With the first session of TAR 11 behind us, the September GSM has come and gone. Thanks to Frumple and MBS for live-streaming the public portion!
We have no new moderators to announce, and the public portion was fairly short. Here’s what we discussed.
Ban appeal policy updates
We are making some changes to our Warning and Ban Policy to make the procedures surrounding bans clearer and better aligned with how we handle bans in practice. The changes can be summarized as:
- We are officially distinguishing between “indefinite” and “permanent” bans, with most bans being issued as “indefinite”. Indefinite bans carry appeal privileges while permanent bans do not. Generally speaking, permanent bans will be reserved for those players who have committed particularly heinous offenses against the community as a whole (and will be extremely rare).
- Indefinitely banned players can now appeal once every six months. This removes the previous limitation of only one appeal. This adjustment is retroactive to previously banned players: those who have submitted their last ban appeal more than six months ago may now make another attempt by following the same process. Players who abuse this system may have their bans made permanent. Low-effort appeal attempts do count against this rule, so any player wishing to submit a ban appeal should carefully read the instructions on the rules page and take time writing an appeal out.
- Bans issued due to unauthorized VPN usage (and the resulting appeals) do not count against you.
These changes are effective immediately. Please contact the admins with questions.
4K rule process updates
We have made a fairly major change to “pure” 4K rail waivers (that is, requests to build a rail line with tracks over 4km long between consecutive stations, without needing any other requests such as IATs to be approved alongside it): while they will continue to be handled by email, staff now have 48 hours to veto them, otherwise they will be considered approved.
DO NOT begin building the rail line until you receive an approval email. Just like Trustee nominations, this is a manual process that staff will need to check on our end. If you submitted a 4K waiver request before the GSM, we should have responded to our backlog by now; if we haven’t, please respond to your original email.
Staff will be rejecting waiver requests if they are missing information. We need to know, from the original email:
- Where the proposed line is (with either coordinates, MRT stations, Premier cities, or labels on the map), and
- For ALL towns that are within 300/500 blocks of the rail line, whether or not permission to build the line has been given.
If you are proposing a rail line that does include items such as IATs, don’t worry: we’ll put it onto the appropriate meeting agenda for you, and we’ll bundle the requests together.
Smaller community issues
- Hovercraft (explainer Tom Scott video, for those unfamiliar) are treated as boats within the rules. Hovercraft docking stations are permitted to be inland, but should be fairly close to the water.
- The 300 and 500 block rules have been expanded: all new construction within 300 and 500 blocks (chessboard distance) of a town need permission or communication before starting. We did discuss at length what constitutes a “town” for these rules, and that’s a hard distinction to make because everyone’s town is different. We hope that everyone will be able to judge whether something counts or not based on examples around the server. If in doubt, get permission or talk to the town’s mayor. Staff are happy to mediate or arbitrate if necessary.
Events
We approved all five events requesting funding at this meeting:
- MGA Champion’s League: Full funding
- MRT Video Contest 2020: Full funding
- London’s Pub Quiz: Reduced funding (prize amounts for places 1-4 halved, top prize now $500; participation prize $25; rule change requested to allow participants to DM answers)
- 2020 MRT Sumotori Championship: Full funding
- Millville S.P.L.E.E.F. Tournament: Full funding
That’s all!
Keep an eye on #events and the Events Calendar to see when the next TAR session is, as well as other things happening in the community! Our next meeting will be an Infrastructure meeting (sections 6-10 only), at 7pm UTC on Sunday, September 27.
<3, Chief