[MUD-Dev] Wild west (was Guilds & Politics)

[Mike Sellers]

At 12:56 PM 12/19/97 PST8PDT, Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad wrote:
>>Finally, the job of administration will be greatly eased by knowing
>>exactly what happened in any given incident.  No more claims of 'But _I'm_
>>the one who finished the quest first.  Boffo just spam-killed my link,
>>took the prize while I was reconnecting, and claimed to have won...'  A
>>simple, 'Well, lemme chack the logs...' will make even the most daring
>>trickster come clean if they know that you _do_ have the logs to back it
>>up.
>
>This is awful...  To me this is a movement towards virtual fascism.

I don't see the problem here Ola -- and I certainly don't see any fascist
tendencies (admittedly, I haven't been following the discussion closely).
If you tell people up front that you will be logging everything that is
said, but that these logs will be kept confidential, what's the problem?
I'm not interested in going over logs of others' private conversations or
cybersex, but I cannot tell you how valuable a complete log of any
contentious or harassing conversation would be.  I've had to handle
disputes in which two otherwise reputable people each emailed me a log of
what was said, and both of which differed in varying ways from others'
accounts of the same incident.  If you cannot tell what really happened, it
becomes much more difficult to deal with potentially explosive situations
(and IME, there is no one quite so ready to be a vocal martyr than someone
who had in fact done something dishonest like edit a copied log). =20

Also, I think that just the knowledge that a conversation is being logged
will tend to keep harassment from happening without constraining any other
forms of speech.

Mike Sellers                     mike at online-alchemy.com
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