right now. (And if we’re in a situation where an admin thinks it’s okay to lie about using their admin abilities to edit other people’s posts, that’s not great either.) I’ve stepped in and removed Rodlen’s admin access, for the sake of the blog; if Rodlen or anyone else wants to challenge that, please do.

posted by Kevan at 05 Feb 2009 23:53:01 UTC Comments (8)

Comments

Rodlen:

06-02-2009 00:07:15 UTC

Well, technically, taking away admin powers that way is illegal according to the ruleset.

However, in this situation, taking away admin powers makes sense.

Amnistar: he/him

06-02-2009 00:08:58 UTC

Can you renounced adminship rod?

Kevan: he/him

06-02-2009 00:20:38 UTC

Sure, this is technically illegal and it’s a shame to have to do it, but we don’t want to wake up to a heavily vandalised site, if your shadowy nemesis logs in to read “CfJ: Last chance to abuse Rodlen’s powers before we remove them!” later today.

Rodlen:

06-02-2009 00:50:42 UTC

I hereby renounce my adminship temporarily.

However, I feel that this sets a bad legal precedent.

Lets take a theoretical nomicer.  Call him Bob.

Now, Bob becomes an admin somehow.  Maybe through a mass adminship like from my dynasty, maybe from a plain proposal to admin him.  Well, Bob, seeing the chaos going on now, decides that all admins are suspicious.

He removes their powers like you removed mine.  Boom.  We now have a big rogue admin.  And a BAD ONE.

Everything goes to hell.

Doom, doom, doom.

Kevan: he/him

06-02-2009 00:56:09 UTC

If this happened, the players could just drop a line to 75th Trombone (who owns the server all this is running on) and ask him to step in and reinstate the admins (and demote Bob) manually.

Rodlen:

06-02-2009 00:58:11 UTC

And boom, we’re back to the original problem: illegal admin power removal.

Kevan: he/him

06-02-2009 01:04:38 UTC

Then it just takes a glossary rule of “75th Trombone is allowed demote any admin who he feels is damaging the site hosted on his server”.

arthexis: he/him

06-02-2009 02:50:08 UTC

Rodlen, Blognomic is not a complete democracy. There is still someone that has the power to remove and do stuff, namely the owner of the service. If you want a complete democracy, the only thing you will get is anarchy.

I think Kevans whole point is that for some things, we simply have to use common sense, not just blindly following rules. We are not computers.