It seems though that Chris actually apologised to sleepey for this. So I hope that can be the end of that particular story.
Well I mean… yeah, but it says a lot how long it took for that to happen or the situation to even be acknowledged in any way.
I don’t think anything further than the option to ignore works well on a forum like this one. Blocking is more for socials. I don’t think blocking staff or putting them on ignore should be allowed either. It would be hard for them to moderate if you did that, I think. People did also mention mini-modding and I'm inclined to agree with that.
See, the thing is when you have users who say racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic etc things but it takes the staff months to delete their posts, you kind of need some way to make sure certain people can’t interact with you. I really don’t get the mental gymnastics people were going through to justify not having an actual block feature.
If you genuinely believe a member of staff is a bad person who preys on minors, why are you still here?
Notice how most of the people who were vocal about this are gone? Notice how the site has like, 30 active users now and almost none of them are the people who were in support of punishing Chris?
An age gap of 21 and 29 is not problematic or even unusual where I’m from (England) or where I live now (Sweden). A 21 year old is not a child. The staff apologised for things said in the past, was placed on hiatus and demoted to a lower role. What more do people want to happen? Can it ever be alright?
They should be completely demoted. Like Lumi said earlier, placing a staff member who poorly handled an event related situation in the position to hold events is nothing short of insulting to the people who were upset about this in the first place. I didn’t think Chris should be removed from the staff at first, but over time I started to agree that he should.
I’m also wondering why some of the same people who seem to be saying this place isn’t safe for minors take such a strong stance against suggestions that minors shouldn’t message adults and that not every adult is to be trusted?
The only people I saw saying that adults shouldn’t message minors are Goosey (and yes, he was a troll) and Aerith, neither of which were actively opposing Chris’ behavior.
Search for certain terms and see if Chris’ behaviour is unusual on this forum. It isn’t. Does it really matter? Or do you want all of those people held to account?
Yes. It matters. You can at least ignore members if they say uncomfortable things. You can’t do the same for staff, so it should be a given to expect better from them.
It doesn’t matter what I think anyway. The staff involved apologised and promised it wouldn’t happen again, so it won’t.
But why did it take until someone brought it up
five years later before anyone on the staff took accountability? What that gives off is “oh no, people are going to hate us even more if we don’t respond now. We have to respond.” Do you realize how selfish that sounds? Like the only reason they apologized is because they didn’t want people to hate them, not because they’re actually sorry? That
might not be true, but that’s definitely what it comes off like.
It did not warrant someone sending that nasty message anonymously either. You can't complain the van was inappropriate and then do things like that and I hope whoever it was has been dealt with too.
I think there’s good reason to believe that like Xara said
here, the person that did that isn’t a current member of this community (a banned member who isn’t seliph) in an attempt to stir up drama. No one who truly cares about the future of the site would have done that.
All this will do will make things seem very unbalanced and that the severity of moderation depends on how popular a member is or not.
As LambdaDelta said:
and the appearance right now is of catering to a small group of people that simply desired seliph to be gone because they didn't like the percieved tone of his posts, instead of enforcing their rules fairly across the board. what of it?
legit don't bring up "appearances" when they already ****ed that over for themselves
I know this won't be well-received by everybody and I'm sorry about that, BUT, Seliph was being rude. Repeatedly.
Honestly, at this point I don’t think it matters whether or not you believe seliph was being rude, I think what most people should be able to agree on is that a year long ban for that when people have done much worse things and are still here is overkill. I’ve seen the ban message, but even if he was being rude, nothing could make me think a year long ban for not being nice (and even then, I can understand why he didn’t feel like being nice to staff) is even remotely fair. And it’s definitely unacceptable to ban someone for a week before suddenly extending it to a year with no prior notice.
I don’t think trying to rally some sort of mob justice is helpful either. It’s perhaps shining a light on what some of the problems with Seliph are that have lead to this ban. If every time Seliph takes issue with someone, half the userbase joins in, then that’s a problem and difficult to moderate. If being rude to people is not allowed on here, then why would you expect anything different from staff?
I… don’t see how that’s seliph’s fault. If someone says something subtly racist, I tell them they’re being racist, and a lot of people agree with me, is that my fault? That’s basically what a lot of seliph’s interactions are like. I don’t see how he can be blamed for saying something that a lot of people happen to agree with.
What circumstances or conditions need to be met in order for you to accept the ban? If the ban will not be lifted, are you planning to leave? To stay and complain it is unfair for the duration of the year? What can anyone do that isn't going to be viewed as bending the rules for one member?
Well as is, the ban already looks unfair, so just ending it right here would be much better. Other than that, there’s no justification staff can give me that I’d accept. Again, even if I did think he was being rude, being banned for a year for that is beyond stupid. Consider the fact that daringred was involved the interaction that caused the initial ban and even she thought it was too much. That says a lot. Oh, and yes, people have already left because the ban wasn’t lifted.
I feel like staff should probably focus on monitoring some of the dog piling that seems to be happening quite frequently in these threads, along with suggestions that this is the norm here. There’s mentions of this private Discord that quite a number of members belong to, where participants are telling each other to respond aggressively to someone they’re unhappy with, or that they feel needs a lecture from multiple people at once.
I’ve never really understood the dog piling complaint. When Betsy said that age gaps weren’t bad, people started explaining to her why they are. And a lot of people agreed with them. How is that dog piling? She should be prepared to handle criticism if she makes a controversial claim. And I’m not apart of that Discord server, but based on what I’ve heard, it doesn’t sound that toxic.
It doesn’t matter the context. Would you have said the same about the message sent to Oblivia, for example? “Oh but in the wider context…” no of course not. So it’s not fair to do that to someone who was upset by your words. People piling on the distressed party was very uncomfortable to read. I actually think LadyDestani saying she understood it was not to be taken literally was as unfair as it would’ve been had someone said this to Oblivia.
That’s where there’s a problem with unfair and unbalanced standards. Given this is what happened, I am stunned some of the same people involved now demand a public apology from staff that a troll got in and made unpleasant remarks. Sounds like it was taken care of very quickly, whereas poor Sheando seemingly had no idea what was going on and has definitely not received a public apology.
According to
Lancelot, what daringred said clearly had no violent undertones. But someone saw it and decided they should share it with Sheando anyway, when they would gain nothing from it other than starting drama. If they didn’t do that, there would have been no issue. I don’t think daringred ever had any plans to make Sheando feel unsafe. I think what’s more important is how the person who was trying to start something in the first place hasn’t apologized, because again, I don’t think there were any implications behind that post. I’m not saying private servers can’t be toxic, but none of this is an example of that.
In the case of GooseyGuos, can I ask, are people absolutely sure this is/was a troll? To me, he reads like a person struggling with the English language who can’t understand why he’s being bombarded with negativity and, frankly, name calling. Pointing out his broken English wasn’t very nice, sorry to say. Neither was calling him a troll, which I also read to be about his struggles to express himself. And it definitely wasn’t cool to say “trying to tell you what I wanted you to do in English was giving me a ****ing migraine”.
These things ARE being critical of his language. And criticising him for calling people “friends” IS criticising his language, so the fact you all were so quick to say that wasn’t happening was baffling to me.
Yes, he was a troll. Even if we don’t look at the fact that his account was banned, which at this post I doubt staff would do without good enough reason, I find it extremely hard to believe that he has such difficulty understanding English and yet praised every single word that came out of Gabby’s mouth while also only reacting to certain posts as well. Sounds like someone who’s just pretending to not know English so that he can use that to start drama (also, the other trolls who were banned reacted to a lot of the posts he reacted to). In addition to that, in the DM I sent him, when I asked him if he wanted me to explain this in German, he said no because he only speaks German with people in real life. It’s almost like he doesn’t know German in the first place. And also, why would a new user even bother to post in this thread in the first place? Let alone one that has no idea what’s going on and can’t speak English.
I know it was me that said that migraine part, but I wouldn’t have been so annoyed at him if he didn’t PUBLICLY DISCLOSE that I started a DM with him. It was just the way he did it that showed he had absolutely no regard for my privacy when I told him multiple times to not post this publicly (and he also made me sound like the most platonic version of a yandere possible), so I didn’t really feel like being nice to him, especially since I just woke up and wanted to see if he responded to my DM only to see this bull**** on my screen. Is it
possible that it’s just because he didn’t understand English? I suppose, but I doubt it. And there were people who assumed he was a troll besides the ones who posted about it in this thread.
Given my line of work and given that GooseyGuos gave us the info of the region he comes from, I would suggest you’ve got this one very wrong. To me, he sounds exactly like how the Balkan Romani Gypsies speak English, especially if it is their THIRD language.
Something you should understand, in Bulgaria Roma are disliked: 59% to 80% of non-Roma have negative feelings towards Roma. So yes, they are heavily discriminated against, even in their own country, as he said. So either this was some kinda mastermind troll (and I’d be interested to see the evidence of this - maybe things were deleted?) or you’ve made a really big mistake there.
I really think he was just making this up in an attempt to garner sympathy.
He was, to me, quite obviously trying to spirit people into moving along, but was met with instant hostility and shooting down ideas from multiple people, without so much as a kind word in his direction. It was uncomfortable to read, just saying. I hope you’re right and it wasn’t a real person. If it was, some of you were out of order. I won’t name or single anyone out. I just hope you rethink, that’s all.
I don’t see how it was hostile. The first posts were me and Blue explaining to him why his idea wouldn’t work out. Then he insisted that we were wrong when we know more about the site than he does. Maybe the comment from Tude was kinda out of pocket, but then he started performing mental
Olympics to convince himself that people were being rude to him because he didn’t speak English. If anything, he was being rude when he said he wouldn’t waste his time translating our posts. Posts that were just trying to explain the situation to him, but he just assumed that people didn’t like him because he didn’t speak English. I don’t know, it was just really frustrating to watch.
The same people who’d piled on GooseyGuos seemed to then jump on those who did try to advocate for him. It was actually admirable that some members stepped in like that. It should have been staff really. Especially when the member who stepped in, shared a deeply personal experience and bore the brunt of the backlash, was being outright attacked. Very uncomfortable reading again.
When Gabby responded to defend Goosey,
these were the only posts directly replying to her. I believe Aerith also only got one response. I apologize in advance for saying that I don’t see how anyone was being attacked here.
In fairness, Jeremy HAS stepped in now over the increasing hostility being thrown at various members and he IS bearing the brunt of it. That actually made me gain confidence in the staff, because that is how you’d want someone in authority to act in a situation like this, trust me. Not join in throwing pitchforks or gently telling the mob that they understand why they’re hurling flaming torches at someone.
Jeremy is bearing the brunt of the backlash because quite frankly, he
deserves it. He could step in to defend someone who was trying to stir up drama and supposedly being piled on, but when another user was actively being trolled (honestly, I think cyberbullying is probably a fitting word), he couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge anything about it until people said he should.
I’m sure that wasn’t pleasant and I'm sorry it happened. I’m not belittling your experience and you have every right to be upset. But if it makes you feel any better, it reads less like targeted homophobia and more like someone, probably a kid, being silly? If the name that was used was your username/title at one time, it was probably just that. Reposting snippets of your posts as Xara describes sounds more silly than malicious. Shake it off, if you can. Rise above it. Don't let it destroy you, it isn't worth it.
But, don’t hold people who weren’t involved accountable and don’t lash out in anger or call people names. You won’t feel any better after, you’ll just be angrier and more upset.
I guess you’re kind of right that the troll was just being immature, but I think daringred deserves to upset about the fact that an entire account was made just to harass her. And she definitely deserves to be upset that staff didn’t say anything about it.
Can I tentatively point out that you didn’t publicly apologise to Sheando for words you said, nor are you being forced to? By the same token you can’t demand a public apology from people for things they were not even involved in. From the sounds of it, staff acted very fast to deal with it and the member that did it has been dealt with severely.
The difference is as I explained above. daringred had no intent to attack Sheando, but the troll account was made specifically to attack her (and Lumi, since another one was made later targeting her). The only reason daringred had to apologize to Sheando was because again, someone decided it would be a good idea to share a message with her to start drama. Here though, Jeremy again, said nothing about the trolling incident until Saylor, Lumi, daringred, and Xara posted saying that he should apologize for it. It would be different in she said something genuinely hostile against Sheando and someone showed it to her, but that wasn’t the case, and so I think daringred does deserve a public apology and should be allowed to demand one.
