The Elder Smurfs

[Yarr! goosmurf]

tl;dr The Elder Smurfs are players that we admins have noticed as being Smurfy - level headed players that we can trust to use their privileges appropriately. They have access to the !votekick and !votemute commands.

The goal is to empower more players to help look after the servers they enjoy playing on, for the benefit of everyone.

Elders are also immune to the high ping kicker as a thank you for their support of Smurfy Fortress.

Background

We introduced a custom !votekick plugin in November 2012. It allows players to start a vote against another player if they think that player is being abusive. The intent was that players could use it to kick griefers, trolls & cheaters if admins are not around.

However, over a 4 week period review of the use of !votekick showed that about 50% of votekicks were for completely stupid reasons, despite a very prominent & beeping warning that abuse of !votekick would result in permanent bans (and we have banned ~10 people for abusing it).

Being a new community we had a secondary problem that we didn't have a large pool of regular players from which we could nominate new admins. But now that we're about 3 months old there are quite a few players who are becoming regulars, and show the kind of levelheadedness that we like to see.

To solve the !votekick abuse problem, yet provide sufficient coverage in case admins aren't around, The Elder Smurfs was created. The Elder Smurfs are regular Smurfy Fortress players who now have the power to !votekick.

Right now there are ~380 Elder Smurfs - we will add/remove players over time with the goal of expanding coverage (in particular we're most interested in adding players who play when the admins don't!), and we'll be thinking about adding/changing privileges as necessary.

How do I become an Elder Smurf?

The long term goal is that everyone should become an Elder Smurf. We want a community of friendly players who look after each other.

The reality is that there's always going to be that 1% of idiots who deliberately ruin things. The Elder Smurfs is definitely not meant to be some kind of exclusive club but a way of recognising players who have shown themselves to be fun to play with.

So it's simple: just keep playing, be nice, and you'll soon find yourself in the ranks of the Elder Smurfs :)

[Karlodinium]

Question: who are the current admins? I've not ever needed to use !votekick yet, but in the (hopefully unlikely) case that Elder Smurfs need to step up, it'd be nice to know if there are admins around, instead. I know who some of the admins are, but is there a definitive list?

[Yarr! goosmurf]

The admins are marked on the group page (including the moderators, though some mods only have admin on some servers).

I'd like to encourage Elders to use their !votekick powers when necessary - one of the reasons we created the Elders was so that we wouldn't have to rely as much on admins being around.

The tooling does need improvement. Right now I manually review usage of !votekick; ideally I'd like to automate reports for all admins to review, and I'd also like to add an in-game !admin call at some point.

I also need to add more Elders, we've stalled at 116 hehe :)

[Karlodinium]

I'm not sure if I'm being an absolute idiot, but I'm not sure if I can find it. When you say "group page" do you mean the "Overview" tab?

And when I say I hadn't needed to use votekick (yet), I meant that I hadn't come across any hackers/griefers/etc. yet. Part of what attracted me here was the strong player base, which (I guess) leaves little room for trouble-makers. I mean, non-regular trouble-makers.

[Yarr! goosmurf]

Yep on the Overview tab, at the bottom is a Group Members section. The group Admins & Moderators listed are all game admins.

[Karlodinium]

Ah okay. Sorry, I *was* being a moron. (Who scrolls down to the bottom of the page? :p)
Cheers!

[Karlodinium]

Hi! It's me again. :)

I was in the situation tonight of attempting !votekick again, but I'm not sure that it went okay. Partially, this was because my HUD blocked the text in the middle of the screen. It said something about writing a reason for the kick, but I wasn't sure where to do that. Just in the "y" chat? Anyway, it didn't bring up a vote at all, which is what I assume is meant to happen.

FWIW there was an engie who was griefing with teles to trap his teammates. I'm not 100% sure if that's appropriate to votekick for that, so let me know if I erred.

Cheers.

[Yarr! goosmurf]

Votekicking a griefer is totally valid, and encouraged!

Yeah, type a reason into chat. The vote won't proceed until a reason has been entered. It waits 30 seconds or so for a reason and if none is entered (or you enter "cancel") the votekick times out so no vote happens.

[Karlodinium]

Ok thanks. I'll keep it in mind for next time. Cheers.

[fish100]

Ty for this post, i will keep waiting to be an elder. :D

[6489]

Hi, how do you know if you're an elder smurf

[Yarr! goosmurf]

XxMinjaxX there's a greeting message when you join the server :)

If you're waiting to become an Elder hang in there. There's actually quite a few players we'd like to make Elders but haven't had the chance to. It's quite time consuming to review players.

[bing chilling]

thank you soo much for making me an eldersmurf i will use the commands only for good :)

[Yarr! goosmurf]

Eggselent :D

[Guido]

i'm abit late, but thanks for making me an elder smurf, i'm really glad to be apart of this community :)

[a danse macabre]

Smurfy i would like to become an elder smurf because smurfy fortress servers were the first I played on when i joined the TF2 community, and i would like to help out the community from annoying pests