The Ongoing Harassment and Discrimination Problem

[Zen]

Introduction
Ever since I have joined this server, I have noticed, and many have experienced an ongoing problem with people on the server being very obviously discriminatory in various ways, whether that be sexism, racism, or any other form of unfair discrimination. This often leads to, or takes the form of, active harassment of community members simply based on their gender, sex, race, and various other characteristics. This happens constantly. I think anybody on the server who is a woman or otherwise feminine in any way can attest to the bullshit and weirdos they have to put up with on the server or by people in the community, and it's real fucking bad.

Just today, we have had a prominent member of the community outright leave and drop all of her roleplay and server positions because of this problem. She's been in senior roleplay positions for as long as I've been on the server, and this problem was bad enough for her to just decide to up and leave midway through ongoing roleplay storylines. And I don't imagine she's the first, nor do I expect her to be the last unless something changes.

And that's what this forum thread is about - something needs to change, and it's a big enough problem that it really needs Network Leadership and other senior staff to make changes that actually proactively prevent this from happen, and that actually work to resolve issues that people have around this. The SCP-RP Suggestions section of the forums is closed right now, so I can't post there, and I'm not sure it's even the place for that, given it likely affects the CN community broader than just these two servers, and is limited in scope to just the Content Team as arbiters.

Existing Rules and Enforcement
Under the existing SCP-RP rules, and I imagine this is similar across the other servers and parts of CN, we have this rule:

1.10 Disrespectful Conduct - Derogatory Language designed to target players in a disrespectful manner is prohibited; this includes racism, homophobia, and other derogatory slurs; jokingly being racist is not an exception to this rule.

This. Is not enforced nearly enough, and nearly severely enough. It is also very limited in scope, and the only other rule I can see (with my poor reading ability) that touches on anything directly related to this issue is the ERP rule. It doesn't cover anything other than direct derogatory language, and that's really not enough.

When it comes to enforcement, it's pretty easy to point out where even this limited rule is not dealt with severely enough. Right now, you will see every so often somebody decide to do something like spam the N-word in OOC comms. That sort of behaviour alone should indicate that that person is not somebody that will ever provide positive interactions in the server, and they have no intention to actually engage in the community at all in the first place. That's on top of the fact that they are spamming a racial slur. What does this result in? A short ban, come back in a week and do it again, or be more subtle next time which is actually worse in the long run for the community. And do you know what this says to players? That it's not that bad, you can get RDM bans longer than that, so it's not serious. Or from other perspectives: wow, the moderation team/owners really don't care. It's that kind of server.

Then when it comes to people just generally harassing members of the community? Nothing, because there's no actual rules against that, at least none that are publicly listed. You can get banned for toxicity, but that's only really if you've very obviously said a slur or are directly attacking people and being rude. Just casually harassing people because they're women, or anything along those lines? Nah, you're fine. A lot of it's likely just small things - one person does it once, so it's not that bad. Multiply that by the amount of people that behave like this, then again by how often they do it, and it really starts to add up. And that's just the smaller things - the smaller things aren't the only problems people face on CN. One person being a bit weird around someone on the server because omg, woman becomes on their side I can barely play the server because of all these fucking weirdos - and that's not a community we should strive to be.

If you've seen or experienced any issues around this, feel free to add them as replies to this - it might actually get NL to give a shit.

Changes
Right now, there's some very obvious gaps in the rules, and these issues aren't being taken (or dealt with) nearly as severely as they should be. The overall change would obviously be to simply not have people be like that, but that's also obviously not going to happen without doing anything. So my immediate suggestions would be:

• Add explicit rules around harassment and discrimination. Not just direct language, and not just directly hostile/toxic words and actions, but the base problems.
  • Individuals can be punished/dealt with in severity scaling with their individual actions, but if every person that did/said something discriminatory, or in any way harassed a member of our community, was punished/dealt with appropriately everytime they did it, it might start to get into people's heads that that's not okay.
• Increase the severity of punishments around existing and future rules around this issue.
  • Does it make sense to you that repeatedly using a slur, or constantly undertaking any actions that just generally create such a toxic community that people just fucking leave rather than put up with CN, should be punished less severely in any context than individual breaks in roleplay like RDM?
  • The point of rules and enforcement here is to make the server and community fun to play and keep it in a state where players actually want to come back - do you think this order of priority and severity aligns with that?
  • If somebody individually is causing big enough problems here, it might even be worth an outright community blacklist. What's the point of keeping one existing player around if they're just causing problems for the rest of the community to the point that other existing members might leave, and new players might decide to never come back.

Unpopularity
Even this suggestion, that we don't just let people discriminate and harass others, will likely be unpopular. It seems every time anything touching on this topic comes up, you get a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork to complain stupid shit like most of the people on the server are MEN, so why should we care about women? And to you, I say "Found one."

This problem is going to continue, and people are going to continue to leave or simply never truly join the community, until actions are actually taken to make things better. Do they have to be exactly what I have suggested? No. But you need to do fucking something about it, and I feel like "treating harassment and discrimination seriously" is not a big fucking ask.

 

[Winkie]

Just in lieu of this, I have posted the following previously for clarity. I will make a response on this at a later date after community feedback. For now however:

Spoiler: Body

@LOA | Winkie

Just going to state this here, this isn't a preach nor' should this be taken in a bad light I am merely informing you of necessary steps we take for prevention and/or how we tackle issues like this. A few things to clarify: Vigilantism is not accepted here, we are not obliged to do so and it reflects badly on the community if doing so, this is a open community for all peoples to enjoy and we take pride in doing so. Harassment, as of my profession I have dealt with a lot of cases of harassment in my time and what I will state is what constitutes harassment: A) Said person must inform said party they would like to be left alone. B) Said victim is scared, distressed and/or threatened due to repeated behaviour from an individual.

In my opinion none of these cases constitutes harassment, I know you have fulfilled criteria A in this case and those members are then penalised for repeating their behaviour after you asked them to stop. We do not view this as a sensitive situation as it's not life threatening, disrupting the network or severe enough.

I do however, understand the situation you are put in and it's importance that we prevent users from causing you alarm and distress, it is difficult to prevent users from doing so and I believe we are adequately reactionary to users breaking our server rules.

I want to re-affirm, we are transparent within our rules and guidelines. We follow an escalation system which allows us to penalise members for repeat behaviour. I hope this clarifies anything and as to why you believe you may not be getting the necessary support or sufficient penalties handed out.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me, CS Winkie.

 

[Zen]

Just in lieu of this, I have posted the following previously for clarity. I will make a response on this at a later date after community feedback. For now however:

Spoiler: Body

@LOA | Winkie

Just going to state this here, this isn't a preach nor' should this be taken in a bad light I am merely informing you of necessary steps we take for prevention and/or how we tackle issues like this. A few things to clarify: Vigilantism is not accepted here, we are not obliged to do so and it reflects badly on the community if doing so, this is a open community for all peoples to enjoy and we take pride in doing so. Harassment, as of my profession I have dealt with a lot of cases of harassment in my time and what I will state is what constitutes harassment: A) Said person must inform said party they would like to be left alone. B) Said victim is scared, distressed and/or threatened due to repeated behaviour from an individual.

In my opinion none of these cases constitutes harassment, I know you have fulfilled criteria A in this case and those members are then penalised for repeating their behaviour after you asked them to stop. We do not view this as a sensitive situation as it's not life threatening, disrupting the network or severe enough.

I do however, understand the situation you are put in and it's importance that we prevent users from causing you alarm and distress, it is difficult to prevent users from doing so and I believe we are adequately reactionary to users breaking our server rules.

I want to re-affirm, we are transparent within our rules and guidelines. We follow an escalation system which allows us to penalise members for repeat behaviour. I hope this clarifies anything and as to why you believe you may not be getting the necessary support or sufficient penalties handed out.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me, CS Winkie.

Some of that is relevant, some isn't. And a big part of this is that some parts of the bigger problem simply aren't covered by any rule yet, and some of the existing rules aren't dealt with severely enough. Some of the issue is also lots of smaller problems/incidents that build up quickly - one person doing a thing once to/around someone isn't a big thing for the person doing it, but when lots of people are doing that same sort of thing, constantly, it becomes a big problem for the victim of it.

 

['Athena']

Thank you for doing this, but I have the unfortunate feeling it will be mostly ignored.

At the end of the day, the issue stems from small incidents, these then grow and fester and build, you're told to "put up with it or leave." Or in one case, threatened with punishment for speaking out against the perpetrator of ongoing harassment. I wish nothing Ill on civil networks, and I truly hope it continues to flourish, I just hope that instead of every case being seen as individual on harassment whether it is against women, men, those everywhere and in-between, children, adults: the issue stems from individual cases but they add up.

Instead of a flat policy, unfortunately, the way we currently operate works on a basis of "well this person said this, here is a clip of me saying stop." But what isn't fair, which I **know** staff cannot do much about, is that at the 8th person doing it that week, it stacks up, it makes you feel so horribly underappreciated and unwanted, and severely has impacted my mental health, and some of the wonderful people around me.

It is an entirely tough situation that I emphasise highly with staff regarding, at the end of the day, they've volunteered to help a game run, not to deal with peoples shit. I hope some sort of helpful ruling and guidance can come of this. Because as I discussed with Yeke, the rightly so, uneducated responses and treatment I recieved made myself extremely hesistent to speak out, to the point that one day I woke up at 5am to a phone call of someone with a blocked number screaming "Chairwoman Maeve Glass" that I've had to report to the police, and on that day I chose to resign. CN cant do anything about these things, even though we are pretty sure we know where that originated from, but unfortunately the types of players within this community act this way.

I want everyone to be comfortable and happy here. Zen you're doing the right thing, and good luck. Hopefully this perspective can assist NL+Ventz and any other involved members of staff.

 

[Winkie]

Thank you for doing this, but I have the unfortunate feeling it will be mostly ignored.

At the end of the day, the issue stems from small incidents, these then grow and fester and build, you're told to "put up with it or leave." Or in one case, threatened with punishment for speaking out against the perpetrator of ongoing harassment. I wish nothing Ill on civil networks, and I truly hope it continues to flourish, I just hope that instead of every case being seen as individual on harassment whether it is against women, men, those everywhere and in-between, children, adults: the issue stems from individual cases but they add up.

Instead of a flat policy, unfortunately, the way we currently operate works on a basis of "well this person said this, here is a clip of me saying stop." But what isn't fair, which I **know** staff cannot do much about, is that at the 8th person doing it that week, it stacks up, it makes you feel so horribly underappreciated and unwanted, and severely has impacted my mental health, and some of the wonderful people around me.

It is an entirely tough situation that I emphasise highly with staff regarding, at the end of the day, they've volunteered to help a game run, not to deal with peoples shit. I hope some sort of helpful ruling and guidance can come of this. Because as I discussed with Yeke, the rightly so, uneducated responses and treatment I recieved made myself extremely hesistent to speak out, to the point that one day I woke up at 5am to a phone call of someone with a blocked number screaming "Chairwoman Maeve Glass" that I've had to report to the police, and on that day I chose to resign. CN cant do anything about these things, even though we are pretty sure we know where that originated from, but unfortunately the types of players within this community act this way.

I want everyone to be comfortable and happy here. Zen you're doing the right thing, and good luck. Hopefully this perspective can assist NL+Ventz and any other involved members of staff.

Like I stated previously,

Vigilantism isn't accepted on CN unfortunately, we do make the extensive effort to make our environment inclusive and protect the vulnerable. I think it's important to note in your circumstance to report any cases to your respective governing body/law enforcement. We cannot prevent such a thing and can only, as stated previously act as a reactionary force. I can see there may be lacking rules/guidelines for our staff to tackle these issues and as to why I will be looking into giving staff the necessary powers to act on this, albeit unlikely due each case of harassment needs to be dealt with case by case. It is not as simple as an RDM and usually the decision is not an easy one, we cannot blanket harassment due to it's severity.

And your case, albeit unfortunate you did leave yourself prone to this hostile environment which we hate to see. If you disclose your personal information online we cannot protect you, you forfeit your own privacy at that point. I wish this wasn't the case and that the world was different. This is also the legality of the situation. I understand your reasoning for not reporting a lot of the harassment, but it's really hard for us to help when we are unaware.

I would also really emphasise on the following:

you're told to "put up with it or leave." Or in one case, threatened with punishment for speaking out against the perpetrator of ongoing harassment.

This is clearly not the sentiment, if you feel this way that is a shame. If this has been the case I would appreciate you reporting this.

 

[Zen]

Vigilantism isn't accepted on CN unfortunately

If there's no actual enforcement against this, then what other means do people have to stop it?

 

[alt_account]

If there's no actual enforcement against this, then what other means do people have to stop it?

unsure if i have the right to comment here considering my past with blacklisted players

but from my experience which is plenty vigilantism never solves anything and turns people into power hungry losers with a power trip fantasy

ive seen this happen to people i was good friends with wont name but they turned into real bad people over an obsessive need to be a vigilante its best just to report it with evidence to the right people and get authorities involved

 

[Zen]

unsure if i have the right to comment here considering my past with blacklisted players

but from my experience which is plenty vigilantism never solves anything and turns people into power hungry losers with a power trip fantasy

ive seen this happen to people i was good friends with wont name but they turned into real bad people over an obsessive need to be a vigilante its best just to report it with evidence to the right people and get authorities involved

That's a good point, and I myself don't think vigilantism is a good solution. When things aren't done properly, it's easy for witch hunts to get started or innocent people to get caught in the crossfire, and it also causes further problems for the initial victims of the harassment. That's why there should be a more robust and severely enforced set of rules around this.

 

['Athena']

Like I stated previously,

Vigilantism isn't accepted on CN unfortunately, we do make the extensive effort to make our environment inclusive and protect the vulnerable. I think it's important to note in your circumstance to report any cases to your respective governing body/law enforcement. We cannot prevent such a thing and can only, as stated previously act as a reactionary force. I can see there may be lacking rules/guidelines for our staff to tackle these issues and as to why I will be looking into giving staff the necessary powers to act on this, albeit unlikely due each case of harassment needs to be dealt with case by case. It is not as simple as an RDM and usually the decision is not an easy one, we cannot blanket harassment due to it's severity.

And your case, albeit unfortunate you did leave yourself prone to this hostile environment which we hate to see. If you disclose your personal information online we cannot protect you, you forfeit your own privacy at that point. I wish this wasn't the case and that the world was different. This is also the legality of the situation. I understand your reasoning for not reporting a lot of the harassment, but it's really hard for us to help when we are unaware.

Oh no, I think the general message I was conveying has come across incorrectly.

By no means am I calling for any semblance of Vigilantism, I think it would be ludicrous and kill the community. The entire point of my post was, I appreciate Zen going for this route of trying to solve issues, but, Staff are in an tough spot. I had my reasons to leave, and unfortunately, to note to your "leave myself prone", a few of the details so far within investigation have not come back via well- what opened that up as they're inaccessible via that means. That incident was regarding my face, and my face alone, how the rest was obtained is entirely up in the air.

I understand that at the end of the day, you have to draw a line, and no-one wants you to sit and white knight for women. I simply wished to explain my choices due to being a direct person of reference, how I have been made to feel in my time here, and give a human perspective to the effects it has. This is at the end of the day an incredibly hard issue to balance, and even I don't have a single suggestion on how to improve this. Online communities create hatred, create friendships and otherwise, it just simply happens people who differ from the kind of more common faces are a target.

This is clearly not the sentiment, if you feel this way that is a shame. If this has been the case I would appreciate you reporting this.

And as a small note, it has been and I wouldn't worry too much I am sure it'll eventually be handled.

 

[Winkie]

That incident was regarding my face, and my face alone, how the rest was obtained is entirely up in the air.

I will leave this as my last reply, just for anyone's reference people can reverse image search photo's which can link to social media. Also want to state you did share your "Tinder" account publicly on numerous occasions. Hopefully this knowledge can help anyone be safer online.

 

[Kayla]

As another female within the community, I have to say I have had issues with harassment and toxicity not being handled. I mean, myself and another female have had threats made to us about assault, and both culprits were warned for "ERP" despite them having literally broken a UK law.
I have reported many situations for toxicity and harassment and it has been overlooked. I did a sit not too long ago, which an admin took. He wanted to help me, but due to his rank, he had to run it past someone higher. This pereson decided it was not toxicity or harassment and nothing was done due to the admin not being able to override the Superadmins decision.
I have shared more than 8 clips in a month with the same superadminthat told this admin not to act on the clip, and he has point blank ignored them all.
People cannot speak to me without being called a "simp". I cannot talk to anyone without people telling me everyone is simping over me. I cannot go a day without someone making some type of remark over the fact I am female.
The lack of action beiing taken by SL has actually caused me to make the decision to stop reporting it when it happens because nothing gets done.

 

[Pupper]

1.7 Don’t ERP - We have a zero-tolerance policy on Erotic Roleplay. Going out of your way to ERP is unacceptable and will be met with serious consequences.
1.10 Disrespectful Conduct - Derogatory Language designed to target players in a disrespectful manner is prohibited; this includes racism, homophobia, and other derogatory slurs; jokingly being racist is not an exception to this rule.

A sexual harassment rule needs to be made while I've not seen it that often personally, the few times I've had to report people for it they only get an ERP warning which means almost nothing.

 

[The Guardian]

At a certain point it just becomes easier to deal with it yourself. The one time I reported someone's conduct IC, I was told that I did something wrong. I honestly hope this reaches the right people, but considering the behavior I've seen this thread will probably just be used to laugh at the women here ""soying"" or some other such nonsense. TLDR it's easier to just shoot people in the face than report them for sniffing me, and I at least know the behavior will stop until they find me in game again. I have little faith that anything would happen if I started reporting people for it.

 

['Athena']

I will leave this as my last reply, just for anyone's reference people can reverse image search photo's which can link to social media. Also want to state you did share your "Tinder" account publicly on numerous occasions. Hopefully this knowledge can help anyone be safer online.

Hi!

Thanks for this comment regarding it! That photo is only on there, and also the "public" nature, was that not the majority your friend group, oh and a member of staff in a high position that he was trusted to? Either way, I have actually confirmed that my other details were not from that incident, but actually floated around players within the community. You have that image, feel free to reverse search it

I think instead of trying to paint someone who is trying to be aproachable, understanding and kind regarding a sensitive topic which is hard to handle with a "winning" mentality is to be quite frank: gross. There are other women here replying regarding their own un-dealt with issues. I'll be leaving this here.

 

[The Guardian]

Hi!

Thanks for this comment regarding it! That photo is only on there, and also the "public" nature, was that not the majority your friend group, oh and a member of staff in a high position that he was trusted to? Either way, I have actually confirmed that my other details were not from that incident, but actually floated around players within the community. You have that image, feel free to reverse search it

I think instead of trying to paint someone who is trying to be aproachable, understanding and kind regarding a sensitive topic which is hard to handle with a "winning" mentality is to be quite frank: gross. There are other women here replying regarding their own un-dealt with issues. I'll be leaving this here.

Thank you for responding to him in such a civil manner, because I had no idea how to respond to him coming on a thread about harassment of women and victim blaming you. This is why so many of us just turn to ""vigilantism"" or just straight up logging out when instances of it occur.

 

[Nomad_600]

Wow, never thought something like this would be posted, I guess I'm about to post the most detailed response as someone who was in Server Leadership as a Senior Admin. Let me be very clear that this is my account from my time during server leadership and in ZERO way represent the current opinion of Server Leadership and it's operation.

Now, I will admit on the US sector, this was an issue that I raised holy hell internally back when I was a newly minted Senior Admin. There was an incident with another female player where they were harassed for being a female, after I have dealt with the situation I then raised inquiry internally about a global policy that state an distinct line of zero tolerance for ANY level of harassment and such punishment should be upheld at the highest level. This is not exactly the value that some player are seeing from leadership on a principal level.

Right now, you will see every so often somebody decide to do something like spam the N-word in OOC comms. That sort of behaviour alone should indicate that that person is not somebody that will ever provide positive interactions in the server, and they have no intention to actually engage in the community at all in the first place. That's on top of the fact that they are spamming a racial slur. What does this result in? A short ban, come back in a week and do it again, or be more subtle next time which is actually worse in the long run for the community.

On a personal level I disagree that severe toxicity is at such a low interval value, in my general opinion from playing and administrating in different community pre and post CN is that this is quite an outlier when compare to other server. Often, you will see server issuing out an automatic 2 week or even 1 month ban for such behavior because quite frankly, it's disgusting, any person that come into a publicly available community and spam an OFFENSIVE slur does not have the place in a community that represent the fact that we are CIVIL ( haha nice pun ) and a group of decent human being.

You might say what about other slur that are use in everyday speech that does not constitute an offensive manner, I have an example for you. "I am a retard" and "you are a retard" it's so far different in usage and manner that it dosen't even compare, and further than that, you have a team of staff member and server leadership that can review these incident and determine whether offensive nature were intended.

It is an entirely tough situation that I emphasise highly with staff regarding, at the end of the day, they've volunteered to help a game run, not to deal with peoples shit.

Now I will defend staff and server leadership here, I'm very sorry @'Athena' about your situation but I will also point this out, we are often in school, not licensed and sure as hell not compensate enough to deal with these situation. We are a group of volunteer from a Trial Moderator to every Super Admin, none of us are compensated beyond the VPoint that we are given from EXTRA work beyond our requirement. This is an aspect from server staff that I have always found odd that despite upkeeping the server and manage a server that generate thousand and thousand of dollar, even SSL don't see a single return beyond Vpoint.

Anyway, another point I wish to make is that at the end of the day, server leadership is also having their hand tied from 2 different factor. First, we are restricted to the punishment guideline and can only break it with good cause, this mean that someone first harassments offense will most likely result in a 2 week ban unless an SL member override it and often we need reason to do so and we can't override it excessively. Second, is that this is a very damn if you do and damn if you don't situation, this is not real life where we have more ability to investigate a claim but a garry's mod community where often word of mouth is all you have, don't get me wrong, there are way to investigate but the resource is still VERY limited. If SL sanction a punishment against a player that does not do it then we risk reprimanding an innocent player, if we let it go then we run the risk of letting a harassed person being harassed which could lead to further harassment from a failed sanction.

Harassment, as of my profession I have dealt with a lot of cases of harassment in my time and what I will state is what constitutes harassment: A) Said person must inform said party they would like to be left alone. B) Said victim is scared, distressed and/or threatened due to repeated behaviour from an individual.

In my opinion none of these cases constitutes harassment, I know you have fulfilled criteria A in this case and those members are then penalised for repeating their behaviour after you asked them to stop. We do not view this as a sensitive situation as it's not life threatening, disrupting the network or severe enough.

Yeah no, I'm going to highly disagree with you on this one boss man, the following is the definition at a legal level regarding harassment.

Harassment refers to words or behavior that threatens, intimidates, or demeans a person. Harassment is unwanted, uninvited, and unwelcome and causes nuisance, alarm, or substantial emotional distress without any legitimate purpose.

Okay sure, you might say "we are not at a legal battle" let's try dictionary.

to subject persistently and wrongfully to annoying, offensive, or troubling behavior

In EVERY example you search up, there is always a mention of either uninvited behavior or annoying behavior, in ZERO way does it need to be in a threatened situation for it to constitute harassment and if that was the case then EVERY SINGLE CASE of harassment punishment that has been handed out will most likely be false under that definition since I'm sure no one actually cause a threat of harm to anyone because of an harassment threat on garry's mod ( except in few situation ).

Also want to state you did share your "Tinder" account publicly on numerous occasions. Hopefully this knowledge can help anyone be safer online.

And your case, albeit unfortunate you did leave yourself prone to this hostile environment which we hate to see. If you disclose your personal information online we cannot protect you, you forfeit your own privacy at that point.

With due respect, what the fuck. YOU are a COMMUNITY SUPERVISOR, last I check you are one of three member with authority over all server, I have always stated and uphold a belief that member of Server and Network Leadership have the duty to uphold a fun and safe environment for the player. It might not have been the job that leadership sign up for but it's part of the duty for being a senior member of the community. Every staff member is expected to enforce the rule to the extend that it's written and every staff member is expected to follow the core handbook for every staff member which states

Player Respect. Player must be treated with respect at all time, and staff are expected to show a degree of professionalism always, whether handling staff business or not, as well as outside of our network

You as a CS should not even be airing out the fact that a player personal account were shared even if it was, you as the administration team should be working to ensure only the necessary information is release and I'm without a shadow of a doubt can say that saying a player share her "tinder" account have zero value to this conversation where you could have simply state "You chose to share some aspect of your personal life to other player, therefore it limit our scope to what we can do to assist you".

To address your second point, no player should be in a state of forfeit to a right of privacy, player can definitely left them open to more issue by choosing what information to released but by zero chance do they forfeit the right to privacy, if someone has digged up someone personal information and use that to harass someone then that dosen't make it fine just because it's in the public domain. Hell, if that's the case then would you justify any punishment that were make when Ventz real name were leaked due to the fact that his name is on the company registry with the UK. By zero mean is a player have to expect to have their real life information in play just because they have something shared, sure just utilizing public information isn't bad but when you use it to cause distress then yeah.

I want to re-affirm, we are transparent within our rules and guidelines.

Are you really tho ? the latest update remove the public eye from any complaint, the team state that the reason is due to confidence in the player and prevent of a witch hunt to the staff member involved but you know what else was in play. The eye of the community, before where decision has to have a statement as to why that decision was made now they are locked behind closed door.

It is not as simple as an RDM and usually the decision is not an easy one, we cannot blanket harassment due to it's severity.

Then don't, but raise the bar to how long harassment should be banned, how the hell can a major glitching Class A a bigger issue than a Major Toxicity Class B.

Anyway that's my post, my apologies to @'Athena' about your situation and I highly urge the Community Team (Yeke, Winkie and Ventz ) to post a response to this post as a unison.

 

[Kw1ll]

I am gonna add onto this as an ex admin, from what I could tell back when I was actively a staff member, harassment was quite rare (though still obviously prevalent), I myself had to deal with multiple harassment cases from both UK and US and 9/10 was told that either they were too afraid to go to someone (which in itself is an issue) or whoever they went to didn't resolve it.

This has led to multiple good people that I've known to leave the community, quite a few of them being in high ranking positions. I do wish to share too however that staff (mostly higher ranked staff) deal with harassment on quite a regular basis, of course none of it is as meaningful or hurtful as the experiences that others have stated already, but it still happens nontheless. Which makes me very confused on how this issue has not been raised or dealt with sooner, the fact that there are SL out there who HAVE been harassed and yet still make silly mistakes or suggest things like "you made yourself a target" is an absolute paradox.

Before anyone goes and says "proof?" months after I left the community there was an incident where someone took my picture/selfie and used it on a new discord account, proceeding to spam the N word in general. Now this in itself wouldn't bother me, what bothered me about this incident was that the only people who would have had access to said selfie were SL.

Let me be clear, harassment has and always was a BIG issue, of course someone who doesn't have the power to do anything would be frightened with the kind of things they have been sent or threatened with, you would be too. The only correct response to this is to start enforcing it to an acceptable degree, and being someone people can come to. Which btw, is very easy (I did it).

Now, onto a bit of a statement, which is directly related to this and shows how badly this issue is resolved. This will be somewhat directed to Winkie.

There was this old O-1 com (not assassin), who decided it would be a great idea to have a chat with all his COs, in this chat he began to talk about how much of a f*ggot tr*nny another member (who I will not name) of this community, suggesting things like r*ping them. Obviously when I caught wind of this I set out to ban him for 26w considering what he had just done was absolutely not allowed anywhere near the server, after I began to set out banning this guy, Winkie and Fox came in and told me to stop, and explain to them. I did and sent the proof and thankfully Foxatron banned the user. Then winkie stated "we dont know if this chat was in discord or teamspeak so we cant ban him", then I saw him unban this O-1 com, let me restate, Winkie unbanned someone who had made jokes about r*pe towards a member of the community. Only after about a month when I finally got in touch with cloak was it dealt with, not surprisingly it didn't matter atall where this conversation was.

I can name another incident, there was a homosexual member of the community who I had quite liked, he had come to me literally crying due to the fact he was not allowed into any RP roles due to his outgoing personality, and due to his sexuality. I told him that I would take him and be his supervisor, while speaking to people about his acceptance into positions he wanted into. I ended up investigating and then telling this user that the reason people were disallowing him was due to his personality, I did not sugar coat it and did say it bluntly, I told him I will work with him and console him through these things to help him get where he needs to be, the user thanked me for "actually doing something". I was then infractioned for it because an out of context screenshot made it look "odd" according to the person responsible for my infraction, the user then profusely apologised to me saying that that shouldn't have happened. My supervision of this user was then taken away due to some new rules. This user shortly after left the community stating that harassment was the reason of leaving.

AGAIN I have another story, about a little child who had anger issues and an annoying voice. I realised that the ENTIRE staff team started to shit talk this user in staff channels saying "hes an annoying _" or such, I quite literally decided to state in a staff meeting "direct any issues regarding this user to me so I deal with it", I easily spent 10+ hours on this user in sits and got him to a state where he was allowed into a major role and did well in it, he had redeemed himself and came to me for any issues, then I left. Shortly after I left he got worse, I can only speculate he was ignored once again.

There have been several times where harassment was forwarded to me by the victim, and multiple times where someone above the rank of Admin had ignored it. This is an absolute issue that exists, going forward with the same mindset that is currently in place is just asking for more people to be discontent and leave.

This issue raises other issues too, most of which lead to an incompetent SL team, and an SL team who are not willing to listen (again, not an accusation as I had witnessed this firsthand and left due to this)

I am well aware this comment may be deleted, wouldn't be the first time things have been covered up or such. The SL team is absolutely abhorrent and incompetent regarding these types of issues, which is only at fault due to inexperience and bad leadership regarding these issues.

Hopefully this raises some alarms in peoples heads, cya. (also rip athena)

 

[Kw1ll]

Anyway, another point I wish to make is that at the end of the day, server leadership is also having their hand tied from 2 different factor. First, we are restricted to the punishment guideline and can only break it with good cause

Absolutely a valid point, forgot to make this in my post but anyone below the rank of Admin quite literally cant do a thing apart from like a 1-4w ban dependant on previous offenses, its ridiculous.

 

[Winkie]

I appreciate everyone raising their concerns, we will be posting an official response by the end of the tomorrow.

CS Winkie

 

[Zen]

I appreciate everyone raising their concerns, we will be posting an official response by the end of the tomorrow.

CS Winkie

I'm really hoping that it's not just a reply and does actually come with changes, because it should be abundantly clear that things need to change.