Web Sentinel Appeals - Change the way they are handled.

Nikoshka said:

Got permission from Bowler to create this thread. It was originally his idea. I am simply expanding on the idea: http://prntscr.com/kpdugz
His thread: https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/cubecraft-appeals-prioritisation-and-more.211358/

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We all know Sentinel false bans quite a lot. So much so that false positive appeals take 2-3 business days to be dealt with. I'm not saying these are all 100% correct appeals, however, the bans which are false positives definitely take too long to be dealt with.

To speed up the rate at which false positive appeals are accepted, I think the following system should be in place:

Appeals which are detailed and very informative on the situation are marked as Green by Moderators. For example, the appeal you wrote for your ban is informative and gives information to Loony about what may have caused the issue. Appeals marked as Green are dealt with upmost priority as they may contain useful information as to how to help improve the anti-cheat. ONLY the developer of the anti-cheat can read these appeals as generally only the developer of the code of Sentinel will be able to understand their own code at first glance.

Appeals which provide very little information regarding false bans are marked as Red by Moderators. These appeals give a hint that the player has been false banned. These appeals go to Loony but are not prioritised and take longer to resolve as Loony will be focused on the Green appeals.

Appeals which admit to hacking or appeals which are completely useless and don't provide any information at all are either Denied or Accepted by Moderators.

Perhaps there can be a thread explaining how to properly appeal a false punishment and what can make your appeal go smoother and faster. This will make players understand that the more information they put, the quicker their appeal will be dealt with and the quicker they will be unbanned if the appeal is false positive.

Why?

To speed up the rate at which false bans are dealt with so that they can enjoy more of their time on their favourite server <3

The conversation system should be merged with the appeals system!
I'll expand more on this later when I have time but why spend twice the time reviewing an extra set of "appeals" (conversations) when a user can simply put every bit of detail (which they would put into their conversation) into their original appeal.

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You have a lot of reason. In all my practice as a player and that I only play in Cubecraft since 2016 that I had knowledge of it at the beginning of implementing Anti-cheat (Sentinel) I got my first punishment which was False, only with the detail of not having Any knowledge of how to create a good appeal acceptable in many ways was denied at that time I had to contact CrazyManjr via (discord) and was never treated. I have been banned 2 times after that old punishment which were marked as [False-Positive] for Moderators, then I got another ban which was for 1 month (30d) to which the appeal was denied just like I did my conversation on the envelope and it was never treated.The punishment expired and was never seen while not was handled now I have a false punishment in my profile it would be good if they can be observed with high priority as well as I respect the work of each staff member! only one point of view ^^!

I don't know if this is possible but it would be a cool idea if Sentinel was able to record every player before they ban them. Create a big database where every record of everyone who has been banned by Sentinel is stored. If the player appeals , the moderator can just go to the big database and he just needs to type the name of the person to find a video of the banned player to check if he really was hacking or not. Sentinel will record the player for 2minutes so that they got clear evidence of the player. This will give more work for the moderators but less work for Loony , if a case is unclear Loony can still go and check the player out. I know that it will take Months to develop this but it is possible. It will just make it easier for everyone and players will not have to wait any longer on an unban if they were falsly banned by Sentinel. It is kinda like @Nikoshka 's idea but only with a recording system extra and a little change in how to sort appeals. But like you told without any good detailed appeals sentinel can't be really improved so appeals are still very important to improve Sentinel's system.

Nikoshka said:

Got permission from Bowler to create this thread. It was originally his idea. I am simply expanding on the idea: http://prntscr.com/kpdugz
His thread: https://www.cubecraft.net/threads/cubecraft-appeals-prioritisation-and-more.211358/

View attachment 148377​

We all know Sentinel false bans quite a lot. So much so that false positive appeals take 2-3 business days to be dealt with. I'm not saying these are all 100% correct appeals, however, the bans which are false positives definitely take too long to be dealt with.

To speed up the rate at which false positive appeals are accepted, I think the following system should be in place:

Appeals which are detailed and very informative on the situation are marked as Green by Moderators. For example, the appeal you wrote for your ban is informative and gives information to Loony about what may have caused the issue. Appeals marked as Green are dealt with upmost priority as they may contain useful information as to how to help improve the anti-cheat. ONLY the developer of the anti-cheat can read these appeals as generally only the developer of the code of Sentinel will be able to understand their own code at first glance.

Appeals which provide very little information regarding false bans are marked as Red by Moderators. These appeals give a hint that the player has been false banned but do not provide any information as to why. These appeals go to Loony but are not prioritised and take longer to resolve as Loony will be focused on the Green appeals.

Appeals which admit to hacking or appeals which are completely useless and don't provide any information at all are either Denied or Accepted by Moderators.

Perhaps there can be a thread explaining how to properly appeal a false punishment and what can make your appeal go smoother and faster. This will make players understand that the more information they put, the quicker their appeal will be dealt with and the quicker they will be unbanned if the appeal is false positive.

Why?

To speed up the rate at which false bans are dealt with so that they can enjoy more of their time on their favourite server <3
Also, the people who actually spent time on their appeals get rewarded with a quicker response time.

The conversation system should be merged with the appeals system!
I'll expand more on this later when I have time but why spend twice the time reviewing an extra set of "appeals" (conversations) when a user can simply put every bit of detail (which they would put into their conversation) into their original appeal. You've basically created an appeals system for the appeals system.

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Thanks for creating this. I think it will be really effective to use such a system for the appeals. :D

Nikoshka said:

This is not possible and if it were, it'd require hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds.
The current Sentinel logging system is a bit like the recording system except information is written in the form of text. The logging system is a bit hard to read though.

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Thanks for explaining the current system. I didn't really know how sentinel did it.

Zombiepower said:

I don't know if this is possible but it would be a cool idea if Sentinel was able to record every player before they ban them. Create a big database where every record of everyone who has been banned by Sentinel is stored.

Click to expand...

Nikoshka said:

This is not possible and if it were, it'd require hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds.
The current Sentinel logging system is a bit like the recording system except information is written in the form of text. The logging system is a bit hard to read though.

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Alongside that, it would require loads of memory (terabytes or more) to record so much data. Even though Cube has gone from 20k to 2k, the file size of so many recordings will be so large and expensive for CubeCraft and it's quite impractical for them to do such a thing, and they are likely not going to have the finances to do something like this anyway. In theory though, it would definitely work to record each player.

Zombiepower said:

Thanks for explaining the current system. I didn't really know how sentinel did it.

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Yes, me too. :p

It looks pretty good, perhaps your idea will work someday.

Zombiepower said:

I don't know if this is possible but it would be a cool idea if Sentinel was able to record every player before they ban them. Create a big database where every record of everyone who has been banned by Sentinel is stored. If the player appeals , the moderator can just go to the big database and he just needs to type the name of the person to find a video of the banned player to check if he really was hacking or not. Sentinel will record the player for 2minutes so that they got clear evidence of the player. This will give more work for the moderators but less work for Loony , if a case is unclear Loony can still go and check the player out. I know that it will take Months to develop this but it is possible. It will just make it easier for everyone and players will not have to wait any longer on an unban if they were falsly banned by Sentinel. It is kinda like @Nikoshka 's idea but only with a recording system extra and a little change in how to sort appeals. But like you told without any good detailed appeals sentinel can't be really improved so appeals are still very important to improve Sentinel's system.

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How would it render the video from the information in the database? Without the environment or surrounding players it would look off.
I like the idea, but that is a lot of information to hold on to.

I like it

SanCookie said:

Yes, I feel like everyone gets false banned at least once here, when I had to wait for an unban, it took 6 days (out of 7 days) which is almost the time I had to wait. It wasn’t even a fair one.

I support this idea

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I had to wait 8 days for my 7d false ban

Blocky said:

I had to wait 8 days for my 7d false ban

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I had to wait 7 months for my 7 days false ban.

BringMeZPeanutButter said:

I had to wait 7 months for my 7 days false ban.

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I remember this. Basically sums up why we need some kind of system like this.

Not gonna lie, coming here to cubecraft for the first time and learning through random info how the whole appeal process worked was a big shock for me. I used to be staff on another big server, and I did appeals for around a year (on top of other duties), but that was my specific job because of the team I was in. I was in charge of forums and appeals, which means I was part of a team that had to process appeals on a daily basis.

What confused me and shocked me the most here was how cubecraft could have a working appeal system without having a team devolving time to this specific cause. It’s not the most efficient strategy to be honest, because you need to assign appeals to a designated person (aka the one who punished the person) who might be busy for the day, is on leave or could not log in / check your appeal. A system like that, on top of “conversations” is in my opinion poorly organized, since you don’t have a specific logged document with information about someone’s punishment. So yes, I very much agree with the idea of merging those two together like you brought up, as it would keep everything logged into one place.

As for the sentinel idea though, I don’t find myself agreeing with the suggestions given above. Marking someone’s appeal based on how detailed their appeal is can be unfair in a lot of cases, example being if my knowledge is very limited when it comes to the English language, and I don’t want to use google translate to fill out the form - another one could be me being in a rush and typing it on a car or train ride going to school. The rule should be first come, first served to give everyone equal opportunities, unless there was a system to sort appeals through punishment expiration dates (if my ban ends tomorrow, it should be prioritized than someone’s that is 30-day long) - however that would be hard to code and still slightly unfair to an extent.

The recording the content in game through a coded system is realistically impossible because of cache and lag. Logs are 100% the best way to go when it comes to anticheat violations, even if they’re not 100% accurate. They get tested continuously for a reason, which is improving the experience for every player that gets the chance to play on the server, including the chance to remove false positives that of course happen, and can happen with any anticheat.

In my opinion, if a specific team could check these logs with the anticheat developer or had access to the code and knew how to read anticheat logs, they would be able to handle them way quicker than it is now. However, the main issue is the amount of staff members that the server has. For an idea like this that would most likely work, they would need a bigger staff team and dedicate at least 3 people to this team, so that even if someone is away, the mole of work can still get sorted by the remaining ones.