Content Suggestion Add a target confirmation display to administrative commands

[Gordon Gudgeon]

What does this suggestion change/add/remove:
This suggestion adds a target confirmation display to administrative commands like !goto, !bring, !slay, etc. Similar to how /pm [Name] shows you who you're messaging before you send it, these commands would now display the name(s) of the player(s) who will be affected before the command is executed. This provides a final confirmation step for staff members.

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Has something similar been suggested before? If so, why is your suggestion different?:
Not that I could find on the forums.

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Possible Positives of the suggestion (At least 2):

1. Improved Player Experience: This change would prevent players from being accidentally affected by staff commands. It eliminates situations where a player is mistakenly teleported, cloaked, or otherwise impacted by a staff action not intended for them, which can be disruptive and break immersion.
2. Reduced Staff Stress: Staffing/Gming requires some quick actions sometimes that leave little room for making sure you are targeting the right people, which can be a little sressful. This suggestion would eliminate that stress.

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Possible Negatives of the suggestion:

1. Development Time: The relevant administrative commands might be part of a core addon or plugin that isn't easily customizable. Implementing this feature could require significant development effort, potentially more than it appears on the surface.

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Based on the Positives&Negatives, why should this suggestion be accepted:
This should only be accepted if it does not require a huge amount of development time, as it is not a critical issue that is killing the server, but rather just a feature that improves player and staff experience in relatively limited cases.

 

[chez_curd]

+support
I would love this as staff.

 

[Steffan]

-support
you're supposed to target with steamIDs instead of mispelling their ic name
this is just a skill issue
not worth the development time

 

[Aphex]

-support
you're supposed to target with steamIDs instead of mispelling their ic name
this is just a skill issue
not worth the development time

I mean sure, but it’s still a good QoL feature anyway. And this response doesn’t consider stuff like targeting multiple people like during events, it would be nice to know if there is someone that shouldn’t be getting something during an event or training. Although I don’t think it’s worth the dev time, still something that would be nice to see from a staff and GM POV.

 

[Kevin Ki]

Ngl, I read this and was like "hold up, Site Admin and Command able to target people? That's actually really cool! Like what's this gonna be, like targeting CI in RP by setting a personel tablet target by some in character means, or setting a specific person from a list for arrest by ISD/AO? I can't wait to see what this is about!"

Then I read it and realized you meant actual admins not like in character leadership. Much less cool but reasonable.

 

["Hydra"]

+Support

 

[Emilia Foddg]

+/- Neutral, leaning +Support
I do like the idea, its utility and potential benefit to the server;
Here's the thing - This functionality is accomplished by an addon called ULX; I don't know if you can make custom commands in ULX? I know it's Lua-based like most things GMod are, but I think you'd need an opinion from devs on whether or not it'd be possible to either add custom commands or make alterations to existing commands to the addon. I can't imagine this affects anything players will have to download? And if so, not by much? But I'm fairly certain this is serverside?

But I think the biggest hurdle here with implementation could be the codebase itself. You'd basically be asking a dev to go through the ULX codebase to look at the related functions and either create new or alter existing commands to add a prompt (or an alternate command that gives a prompt) to said commands. I'd imagine that for moderation purposes, the idea of an alternate command for it, rather than changing/replacing the base functionality outright would be more preferable for the simple reason that there are a lot of situations in moderating where things need to be actioned quickly - A simple example off the top of my head is that someone is MRDMing. Yes, you want to be accurate with who you get (I'm sure Dennid specifically can attest to this )

Additionally, how much will this help? Let's imagine for a second that all of this happens and we have ULX commands for Staff to use that give prompts to confirm or cancel performing certain moderation actions. I imagine that at first, there'll be some teething problems with adapting to this.. Then you end up building the habit of just autopiloting the 'Yes' button. In those cases, if you don't catch yourself before you make a mistake, the confirmation prompt becomes useless.

Then after all those considerations, feasibility. Is the benefit provided by having additional, safer moderation commands with prompts worth the required effort to implement? That will probably end up being the largest factor when it comes to whether or not this is actually a good idea.

I'm mostly speculating based on limited and aged experience, and I imagine others with more recent and intimate knowledge of this than me such as Yeke, Kvarkar, Jacub, Auburn, or even just anyone on the programming team will be able to give a better idea of how possible this actually is? Maybe it's doable and practical, and as such my concerns would be over nothing. That's mostly where my uncertainty comes from, the fact that I don't know enough about this to definitively say whether or not it's doable. I only know enough to point at holes that I see. Maybe there are also completely different problems with it, too, who knows.