So, as we have been receiving more and more ban appeals, I just wanted to give some advice for people going through the process and shed some light on the process as a whole. Please remember that DeadLaugh is a labor of love, all of the current Admins are employed full-time (some work 50+ hours a week) or have other projects that also require substantial attention. This isn’t a pity post, but I just want everyone to understand that there is a reason that sometimes we are hiding in our admin channels, have pokes disabled and use auto reply to messages you send us. We don’t have time to baby sit, and have implemented the appeal process for a reason, to make it as efficient as possible – for everyone involved!

Process:
1. User submits ban appeal via contact form on deadlaugh.com/contact or by sending an email to support@deadlaugh.com.
2. Admin (usually the admin who imposed the ban) will review the evidence, explanation, or information in the appeal and share it with another Admin (when available) to get their input on the fairness of the ban or sincerity of apology.
3. In the event the appeal is accepted, we will contact you and let you know that the appeal has been approved, and unban you as soon as possible.
4. In the event that the appeal is denied, we will not contact you to tell you that it has been denied. If you don’t hear from us within 2 to 3 days assume your appeal has been denied, and move on. If we get to it later than 2 to 3 days and you are approved, SURPRISE!

Look, bans and ban appeals are unpleasant. We love the community and generally want everyone involved to have fun. We dread having to ban people and even more having to revisit those bans when an appeal is submitted. Here are my Do’s and Don’ts when it comes to submitting your appeal. Follow the do’s and avoid the don’ts and more than likely you will get your appeal approved.

DON’TS
• Harass Staff.
• Act entitled.
• Lie.
• Spam admins on TS or Discord
• Poke people in the same channel as Admins.
• Appeal a ban for a friend.
• Demand a ban appeal be address over any other means beside email

You are much more likely to have your ban appeal approved if you make things easy on us, If you own up to your mistake, provide an apology, are sincere, and don’t hound us 24/7, we are reasonable. If you tell us you screwed up and are sorry, you are more likely to get approved, than if you tell us some outlandish story. We are (we feel at least) intelligent and generally see through the usual lies. Take for instance these scenarios:

You email us and tell us you wish to appeal your ban because your half-brother’s cousin’s son’s boyfriend borrowed your account and spammed the chat with racism, versus the real story… You email us and tell us you wish to appeal your ban your appeal, you apologize and that you take full responsibility, you lent your account to someone who you thought was mature enough to play the game and they proceeded use inappropriate language in the chat.

Which do you think is more likely to be appealed?

As previously stated, bans and ban appeals are unpleasant. When you do the things I have listed here as “Don’ts”, it makes them even MORE unpleasant. It gets to a point where if you do enough of these things, I won’t even read your appeal, I’ll tell you straight away it has been denied without a bit of consideration. There is a reason we don’t allow pokes in Teamspeak, we get overwhelmed with them. If we are in a private channel with someone and you notice you can’t poke me, why would you think it would be OK to poke the other person in that channel? It isn’t, and it doesn’t help your case any. I would say one thing that leads to 50% of appeal denies or more is lying. When I say lying, I mean about ANYTHING involving the case or the appeal. If you tell me so and so told you that your appeal would be reconsidered because this or that, for one I’m going to validate that with that person, two if untrue I’m going to assume you are lying about everything involved in the case and your appeal is denied on the spot.

Another issue is acting entitled, I will say right off the bat on DeadLaugh you are entitled to nothing. You have no rights to be on the server no matter how long you have been around or how much you have donated. As I said, DeadLaugh is a labor of love; we donate countless hours to keep the server running. I doesn’t matter how much you have donated, the value of the amount of time we donate to keep things smooth will always outweigh any amount you have donated. We don’t work for you; we aren’t your baby sitter.

With all that being said, we always appreciate you for playing with us and being a part of our community. Please be reasonable when submitting ban appeals and be considerate of all parties involved!