Inside the Square Moderation Tool

This page contains a detailed profile of exactly how Square works to help you have a better understanding on why some things are the way they are, and why some moderation actions are taken.

/Report(top)

When a player is reported, the report is sent to Square. Staff members can view reports from the dashboard, which is Square's homepage. A report becomes visible on the dashboard when it arrives. It looks like this:


As you can see, we cannot view who reported the player from where we claim reports (although we can see the name of the reporter if we view a player's Square Profile, and we are automatically shown it after we claim the report). We have two options that we can immediately do when we view a report from our dashboard: claim it or unflag it. Claiming a report means that a staff member will act on it, while unflagging removes the report from Square without any action being taken.

When a report is claimed, the staff member can use Square's functions to look into its validity. They can also contact the reporter if they suspect that they will have more info on the report. After a report has been verified, the staff member can then kick, mute, ban, or add a staff note to the player, and then close the report. If the report ends up being invalid, the staff member can simply close the report without taking action. This means that false reports do not count against you in any way.

Staff members are also able to unclaim reports that they are unable to deal with for other staff to handle.

You can learn about the best ways to use the command on the Reporting a Player that Breaks the Rules page.

Logs(top)

Square records a variety of events to that tells the history of what the player did on the server. These logs let us paint a picture of a situation and help understand what happened when investigating a report or a potential bug.

Staff members are able to filter logs by server, event type, and player. They are also able to filter the Chat by channel. Community, Server, Local, Market, Moderator, and Supporter Chat channel logs can be viewed by all staff members, whereas only Senior Staff members and Administrators are able to view private conversations, residence Chat logs, and group Chat logs.

These logs are only checked when needed for moderation action. However, for Chat channel logs, it is possible that your messages could be seen if you have not been reported (for example, if a staff member filters by server instead of by player). As private Chat logs are stored separately, it is not possible for them to be accidentally viewed.

Staff members will never purposely intrude on any logged Chat messages, but they cannot guarantee that they will not see something private if it was sent in a Chat channel, since specific filters may be set to allow your message(s) to show up. Staff members will always keep private messages confidential, though.

Square Profiles(top)

Every player that connects to EMC has a Square profile, which is used to track moderation actions.


As you can see, when we view your Square profile, it is designed so that we do not accidentally see anything private. We have to intentionally click a button to view any data that has not been specifically left by staff members to be viewed by other staff members.

The Square profile pages are designed to allow a staff member to quickly view information when it is needed, but to also hide anything that does not need to be seen at the exact moment.