[TheUltraFish]

PH Staff Guidelines

This is an update from the last PH staff guidelines were put up over two years ago and are getting increasingly irrelevant and incorrect with the rule changes that have taken place, the difference in staff since that time, as well as the updates that have been made to Garry’s Mod and PH since they were first posted. The point of these guidelines is to help staff and users learn how to handle different situations, as well as follow protocol to ensure that cheaters, spammers, harassers, etc. are properly taken care of. They are also in place to ensure that staff do not overstep their bounds and abuse the trust given to them by Dinkleberg and the community.


When going through this, you may have to submit a ban request depending on the crimes being committed. The link to the PH ban page can be found here. The correct format for ban requests can be found here. When submitting a ban request, make sure to have evidence to back up your claims either with screenshots or video. Garry’s Mod has a screenshot function that can go to your steam screenshot library; the key for the screenshot varies from user to user so that would be your job to figure out. For video, which is considered by many to be the best way of gathering convincing evidence since screenshots cannot show hacking, ghosting, mic spam, or verbal harassment most of the time, you can find whichever recording service works best for you here. Several users have found OBS and bandicam to work well enough of their computers/laptops to get concrete evidence that they need. 


If reading through this, and you believe that you have been wronged in one of these areas, you can submit an unban request here the proper format to use can be found on the same page as well. If you believe that you have found a staff member or donor being abusive please submit a Donor/Staff Abuse report here with as much evidence that you can. Make sure to use the proper format that can be found on the same page as the link.

Rule Enforcement

Enforcing the rules for PH keeps things in a moderate order to ensure that the game is not full of cheaters, harassers, and abusive donors/staff. The following are further explanation on procedure to handle a particular situation or situations on the server when they eventually come about.


Situation 1-
Ghosting: Ghosting is the act of revealing the location of props with another player or over the microphone. There are two basic situations of ghosting.
 
Instance 1. A player states the location/hints about a prop over chat or in the mic.
 
Procedure
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Verbal/Chat Notification & Mute/Gag for round
-Verbal/Chat Notification & Mute/Gag for map
-24 hour ban
-2 week ban
-Permanent Ban
 
Instance 2. A player has been suspiciously gaining kills quickly and numerously. For this instance follow the preceding guidelines. They appear to be ghosting via 3rd party.
 
Signs
-If a player has a suspicious high score.
-If a player seemingly walks up to props without hesitation.
 
Gathering Proof
-First check the player if they have any friends on the server.
(type !friends, use the menu or to access the command)
If the player has friends, make sure they are on opposite teams before proceeding.
 
Procedure:
-Spectate the suspect while they are a hunter, and record the gameplay. Try to be discreet when doing this, if you are more obvious that you are spectating them. They may stop ghosting, if not leave the server entirely.
 
REMEMBER COLLECTING PROOF IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE PROCEDURE
-If you gather enough evidence, proceed with the following
-24 hour ban (Trusted would have to make a ban request)
-2 week ban
-Permanent ban
 
This is different from the past, if you catch someone ghosting via 3rd party you can have them banned immediately as long as you have the evidence to back it up. If you are a Trusted, you can kick them from the server until you can get a ban request up or provide enough evidence to staff in the discord. The reason why this was altered was that ghosting is an every day occurrence now and incredibly easy to do. If multiple groups of ghosters are on, they it can be too much for a single staff to handle on a busy server.

Always check to see if a group of ghosters have been caught in the past. All former forceswap punishments, where they got forceswapped for a map before the 2 week ban occurred, now count as the 24 hour ban. The amount of evidence you need for a 24 hours, 2 week, or permanent ban should be about the same. The evidence gathered should be able to stand up to an unban request or a staff abuse report, anything less should not result in a ban. Sometimes this evidence will only take a round or two to gather while others will take over a map, it all depends on the situation. Always remember to put evidence of a ban with the user information in the watchlist so that staff can keep an eye on them in the future and so that the next level of punishment can be delivered instead of the same punishment given over and over again.


Ghosting the Ghosters
People ghosting the ghosters is easier to catch than some ghosters as they will, in most cases, follow the ghosting group around and steal their kills before they get them. This will mainly happen with people with many hours on the server to either get kills and/or troll the ghosters.



MAKE SURE THE PERSON GHOSTING THE GHOSTERS IS NOT A PART OF A GHOSTING GROUP OR HACKING BEFORE PRIVATE MESSAGING THEM!!!


They will awkwardly follow them around pretending to hunt for props at a distance but magically appear right before the ghosters get the kill and steal it or be a half a second too late. The staff member gathering evidence would need at least one good round of evidence before confronting the cheater in DMs.


Using DMs is important as said staff member may not have enough evidence on the ghosters yet but may have enough on the individual ghosting the ghosters.


Two ways to contact this ghoster:


Use !p player’s name message
The safer route would be to use !menu find the !psay command in the ulx menu and select the player’s name and then type out the message


Procedure:

• Message them in private chat warning them to stop ghosting
  
• Message them administering another warning in case they missed the first warning. Warnings here do NOT reset
  
• Slay (For trusted, use the forceswap command to slay them, and then use the forceswap command again to swap them back to the original team) This step can only be done AFTER the ghosting group has been caught. If you do it before, you might scare the ghosters off the server or cause them to be suspicious and stop ghosting
  
• 2 week ban if they continue after this (trusted and tmods would have to make a ban request)
  
• Permanent Ban (trusted and tmod would have to make a ban request)
  

 

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Situation 2-
Hacking and Exploiting: This comes favors unnaturally tipping the scales in their favor by either downloading or implementing hacks to see through walls, have better aim, or any number of hacks to achieve the best score unfairly. Exploiting is treated the same, circumventing the natural way the game is played to get ahead either by killing before the round starts (generally with an smg grenade), getting out the map, getting to places that hunters cannot kill them like sneaking into the hunter spawn on the underwater map
 
Exploiting Procedure:
-Tell them in the text chat to get back in the map, voice chat is a bonus
-After about 30 seconds, and they are still out of the map, slap them if they are close to the map bounds, teleport them back into the map if they are farther than that
-Kick
-1 week ban
-Ban length depending on severity of exploit

-For abusing unstuck commands follow the above procedure if they are getting out of the map. If they are spamming the comamnd (you will see it posted multiple times in the chat) you warn them and they do not stop, you can slay them. If they continue the next round, proceed with the exploiting procedure.
 
Hacking Procedure:
Make sure that they are not friends with someone on the server, they may not be friends on steam, which can make this more difficult. Gather evidence of their hacking
-Permanent Ban
 
Signs of Hacking (just to name a few):
-Try looking or shooting through walls that have a prop that is on the other side
-Running prop to prop
-Unnatural gun shake

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Situation 3-
Toxic Trolling: the act of breaking multiple rules purposefully/blatantly doing the opposite of what is told of them
 
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat notification
-Round Gag and/or mute
-Map gag and/or mute if they continue
-Kick
-Ban length depends on the severity of trolling

 

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Situation 4-
Player in unassigned: players sitting in unassigned, is a common occurrence within the server. A person in unassigned is just taking up space.
 
Instance 1. A player in afk in unassigned.
Procedure:
-Type "status" into the game console to bring up player information. 
 
If the server has less than 30 players
-Check the players within unassigned if they have been connected for more than an hour since you joined
-Kick if it has been over an hour since they joined unassigned
 
If the server has more than 30 players
-Check the players within unassigned if they have been connected for more than 15 minutes since you joined
-Kick
 
Instance 2. A player in unassigned who refuses to join a team.
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat notification
-Kick after about 15 minutes
 

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Situation 5-
Timefarming: players will sit on a team being inactive or on the server to get their time up. Some have tried doing this for a staff position or a rank (like regular) on the server to get free points or random drops.
 
Procedure:
-Kick
-Kick
-24 hour ban
-1 week ban
 

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Situation 6-
Swapping Teams: the act of a player switching teams. This is fine if their score is 0 kills and 0 deaths, if they are joining a friend, or get permission from a staff member to do so. The round this takes place no longer matters.
 
If a person asks, make sure teams are relatively even before allowing them to swap. If teams have a big difference in numbers on each team try to see if a couple are willing to balance the teams.
 
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat notification
-Wait 30 seconds
-Forceswap with notification
-Kick
-24 hour ban
 

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Situation 7-
Chat or Mic Spamming
Mic/chat spam is the act of producing irritable or bothersome noises into your mic or spamming the chat.

You have access to the !gag * command. Please use this sparingly and only for as long as necessary. This is when multiple are mic spamming at once and you cannot tell who is doing it or there are just too many to gag in a short time period. Most common places that !gag * is used is right before the map change and the staff member(s) cannot see who is spamming. 
 


Examples:
- Screaming, excessive singing, whistling, humming, excessive loud speaking, pressing x where people can your game audio repeatedly, repeatedly telling somebody to do something, playing music into a mic, repeating a word/phrase into the chat box, repeating a word/phrase using !p or @, repeating sexual words/phrases, excessive laughing, excessively doing voice impressions, using a voice changer, and using another language to cheat or say inappropriate things
-Arguing with staff about rules or how they handled the situation can be discussed as long as they are civil. If they are not follow the same guidelines as mic/chat spam
 
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Verbal/Chat Notification+Mute/Gag for round
-Verbal/Chat Notification+Mute/Gag for map
-Kick
-24 hour ban

Dealing with players that call out ghosters/hackers in chat:
-Verbal/Chat Notification (this applies to everyone on the server at the time)
-Round gag/mute
-Map gag/mute

Punishment Evasion:
-Regag/remute for alotted time
-24 hour ban

-Ban length determined from situation analyzation
-If someone is banned and caught using an alt account, it is an immediate permanent ban.
 

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Situation 8-
Hiding in illegal spots- when a prop is in an unseeable and/or unkillable location with a standard weapon. Hiding so that only a couple pixels are showing of a prop can also be considered unseeable.
 
Go here for the list of the current illegal spots.
 
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Wait about 10 seconds
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Wait about 10 seconds
-Slap/Teleport
-Slay/Teleport
-Kick
-24 hour ban
-2 week ban
-Permanent ban
 

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Situation 9-
Door Blocking or Spamming Doors- This is generally done by props to avoid getting killed by hunters either by blocking the doors themselves or blocking the way with random props in the room making themselves impossible to kill. Hunters can do this (generally to protect a friend who is a prop) as well but both follow the same procedure
 
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Wait around 10 seconds
-Slap/Teleport
-Slay/Teleport
-Kick
-24 hour ban
-2 week ban
-Permanent Ban
 

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Situation 10-
Disrespecting/harassing staff/players- all harassment/disrespect issues should be taken seriously when they are found out about. This includes general harassment/disrespect, targeting, racism, suicide jokes/threats, rape jokes/threats, pedophilia, gender, age, dialect, homophobia, mental/physical capablilities, spamming the private chat of a player, and spamming trade requests.

When a player is told to shut up in some sort of way, make sure it is done in a spiteful/hateful manner before continuing. General usage of some sort of shut up or jokingly asking some to close their mouth isn't player disrespect. Also, please remember that n word with an 'a' is allowed as long as it is not used to be rudely, spammed, or/and maliciously.
 
Suicide, rape, pedophilia
Procedure:
-Round gag/mute plus verbal/chat warning
-Kick
-Permanent Ban
 
Targeting (voice, homophobia, gender, age, mental/physical capabilities)
Procedure:
-Chat/Voice Notification
-Round gag/mute
-Map gag/mute
-Kick
-Ban length depending on situation
 
Trade Request Spam
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Kick
-24 hour ban
-3 day ban
-Ban length at staff discretion

Racism:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Round gag/mute
-24 hour ban
-Permanent Ban
 
Disrespect/Harassment Towards Staff
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Round gag/mute
-Map gag/mute
-Kick
-Ban length varies situation to situation
 

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Situation 11-
Player and/or Staff impersonation- going out of their way to have the same name of a player or a staff member, pretending to be or lying about being staff, threatening players with bans and/or other punishments
 
Copying player/staff name(s)
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Wait 30 seconds
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Kick
-24 hour ban
-1 week ban
-Permanent ban
 
Pretending to be staff and/or threatening with bans/punishments
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Round gag/mute
-Map gag/mute
-Kick
-24 hour ban
-1 week ban
-Permanent ban
 

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Situation 12-
Inappropriate Names and/or profile picture- anything involving racism, sexism, suicide, overly sexual phrases, and rape. Names with clickable names/links are also prohibited. Names purposely changed to slander or harass a player are also included here.
 
Procedure:
-Chat/Verbal Notification
-Kick
-24 hour ban
 

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Situation 13-
Advertising is prohibited: links to other game servers, other discords, youtube channels, videos, websites, sexual photos/videos, any form of hacks, or anything else that would require players to go to a website other than the forums or Dinkleberg’s discord
 
Advertising Servers/Videos/Websites
Procedure:
-Chat/Verbal Notification
-Round gag/mute
-Map gag/mute
-24 hour ban
-2 week ban or permanent ban (varies on situation)
 
Advertising Hacks
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Kick
-2 week ban
-Permanent ban
 
Links to child porn or forcing sexual images is a permanent ban
 

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Situation 14-
Talking too much about sexual/religious/political/racial issues- players are allowed to talk about sexual/religious/political/racial subjects however, there is a line and they are not allowed to cross it. This one can be difficult as it varies day to day with different players online and staff discretion
 
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Round gag/mute
-Map gag/mute
-Kick
-24 hour ban
-Ban length via staff discretion
 

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Situation 15-
Killbinding- this one comes and goes but props will either use kill binds or will purposefully kill themselves by other means to stop the hunters from getting the kill. This ruins the game for the hunters, as well as the props who are trying to play the game normally.
 
Procedure:
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Verbal/Chat Notification
-Kick
-24 hour ban
-2 week ban
-Permanent ban
 




Situation 16-
Minge- Taking a page from the TTT rules, Minge is defined as a player joining the server and intentionally breaking multiple rules, but not necessarily to the point where they reach a ban for any particular rule.  An example could be a player joining the server, micspamming constantly, saying the n-word twice, and harassing players. 

THIS PROTOCOL IS FOR MOD+ ONLY.  Trusted and TMod should follow the protocols for situations 1-15, and provide evidence to a Mod+ staff member who may/may not decide to institute a minge ban.
 
Procedure:
-7 Day Ban
-Permanent ban

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Staff Expectations

Staff Balance
If the server has 10 or more players:
-Staff should be on opposite teams. This is so that both teams can be watched in cases of ghosting and so that both team chats can be seen. Making this a habit to follow is simple and most staff already have it so that they are on both teams if more than one of them are on.



Spectator
-Spectator should be used responsibly and not for going afk for more than 15 minutes.
-If there are 2 or more staff members on, there is little reason for a staff member to also be in spectator since everyone can be watched.
-If you are in spectator it should be to handle staff business or server related issue.
-Talking with friends on Discord is not a good reason to join spectator.
-Be careful when going to spectator to watch players for hacking/ghosting because this can cause them to get suspicious of being watched.
-Checking player’s spots to see if they are legal.



Shop
The shop is a wonderful addition to the server however some restrictions should be applied for staff. The reason for this, many staff have been around for quite some time, and have many items, skins, millions of points, etc. We want players to continually return to the server and them getting items and skins is decent incentive for many of them.


With this in mind, do not give items from the store to players for free, trade with them fairly. Other players that are not staff, are allowed to give however much they want.
Banned Items to give away:
 
-Weapons
BO2 Executioner
HK MP7
Honey Badger
Vector
Magpul
Knives (Orange/Purple)
 
-Player models
Any Premium shop models
Rare player models from crates
 
-Accessories
Text Hat & Rainbow Text Hat
 
-Over 25k points (Do not try and be sneaky giving a player 20k one day, 13k the next, etc. Points are not that hard to aquire on the server, let them earn the money)
 
Trading: when making a trade, trade fairly. Giving a premium skin away for 100 points, does not qualify as fair. Once again, let them earn the benefits that the server has to offer, we want them to come back.
 
 
Teleportation-
The teleport command is a useful tool to have, and should always be used responsibly.
-Teleports should only be automatically made when a person is under/outside the map. 
 
The other situations are as follows:
-When a person is stuck, but still visible enough and able to be shot, you must ASK them before teleporting. Do not automatically teleport them, especially as a prop, they may have purposefully placed themselves there. You can also recommend that they use the !unstuck command.
-When a player is in an illegal spot: see Situation 9
 
 
Dividing Responsibilities on the Server
If there are multiple staff online, not one staff member or rank should have to handle every responsibility/issue that can pop up on the server.
 
If there are several of the same rank (for example: 3 trusted on at the same time) they can use the admin chat to discuss how or who is going to handle a situation like team switching so the person does not get switched multiple times in a vicious circle. (Remember: to access the staff chat press @ and then type your message)
 
Trusted: should handle mic/chat spam
Test Mod: should handle team switch/spectator
Moderators: should handle ghosting/trolling/anything beforehand mentioned for bans
Admins: handle harassment/impersonation/trolling
 
If any rank is missing the highest rank on can handle the issue. Such as Test Mod doing their job and trusted. If a higher rank is missing, then the highest member on at the moment shall handle any other jobs not accounted for. This is not obligatory but can be helpful, so that staff do not overlap each other. Admins have missed things because they are handling items on the forums/server/discord or if it is getting rough with the mic spam other staff are obviously allowed to help the Trusted out.
 
To find out the specific requirements for a specific staff rank go here.
 
 
If a staff member is proven to be unable to handle the expectations given before them, refuse to do their job, or break the rules they said they would uphold, they will be greeted with a three strike policy. The three strike policy information can be found here.
Make sure to keep a healthy environment for the players to be in.
You don't want them to be looking up to someone false.