Staffing Guidelines

Staff Rules

TRAINING

It is important that new staff go through the rules with someone in training, rather than having someone read the rules alone; that way if they don’t understand something that is part of the rules questions can be answered regarding misunderstandings. (doing so removes the need for precedents because staff should know how to apply the rules to different scenarios).

As it currently stands, all staff members must go under both staffing and event training to be fully admitted into the staff team. Whereas eventmins only require event training.

1.Responsibility

As staff, the consequences of your actions fall completely upon you, and you alone; you will be held accountable for whatever consequences arise due to your actions. Examples of this are: handing out antagonistic roles, spawning in hazardous creatures or entities (Such as xenomorphs or vines), leaving an event that you started, etcetera.

Keep in mind that although these things can or can not necessarily incur in breaking this rule depending on context, if they cause problems, you will be blamed for them, and suffer the appropriate consequences. You’re advised to keep adminbus to the minimum.

Examples of things that count as hard breaks of this rule are: spawning in things for yourself or others as a sort of advantage, handling your own tickets, etc.

Furthermore, these examples only cover the 'types' of things that may lead to issues; you will not be without blame simply because you did something problematic that WASN'T listed here. Please make sure to coordinate any actions you make that could affect the round with the rest of staff. It helps to avoid problems and take care of them if they happen.

2.Respect

As a member of staff, you are expected to be respectful in many matters; you are expected to speak respectfully when discussing important matters, you are expected to respect the words and decisions of other staff members, and you are expected to act in respect to your own rank and role. As a part of the staff team, we are all expected to be able to speak cordially with one another, regardless of the circumstances; arguing, fighting, acting snide, or otherwise speaking maliciously when interacting with other members of staff is utterly unacceptable, and doing so will lead to swift consequences.

That being said, you are more than welcome to discuss your thoughts on any changes made by those within or above your station. Your opinion is important for us and your feedback helps us make the station a better place each day!

3.Civility

As a member of staff, you are expected to behave accordingly, both in and out of tickets! This should be needless to say, however, handling tickets carelessly, in any way, completely violates this rule; For example speaking rudely to ahelpers/players, ignoring or otherwise leaving tickets unanswered, acting dismissively towards ahelpers'/players’ issues, or otherwise disrespecting the very players we are meant to serve all violate this rule. If you do not wish to handle tickets, you must de-admin yourself.

This rule also covers, albeit to a lesser extent, your attitude towards the community as a whole, along with individual players; incessantly insulting the playerbase, the community, specific players, etcetera, thusly violates this rule. As a staff member, we expect you to have interest in your duties, and look for the best for our station, since you represent us as a whole when you’re either on station or in our discord.

4.Maintenance

As Splurt is a community utterly dedicated to erotic roleplay, staff members are expected to help maintain an ideal roleplay environment. This means you should NOT actively disrupt the round and its environment through your intervention. Try and keep your interventions within our roleplay standards and the general mood of the round.

Each round is different and its environment and mood can vary, especially with different storytellers and for planned events, but it is important to avoid the round to have a sudden change of pace that disrupts its natural flow.

This means you should try and avoid, for example, constantly changing the splashscreen to things that do not fit the environment that we want for our station, changing the announcer too often, intervening too heavily in the storyteller’s functioning and its events without a good reason for it. Admin interventions should be limited to prioritize the decided mood of each round.

5.Integrity

As a member of staff, you are expected to maintain the privacy and safety of all community members, and the community itself. Which is to say, you are expected to keep all information you discover as a staff member private, regardless of the circumstances. For example, sharing other players' Ckeys, notes, personal information, etcetera, is utterly against this rule; as is sharing the details of any tickets, contents of staff channels, etcetera, you might come across, in OR outside the server and discord. You may come across agevetting situations, you are REQUIRED to keep personal information about users to the utmost respect deserved, violation of which WILL see you punished by staffers and Discord TOS for privacy violation.

Likewise, you should not perform any actions that could endanger our community. Examples of such actions are violating Discord or Byond’s terms of service, inciting drama or competition between servers, knowingly allowing underage players into the community, etcetera

6.Enforcement

Your duty as a member of staff is to ensure the following of our server’s rules and standards. It’s important that you have a good understanding of our rules made for players to follow, so in case you have any questions about any of our rules, it is your responsibility to ask the rest of staff before enacting the rules. This rule covers staff responsibilities such as applying proper punishments for rule breaks, properly handling tickets related to rulebreaks, acting on any situations you notice break the rules, etc.

We do not aim to be always surveilling everyone’s actions in the server, and moreso try and enforce rules in an ahelp basis (wait for players to ahelp about a rulebreak, if it’s not broken don’t fix it), but it’s still your responsibility to act upon situations that diminish our server’s enjoyment and experience. Any situations that are visibly wrong and causing notable issues should be handled by staff. However, you’re not expected to, nor supposed to solve every inconvenience for our players, as that diminishes the experience in the station. Treat them like adults, and feel free to press the IC issue button whenever necessary. Only act whenever necessary as per our server rules, as a good measure.

Likewise, you’re expected to be active enough in our server to justify your position as a member of staff. This is achieved by connecting, handling tickets, helping around with events, showing interest and helping with the server’s direction, etc. Any proof that you’re actively helping the server is accounted for. However, failing to be active in the server enough to justify your position in staff will lead you to be removed from the team. It’s your duty to communicate with staff to tell us if there are any issues keeping you from being active enough.

Consequences

The consequences for breaking staff rules, and other forms of guidelines, vary greatly depending on the severity of the offense; furthermore, the punishment to be given is ultimately decided by the headmins.. Whilst they may CHOOSE to include other staff members in the process, this does not mean the result is chosen democratically, NOR is a vote required to issue consequences to an offending staff member. Deciding the fates of other staff members is not a responsibility given to administrative staff, as it is reserved solely for the headmins, specifically to the designated Staff Supervisor. With that all in mind, punishments will usually, but not always, follow a set pattern; first, an official, verbal warning will be given, then demotion with the chance to re-apply, and, lastly, demotion with no chance at re-applying If you must take an extended break from adminship, simply ask and you will be put on break until you are ready to return.

Explanation of In-game rules

Rule	Explanation
Malice	The key of this rule is to detect when an user is causing issues to someone else with malicious intent, deliberately harming their experience on the station with no IC justification enough for it. This is not acceptable by our standards, as we should make sure no one tries to hinder the experience of our users.
Impact	When applying this rule, you’re looking for someone whose actions, deliberate or not, cause harm to the experience of everyone else on the station. Take into account who they’re hindering, how they’re hindering them, and what amount of players have had their experience hindered by someone who breaks this rule. Generally people guilty of this will be reported over several rounds by several players over similar issues.
Roleplay	This rule you should actually look for whenever you’re on the station, as rulebreaks of it often go unnoticed (e.g. uses of netspeak ICly). In general, you want to make sure characters are serious enough to not disrupt the roleplay of others, your best guide for this would be if you see tickets related to a certain character appear from several users, even across rounds, and if you feel like a certain character, just by its mere existence, disrupts immersion.
3.1. Escalation	The purpose of this rule is to make sure every conflict is escalated adequately and that the use of violence in every situation is proportional to the situation at hand.
3.2. Fuck around Find out	This rule is reliant on staff’s judgment of a certain specific situation, it’s more of a warning for players to be conscious of their actions than a rule as such. It is created so you as staff can easily tag an issue as an IC issue in case the situation at hand is proportional to the actions of a related user. To summarize, if a user is not deserving of something, then this rule does not apply. For this, you’ll generally want to look for repeated behavior instances, rather than singular situations in the round. Specifically those types of situations that would otherwise considered rulebreaks: Someone called someone else names during the round and it devolved into a fight ❌(This would be handled through the escalation rule) Someone decided to break space law once and got engaged by sec in some way ❌ (This would be handled through the escalation rule and the standards rule) Someone joins prisoner and constantly tries to escape, happens to be killed by sec due to their danger even without CC approval ✅ (An exception to the standards rule could be made through rule 3.2.) A character over several rounds acts antagonistically towards the station to the point other players start taking preemptive measures whenever they’re on to avoid being harassed by them ✅ (An exception to the escalation rule could be made through rule 3.2).
Consent	No lewd interaction should happen without consent from both parties, simple as. You’ll want to try and make sure that players have been able to talk things and fix whatever issues might arise from this ICly or OOCly before acting upon this rule. You should only interfere when diplomacy between the players involved has failed and one party is not respecting the other’s preferences even after being asked about it.
4.1. Noncon rule	Noncon should be treated as non-canon to the round by default. Both parties must agree otherwise in order for it to be considered canon.
Standards	This rule is put in place to ensure that players in jobs will fulfill the job they must in order for the round to succeed properly. Especially cases of being too busy erping to do their job.
Safety	Do not allow any unsafe content to be posted on the server, as such can lead to being questioned by staff.