Alright so I personally feel we have two options here and I'm going to open with them - we either put our limited developmental resources into fixing the issues I am about to outline as soon as possible, or we block NM messaging and return to essentials messaging for the foreseeable future whilst fixing NM is raised as a ticket and cast to the side.
The first issue I am going to outline is punishment bypassing. Anyone can send a message to another player to any server regardless of the current sanctions imposed on that player. This means two players who have both been muted for having a heated argument with each other, a player who has been banned or muted by an admin can spam that admin with "unban me/unmute me" (or worse) and that players can send these messages from the hubs.
The hubs are a big issue. There is no server chat or way to remotely sanction players in the same way we have for the freedom-01 and freedom-02 servers. There are also only a handful of players capable of actually handing out bans in the hub. We have Ryan, Lyicx, Red and Dragon as the most active of these, with 3 being from the UK and 1 as far as I know being from the US. All of these people are adults with lives and things to do outside of this server. Yet in a case of one of these fairly common situations, we have to rely on one of these few people. Even if assistant executives, at the time of writing being myself and Shyrix, were opped in the hub, it would still not help the situation too much (although I believe it would be a step in the right direction.)
This has put, in my short time of being on the server, a lot of admins in particular in situations in which a player is blatantly breaking the rules - often by spamming them with messages, with absolutely zero ability to do anything about the situation, besides bother one of the few people who can actually do something about that - which I don't like to do, but had to this morning to an executive who had just woken up.
This issue is bad enough on it's own, but I believe there is another glaring problem with the NM messaging system - NM commands are not shown on commandspy or telnet. This means that in the situation that a non-admin is spammed with messages, any online staff would be completely oblivious to what is going on. And the only way it can be dealt with is if the player being spammed is proactive enough to be able to send a screenshot to the staff members online - but even then the player could always just go to hub and repeat the process from there and force us to grab an executive again.
Also due to the fact NM seems to be in a different plane of existence to every other plugin on the server, when players are committing messenging tomfoolery from the hub, the only option is to ban them. Which, if they are unaware of the direct IP link to the freedom server to avoid the hub, effectively bans them from the entire network. I am referencing a recent situation with a player who was banned for doing exactly that and they had to make a forum post to find out the direct link several days later. Now, while I obviously don't like players doing that, it's not fair that if they don't know of the discord or forums they are effectively permanently banned from TF.
To fix this, I would like it to be implemented that players who are banned from a certain server cannot send messages to anyone from that server. I get that that is likely developmentally complicated but considering cross-server messaging is almost entirely used by banned players (since everyone who is allowed there is already in freedom-01) it could also be entirely disabled if we want to use NM over essentials for messaging. I doubt it would be missed too much. Even something like just blocking /msg in hub-02 and hub-03 would also help. I'd also appreciate if /mutes would block messaging for that player entirely, but I understand our current developmental situation.
I am unfortunately unaware of how to resolve the commandspy/telnet issue with NM. Someone with more technical knowledge might be able to shed some more insight on a solution.
I think that's it, I appreciate any who have read this far - I've spent 45 minutes writing this so there might be some repetition as my memory is not fantastic.
