Board Thread:Administrative Requests/@comment-24728342-20160321201257/@comment-4403232-20160322034612

Oppose: Realistically, I don't really see this solving any issues. If there's an issue in chat while no moderator is present, literally any single user present for it could press printscreen or copy/pasted the text from it. If an issue isn't being presented already, then having a chat log won't help that, as no one would be looking through the log for an issue if they didn't know said issue existed. If something causes an incident severe enough that people feel that it should have been acted on, these people should be presenting the issue to moderators or administrators already, rather than going "Oh no one handled this, oh well". Either way, nothing can be done about an issue in progress if a moderator is not present, regardless if there's a bot sitting there. A moderator or administrator would only be able to act upon it once they were made aware, which can already occur simply be contacting any staff member via message wall, or by contacting one in the chatroom when they do arrive. Gaps in moderator presence mean that we need more chat users to step up as great choices for future chat moderators.

Furthermore, this will present several new issues. Having every single chat post displayed for everyone to look back at 24/7 is a wide-open invitation for drama. It'll encourage more issues between users, and cause people to go sifting through the logs searching for someone's username in the hopes of finding something to use against them. People often act in the chatroom differently than they might in the forums or elsewhere, because they're generally in an environment of "friends" or at least people they're comfortable with. People will be much less willing to share things they've created with their friends if they know that not only the entire wiki, but any single person on the internet who stumbles onto the log, can go stalk it if they wish. Can people already document anything in the chatroom? Sure, of course. But there's a big difference in the mindsets of "Someone technically could copy/paste this for no reason" and "Everything I'm saying here is being permanently recorded and duplicated for the masses". Despite saying that "Logs will only be kept for a month", once you put something on the internet, it's going to stay on the internet. There's the obvious fact that anyone on the internet can download a page (though anyone in the chatroom can share their own screenshots publicly). Google constantly saves "caches" of websites as it crawls the web, this is how it's able to provide search results. Several other resources permanently record websites, [https://web.archive.org/web/20160322025647/http://rwby.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Sgt_D_Grif/Jeff_Williams_Releases_8_Tracks_App! such as this one]. Even those that don't automatically store websites can typically be engaged by anyone. Implying that records would only be temporary on the internet is simply wrong, and makes me question how much thought has really been put into this. However, on the flipside, if these logs are instead made "staff-only", it may cause a level of distrust to form from users regarding staff, and would inevitably raise conflicts of "Why was Issue X excerpted from the log, but now Issue Y?, and make people question the honesty of the staff if there's no way to tell what they're saying is true. While I can certainly trust myself and the other staff members not to lie about the contents of a private log, I can't be certain that everyone else does. So while having it be "staff-only" would be fine with me, I guarantee it being fine for everyone else.

The logistics for running this bot also appear to not be thought out very well. Where is this bot going to be hosted? If it's run on Nappa's computer (or some other staff member's computer), they'd need to ensure that they don't have any power outages or internet outages. Hosting it on an external server would generally require someone to fund the thing, which isn't something most people (myself included) would be interested in doing, nor would it be fair to ask people to do so. Then there's the statement "this bot will not be able to kick or ban under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES unless done so by an admin logged into that account". A bot isn't going to know the difference between a moderator or an administrator using it, and isn't even going to know the identity of who is using it. This statement suggests that its login information is going to be shared with all staff engaged in chat moderation. This would result in an extreme difficulty in ensuring accountability for any action taken via the account. And while I certainly don't suspect our current moderators would do so, giving every chat moderator access to an account with administrative abilities would be imposing a much larger need of faith from the community towards each chat moderator to not do anything with it.

This whole thing quite frankly feels like it hasn't been thought out or planned out at all. It introduces several new issues and a can of worms in the hopes of assisting in a situation that can already be handled in more constructive and better ways. If there was concrete plans of implementation and a reasonable assurance that this would actually contribute to solving issues and not just causing them, then I'd reconsider and maybe support. Right now, it just feels like a hasty idea to try to solve a minor problem. I really feel the goals, drawbacks, consequences, and implementation of this idea needs to be discussed MUCH further before going ahead. Having Wikia flag the account with a bot status and THEN discussing how to use it may lead to the scenario where those who initially supported making the bot may not support the way it winds up being used. To reiterate, it's not that I'm definitively against chat bots, there are chat bots on other wikis that I am fine with existing, such as this one. I just see a chat bot being implemented as mentioned above being more harm and trouble than it is good and a solution on this chat at this time.