Board Thread:Administrative Requests/@comment-24728342-20160321201257/@comment-3387274-20160321212601

Oppose- 

We have already established that if a mod is not present somebody should take logs of anything that needs bringing to their attention, and it is standard policy for a mod to pass this duty to somebody if they can't leave another mod in charge. Furthermore, many people who have a complaint or an issue to bring up usually take logs of it as evidence themselves, and we encourage this practice. With that in mind, the important logs should already be being taken when they are needed. A bot wouldn't bring the mods in any faster, and so instead would achieve nothing besides creating even more logs to sort through, the majority of which would be completely unecessary.

Furthermore, the presence of a bot is a false reassurance; while mods may feel confident to let it log things, it is incapable of reacting to an incident imediately and promptly. The fast majority of situations the chat devellops, in my experience, are things that need a mod on hand at the time to resolve, rather than things worth looking into at a later date. As mentioned before, the bot could not bring in a mod faster to respond, nor could it handle the incident itself.

As mentioned before, the bot could not bring in a mod faster to respond, nor could it handle the incident itself. In this respect, it is vastly inferior to having a mod present, and the presence of a mod would render it entirely redundant, since it would be logging events that we would already be looking over.

On ballance, a bot is only really useful if it is necessary at a later date to look back at an incident and decide exactly what had happened in it, and we did not already have users taking screencaps of it, and the incident was serious enough that we had to take action. I cannot recall a single instance of an event of that kind happening as long as I have been present on this wiki.. And aside from that if the incident occurs without a mod on hand to calm it down imediately, the damage has been done whatever we subsequently do after the fact.

And all of this is quite asside from the emotional response of disliking surveilance and constant recording and monitoring of a chat that, for the most part, does not need to be taken anywhere near so seriously. The impllied level of distrust towards the members of the chat, as well as the pressure of having nothing ever forgotten or overlooked, are both deeply unsettling concepts to me.

For all of these reasons, I cannot in good conscience approve of this, or passively allow it to come about. I object utterly to this, as I always have and probably always will.