Gathering Evidence

We, the staff at CFC, try to be as fair and unbiased as possible when handling a situation. Sometimes this may come across as indifference, but you can be sure that it is not. It is even possible that no response from a mod or admin means that the situation is being investigated!

Before we can take action against someone, we make sure that we have good evidence of actual wrongdoing. If we as Staff see it, this is solid evidence for the vast majority of infractions. However, there will be times when a member of the CFC Staff Team is not online when there is misconduct. In this case, someone may need to report on it for the situation to be resolved.

When a player reports, wish as we might to take action, there must be a certain standard of evidence. It’s not that we don’t trust you, it’s that we want to extend everyone the benefit of the doubt. Worry not, however - providing good evidence is quite easy!

What is evidence?

When it comes to evidence, seeing is believing. The gold standard is a screenshot. We need to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone is actually infracting. Above and beyond this is video, which is unfortunately the only way to capture certain specific actions such as hacking or third-party-software/e2 abuse

Any video/photo evidence needs to show the infraction being reported and must clearly show that it is the reported-upon person who is committing the act. An example of this is with propspamming - to show evidence of propspam, the props being spammed AND the ownership tag that shows up on the left must both be visible.

What is NOT evidence?

Hearsay is not evidence, nor is posting someone SteamID and just saying “they did it”. Someone’s prop count also isn’t evidence of prop-spam, and a picture of an E2 with a scary name isn’t either. That being said, you can still report these actions and staff can look into them if they are serious enough offenses. A lack of evidence doesn’t mean nothing will be done, but evidence helps to speed Staff action. After all, why wait for an rcon user to get on and check the console when you can just show what you saw!

How does one gather evidence?

Taking a screenshot isn’t hard at all in the modern age! Just hit the PrtScn/Print Screen button on your keyboard, typically near the numpad on the right-hand side, but sometimes it’s above the arrow keys. It may also be a function+key combination if you are on a Laptop. Then just paste the results into the #reports Discord channel.

Don’t have printscreen? If you’re playing in Windowed mode on Windows 7 or later, you can use the Snipping Tool. Hit the Windows key and search “Snipping” to find the snipping tool. It will pop up a window, click new and then click-and-drag over the area you want to copy. Then right-click the image, click Copy, and you can just paste it into reports. This isn’t as good as a full screenshot, and it’s clunkier, but it’s better than nothing!

We highly reccomend taking the time to set up a program called ShareX. It's not the easiest to configure, but it's extremely powerful.

Wanna take a video? The free trial version of Fraps is more than adequate, and the quality doesn’t need to be good. If you use an Nvidia graphics card, they also come with capture software that you can access from the Nvidia GeForce Experience that is in the system tray, which is the arrow on the bottom-right of the screen when you are in the desktop.