@simplications said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:
The premise of a forum warning people about bad actors seems thin. These are text games that provide anonymity. Any one of the bad actors can join and make a new character. What outs their identity to the forum is the actions that they take from that point on. They do some fucked up stuff and people who hear about it go "Oh hey, that's fucked up in a way very similar to Well Known Jerkface. it must be them." People on the forum all agree. Got'em.
At what point did the forum protect someone? If Jerkface gets banned from the game he's on, it's not because he's somehow been identified as Jerkface without having engaged in bad behavior. The identification requires the bad behavior to occur. The behavior, and the toll it takes on the victimized, has not been prevented.
In order for that behavior to be reported, it has to have been done to or in the presence of someone that is reporting it. Did they skip reporting it to the game runners and instead came to the forum instead? This doesn't make any sense.
Part of the reason I chose the handle "Ghost" is because given the anonymity of the hobby and these forums, I've always found it a little tongue-in-cheek funny this concept of "tracked identity".
I mean, nothing is keeping me from logging onto a game and claiming to be some "well known jerk" like Spider or Cullen and creating waves of panic/board postings and adding to their "legends", just like it would be so simple for someone to join a game, claim they're "Ghost from MSB" and do all kinds of shit that I wasn't actually doing. I guess it's my little version of "The Comedian" from The Watchmen's smiley face. I've joked a few times that I've given other people the login/ID information for this forum and that it may not actually be me typing this right now. This login could have changed hands multiple times and no one would have known.
In the end, all you can really do is address the actual bit in the present-tense and get rid of them, because really anyone could be anyone. Tracking it on a forum IS somewhat thin. (ex: THIS bit currently on THIS game is doing THESE actions)