[TheUltraFish]

An interesting proposition, if something like this is being posted, I am guessing that ghosting must still be a daily occurrence if not multiple times a day. The ghosting ban length has been adjusted multiple times throughout the years.

When it was first added, it was given the same treatment as hacking. Of course, that is back in 2016, if not before, where you really had to put a lot of work in to ghost. Ghosting was a pretty rare occurrence and the amount of work involved to do it had an understandable reaction. As technology communication for gameplay has improved over the years, the amount of people being banned for ghosting obviously increased and permabanning everyone who violated the ghosting rules seemed a bit harsh for a first time offense. When I joined the staff team in early 2018, a 2 week ban for first time offenses had been implemented followed by a permaban if the violation was repeated.

Somewhere during this a rule was added to forceswap them for an entire map first before proceeding with a two week ban. This may have been added to not immediately punish those for first time violations, there may not have been many staff with banning capabilities for the two week punishment, to stop clogging up the forums with ghosting ban requests back when even archived ban requests still showed on the front page making it so that topics were missed, or some other reasons that I do not remember. Remember, only moderators or above can ban for more than a day. Having to babysit ghosters, sometimes multiple groups, could be exhausting for a single staff member to handle, especially an inexperienced one.

In mid 2021, after discussing with staff and community members, adjustments were made to the ghosting rule to make the process easier. A test phase was done and the results can be found in the following links:

https://www.dinklebergsgmod.com/site/sho...?tid=14336
https://www.dinklebergsgmod.com/site/sho...?tid=14455

The banning for 24 hours section was added so that there would be an immediate response that did not have first time players banned for two weeks having them forget about the server in that time span, have tmods be involved in the first time banning process rather than just dumping all the work on the moderators and admins. Depending on the day, there could be multiple ban requests up for ghosting. I remember sometimes spending a couple hours on some days just looking through the evidence of ghosting ban requests.

I am not involved in the server so I do not know how bad ghosting has gotten or if it has improved. I was just providing the history of the ghosting punishment rules as I knew them. If you do increase the first time violation punishments, tmods will only be able to partially deal with the situation and have to do more work with uploading evidence and making ban threads. It should not hinder community members making ban requests seeing as how the process for them would not change. It would send a clearer statement to other ghosters on the server but I do not think it would have a significant impact on others that join wanting to ghost. It may have ghosters not come back on the server in a weeks time to ghost again since the time had been increased but that would be current staff to figure out those numbers.

I wish you all the best.