POI System

The POI Registry, or Player of Interest Registry, is a private staff registry of suspicious or otherwise potentially problematic players within the platform. It allows moderators and admins to stay informed on the activity of potential bad actors.

History

The POI Registry was created in circa 2023 to solve the following question: "How can we stay informed when a bad actor, suspicious player, or person involved in a damning report or investigation actually joins or switches servers without pulling records or watching chat?". And the answer was simple: create a system that directs the subject's activity to staff channels.

It was later implemented in the early development stages of the API project.

Behavior

Staff members can run an in-game command or invoke an action in Argus to interact with the registry. Of note, they can flag a player, "unflag" a player, view the details of a flag, and view a list of currently flagged or previously flagged players. Becoming "flagged" entails entering the registry.

When a subject is flagged, their activity on the Minecraft servers is logged and staff thus receive such notifications pertaining to the activity events. For instance, when John is flagged, staff may receive a notification of the network connect event both in-game and on Discord. This forms the essence of what the registry is for: staying updated when staff can't be online all the time.

Generally speaking, flags expire after a period of time, although more serious or persistent violation cases may have a permanent flag often accompanied by other moderation actions.

Audience

The following are some of its subject audience:

• Recently banned players
• Players involved in a serious or significant report or investigation
• Players described as allegedly cheating or violating significant policies or rules
• Official offenses or observed offenses that are consistent with certain internally-classed categories which automatically open a moderation investigation (e.g.: hate speech, discrimination, abuse, inappropriate content or sexually suggestive material or coercion, etc.)

Players who follow the rules, receive low priority offenses, or don't present a moderation issue are typically never flagged.

Data collection

Any sensitive player or user data is not collected in the registry outside moderation and case information or personal identifiers (Mojang UUID and internal IDs). Under the Anonymize, Audit and Freeze policy (AAF), the deletion of player data (i.e. after an account deletion request) does not destroy moderation records to preserve the audit trail for reasons of accountability, transparency, and causality. However, the Minecraft identification link is destroyed, preventing a player lookup based on prior identifiers. As such, this effectively anonymizes the user.