Reports and the lack of response from the staff team

[Karst]

I'm going to post this topical section from the Rule Violation Report Templates and Guidelines:

Ask yourself the following questions - If your answers to these might be a little sketchy, odds are your report will be too.

1. Am I filing a relatively petty report because I’m currently angry?
   • If you’re a little hot under the collar, the Sandwich Rule* always helps to keep yourself from looking silly. Just step back for half an hour, then come back and decide whether or not it’s worth pursuing.
2. Do I really have enough evidence to make this stick?
   • Sanctions won’t go through unless sufficient evidence is provided of the report. You were there for the entire incident, yep, but the administration was not. All we have to go by is what you give us. Is that enough?
3. Is what this person did really worth removing all his credits and guns?
   • That’s the standard punishment for server offenses. Is what the suspect did serious enough to warrant this sort of punishment?
4. Is this person clearly just a new player who doesn’t know better yet?
   • You should know by now that while most of the rules are common-sense, we’ve got a lot of ‘em. Go ahead, swap tabs to that list you’ve got open. There’s a lot of them, and to new players that can be daunting, or perhaps they haven’t even seen the forums yet. If you suspect someone of being a new player, unless the violation is serious, you’re better off pointing them in the right direction than slapping them with a violation. Remember, we were all in their shoes at one point.

Obviously, you should read this before submitting a violation report.
I would also strongly suggest reviewing it again before you ask for details on the dismissal of a report, because in all likelihood the explanation can be found there.

The most common reasons for dismissal by far are:

- There's no evidence of the alleged violation in the report.
- The evidence in the report directly contradicts the allegation.

But there are plenty of other reasons. Misunderstandings of the rules themselves leading to reports of actions that aren't rule violations. Or reports for violations that are so minor they don't warrant a sanction, or situations that cleared themselves up. See points 1 and 4: Not every rule violation actually needs to be sanctioned.

Having a quick conversation about this actually shows pretty well why this isn't something that we generally do, because of course everyone wants the reports they file to be upheld, and actually explaining why they weren't will swiftly lead to a situation in which all we can say is "well, the team does not see it that way, end of story" after a bit of back and forth that doesn't go anywhere.

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