This is absolutely beyond the pale. I know what that conversation contained. You are angry at Farfalla for being one of the people to post unhappily about administrative choices and you are absolutely using this as retaliation. I am honestly shocked that you would engage in this level of unethical fashion.
Farfalla blocked her when she said to stop messaging her.
Like, holy shit, did you even look at the conversation wherein the other party was continually extending the conversation?
@ganymede Are you for real? Do you mean the DMs that other user instigated, the conversation they started, and that they returned to several times, hours later, after the conversation had ended? Are you absolutely serious right now?
@devrex said in The hog pit thread titled Admin Derp:
@kanye-qwest said in The hog pit thread titled Admin Derp:
@ganymede said in The hog pit thread titled Admin Derp:
when the situation has been dealt with to my satisfaction,
How long does it take to tell Derp he should step down?
@devrex said in The hog pit thread titled Admin Derp:
I wonder if people would be so comfortable reading an unemotional statement of legal procedure as an attack if it had come from a woman.
Absolutely disgusting, my guy. Get out of here.
Why? He was essentially told to sit down and shut up. It’s a valid question. Or maybe I should be asking if an unemotional legal analysis would be taken as an attack if made by anyone but Derp.
He was not told to sit down and shut up. He was asked not to respond in such a condescending manner by asking someone "How is this surprising?" when someone was being upset at a major political moment. Most of his initial post could have stood without anyone being bothered, I think, if not for the explicitly unempathetic opening implying that someone was stupid for being upset.
As a general update on my status: I am not a mod/admin. I declined the offer last night because I do not believe I can moderate alongside Derp in any sort of professional manner.
If you are accessing from the IP because the domain isn't pointing to the new site yet, you can help speed up the process with this:
chrome://net-internals/#dns<-- this does half the trick (if you're like me using Brave, just replacechromewithbraveand it works. not sure about non-chromium browsers
ipconfig /flushdns(Windows) orsudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder(Mac) <-- this does the other half of the trick from a command prompt
@il-volpe there'd be one ending to that game on a MU* and it's fucking
@rucket said in Forum wonk:
@arkandel I know there's stuff people want to keep but man at some point I can't help but feel like it might be easier to archive certain important posts/threads in some fashion and then start a fresh forum. I know a lot will be lost but it sounds like any sort of migration is going to be either costly or damn near impossible and i fear we may hit a point where, as you mentioned, restoring functionality won't be available and we'll lose everything anyway.
I just saw an Arx cat tarot Kickstarter raise thousands of dollars in 24 hours, I don't think cost would be a difficulty.
@macha said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
Basically, a new management company bought our complex a few months ago. They've been kinda jerks about some stuff. They raised the rent without any actual warning or anything signed by us, but we let it go.
Uhhh. Why? If you have a lease, your rent is fixed for the length of the lease, unless there is somehow language in the lease allowing for this (which wouldn't make any sense). It's very likely that you're legally owed the difference in that rent. I'd definitely follow Pyre's advice above and see if you can find a legal advocacy org focused on tenants' rights, etc.
@devrex said in GMs and Players:
@greenflashlight I think you are being unfair. I think you took that straight to the most extreme hyperbole possible. It certainly doesn't match up with the reality of how I have seen Derp handle people who need help. If you meant it to be a demonstrative example, or to get your own back somehow, then we've moved far afield of the point. We have gone from a civil discussion about principles and best practices and the pros and cons of two approaches to basically just attacking Derp. Heck, a few folks have said this is now just about attacking Derp for some past threads, and we have now moved so far past "constructive" it's not even funny. I have watched Derp be the first to jump in and defend people who need help.
I just want to clarify why I initially brought up that people's opinions of Derp's posts are colored by prior interaction. Not because I was saying, "Oh, Derp and I or Derp and others have gotten into tiffs in other fights, so people just hate whatever Derp says and wanna be jerks to him because of it." What I meant is that myself and others have seen Derp be dismissive numerous times on this board to these very sorts of issues, including one instance that wasn't even remotely connected to MU*s or games but was just someone talking about some unsettling RL interactions. What that means is that, for some people, he's not someone who has engendered trust or confidence in this particular area. I am very glad that Reimesu's experience with your game was one that was so swiftly positive, I honestly am. I am glad that your experience of Derp is one who will jump in first to help defend people, and I sincerely hope it all works out well on your game for you. Just understand that others have a different experience that make it difficult to always take his words on this particular topic at face value. I would not feel comfortable playing on a game he staffed, which I'm sure is not at all an issue, because I imagine he has no desire to play on a game with me either, so it's honestly the best result for both parties.
Setting that aside, I think this topic as devolved pretty dramatically to just a cycle of hyperbole on both sides. No, says one side, we are not advocating for acting on every single complaint that comes our way without any judgment or due diligence. No, says the other side, we are not advocating for refusing to act until we have a signed affidavit as evidence.
In practice, I imagine the distance between the two sides is smaller than any of these arguments is going to really illuminate; it comes down to probably a bit more extension of trust in some areas, a bit more skepticism in others.
In any case, you're not wrong that the thread as a whole has likely moved beyond "Mildly Constructive" so I will largely be tapping out of the central debate. Or trying to, at least.
@reimesu said in GMs and Players:
@bear_necessities Isn't it? Roz is talking about banning innocent people in the name of the greater good.
Go on, you guys explain to me how going all nuclear option on innocent people is the right thing to do. I'm listening. Explain to me how mentally harming innocent people is a good thing.
That's a pretty big misrepresentation of what I've said. I could use that same sort of logic to say, "Explain to me how letting an abusive stalker remain on a game because you don't have 100% incontrovertible evidence of all their action is a good thing." But I don't think anyone is actually saying that. Just like I'm not saying it. But both sides of the argument end up potentially harming someone. That was my point. Both sides do harm when people get it wrong.
It feels like you've taken your situation, mashed it together with a really painful part of your life, and said, "Roz would have been one of the people causing my pain." And yet nowhere have I said that I am in favor of wielding staff power with absolutely no judgment. Your situation as described sounds awful, and I am sorry that you had to go through it. It also sounds fairly different from what I was speaking about. I think whisper campaigns are a really nasty beast, and the one you've described clearly wasn't handled well by the staff of the game you were on.
@faraday said in GMs and Players:
@roz said in GMs and Players:
any bad actor can easily avoid putting their efforts into places that can been directly reported on the games that are on Ares. If these are the only methods of evidence that are acceptable, you will be leaving countless openings for bad actors to exploit.
Channels, mails, pages, and scenes can all be reported in Ares, so I think you're pretty covered? If someone is aware of a gap in the reporting defense I'd love to know about it.
Apologies, I didn't mean gaps in Ares itself. I meant more that people will simply go off-game to pursue manipulation on platforms that are judged to be more easily faked or doctored so that any evidence that comes from it will just be doubted by a game's staff and deemed unactionable if they're only prepared to act on activity that occurs on the game proper.
Here is what I think is something of a crux here:
Is more harm done by 1) someone innocent erroneously being removed from a game, or 2) someone malicious being allowed to remain?
That is, I think, part of the fundamental difference of opinion happening.
Yes, the US courts (and I assume others internationally, idk) say a person is innocent until proven guilty. Yes, that it is an incredibly valuable legal principle to use in actual criminal proceedings where the cost of declaring an innocent person to be guilty has severe consequences for that person's actual live.
But this isn't a court of law. It's an online hobby game. Big games in this instance might have a playerbase numbering in the hundreds; a lot of the games discussed here are more in the tens or dozens.
My view is that more harm is done by the malicious player allowed to remain. Hugely so if that player is someone who has actively stalked or abused another player. Being stalked is active, real-life harm. It is severe, in a way that being removed from a RP game simply isn't.
That does not mean that you have to simply believe each and every report that comes your way. There is a measure of common sense to be deployed here. If you have a long-term player who has a visible history of getting on well on the game, who does not have a history of making a lot of complaints, such that receiving a complaint from them is notable -- that is very different from receiving a complaint from someone who makes them regularly and frivolously and who maybe has had more than one complaint made about them. Someone making a clear, serious request involving stalking or targeted harassment is different from someone making a request about not getting along with someone. Yes, absolutely engage in judgment and critical reasoning here. Absolutely. But if a player's history on a game points to them being generally above board? That's also a form of evidence.
There are very, very few methods of providing evidence on a game in a manner that are 100% reliable. I know that Ares has built-in tools. Not every game is built on Ares, and any bad actor can easily avoid putting their efforts into places that can been directly reported on the games that are on Ares. If these are the only methods of evidence that are acceptable, you will be leaving countless openings for bad actors to exploit. If the answer is that any other avenues will likely be off-game and not policeable, I think that's a bad answer that favors manipulators and harassers. Yes, you may have to take a critical eye to evidence that's presented, and that's fine. But rejecting it out of hand as being outside the scope of a game's staff isn't.
As for staff favoritism: if staff are going to behave in an unethical manner to favor the people they like best, neither philosophy will make a difference. It will be an issue on both sides of this philosophy divide. No amount of evidence requirements will get around this if a staffer wants to give shinies to their friends.
As has been stated, if someone is being stalked or abused, and they are given hoops to jump through in order to avoid their abuser on a game, they will just leave. And maybe that won't impact the game in the grand scheme of things, and maybe it doesn't impact a staffer personally. But it is a form of violence on the victim's life. It is one more place of fun, engagement, socialization, and community that is now lost to that person due to the systemic efforts of their abuser.
And I don't want to be party to that. It is, in my view, a far greater harm and moral failing to allow that to happen than to potentially ban an innocent player.
@devrex said in GMs and Players:
I really don't understand why we're turning this whole thing of "setting down rules" and abiding by them into "you terrible abuse enablers."
FWIW I think it's worth pointing out that some of these reactions and responses are absolutely driven not just by this particular conversation, but a lot of previous conversations had with Derp centered on the same topic of balancing this particular issue. I wouldn't necessarily take responses to him as also necessarily being aimed at you.
@derp said in GMs and Players:
@icanbeyourmuse said in GMs and Players:
Assume on your game for a moment she was a player who said it that exact way. It might be better to ask what actions she expects to be taken and if there was a reason she suspected/knows it is her ex.
I mean, I'm not even going to go into that level of detail, honestly. As stated, if someone says 'hey this is my creepy ex, help', I am going to tell them exactly what I told them: Tell them not to contact you, and if they continue to contact you, report it and we'll handle it.
If someone is stalking you, you are absolutely not supposed to make contact with them.
@derp I don't think the "living room" mentality means that you're expected to be friends with every player? It's just an approach that's more focused on hobby community than it is some sort of professional service.
@krmbm said in GMs and Players:
I think the "abusive ex-husband" scenario is ridiculous and over-the-top
Is it? I have known people who have been in the situation of RL abusers stalking them on MUs. It may not be COMMON, but it’s not somehow outlandish.
@juniper said in Decriminalise Pretty:
We as a hobby... kind of hate women who want to be pretty. I can't count the number of times that a new character has walked into the scene and one of my friends has OOCly referred to that character as a whore because she is described as being willowy and slender with cerulean eyes and perfect lips or whatever. I can't deny that I've felt this same sort of knee-jerk reaction.
hey so my eyes skimmed over this and i didn't really see but what the fuck is wrong with your friends, maybe you have bad friends??
