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.
