Cobby wrote:Ban requests but purposefully worse for the sole purpose to not appear like ban requests.
Also the whole "b-b-bbut irc" to people who actually used the irc is weird.
1) Discord by design fixes the shortcomings of IRC's. Instead of opting into channels, you opt into servers with multiple channels easily accessible. Even if admins only look at say admin-voice-chatter, you can still privately communicate to them or ping them to direct them to another channel to answer a game-related question. In IIRC this was useless if they aren't in #tgstation13 or surprise surprise #supportbus. That said, supportbus was mainly used for singulo.io drama bait. I don't recall anything beneficial from it besides solidifying some players are absolutely mental and asking ingame questions, which can be done now on our current roster of channels (most suitable in probably tg-station-general).
Sure, but Discord DMs create their own issues, as noted, and there's a reason the previous headminship ruled against handling any admin matters via them. Also, I don't see why or how you believe supportbus will be ban requests by another name, something no one has mentioned in any facet other then you. You also originally seemed to think it was going to be a policy discussion replacement so I'm not sure where you're getting either of these from, since it's not something that's been mentioned or even discussed outside of responding to you.
To save myself retyping, I'll just quote a couple of sections from the proposal I discussed with the headmins (and posted in adminbus asking for feedback on before implementation even started)
[...] [Supportbus is for] Players in need of help with in game issues, a question about the rules/policy or other similar *specific* questions [...]
Additionally, supportmin's can be pinged if an admin is needed on a particular server for a specific issue. Please do not ping simply because a server has no admins.[...]
2) We specifically moved away from IRC (because of 1).
I'm certainly not suggesting a return to IRC (I was and continue to be one of the advocates for never touching IRC again), that said, I believe there are useful things we can draw from it.
It's a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist. Give a specific example (you can morph a ban appeal to be "oh this would be so much better if we just had supportbus!") where you need to use this channel that cannot be covered in ingame/wiki/current discord channels/forums/private messages.
The only thing I can think of would be if admins aren't on the server, and a simple opt-in supportmin role you can ping on any channel would suffice. The channel itself is not needed.
First of all, while it's true that the vast majority of gameplay questions could be answered by checking the wiki, pretty much any admin will be aware that players still frequently ask them. I don't expect this to be the common use case for this channel, but I listed it as one of the possible ones.
And the forums, while incredibly valuable and a place I have spent a lot of time, are still not a low enough barrier to entry for your average player, and the vast majority don't bother unless they have a ban they want to appeal. That's not to say I'm suggesting replacing the forums/forum PMs with Discord, but rather that it gives another avenue that may be more accessible.
You may, in the end, be correct that supportbus is unneeded and that the supportmin role is the only part that's required, but I feel this is something that we're better off shutting down because its useless then rejecting out of hand.
Supportbus was open to all and you couldn't discuss IC issues in it, so it's nothing like it at all.
If anything it's closer to the rare times the admins invited people into adminbus
Fair enough, my memory isn't great but I recalled the mentioned aspects from the past. Apologies for the mistake.