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Member Receiving Abusive Messages


FoxFace
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TW: Abusive behavior. 

 

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One of our members received an anonymous Discord message from someone calling them a disgusting bully, and telling them that they should kill themselves.

 

We have our suspicions about who this came from - this individual was the victim of excessive bullying earlier this year, which contributed to the removal of the offending member from our community. Unfortunately, the message was deleted in a panic, and there seems to be no way to recover it. At the end of the day, this is an absolutely deplorable act, and is highly offensive to everyone in the RP community.

 

Any advice on how to support and protect our members would be greatly appreciated. 

Edited by FoxFace
  • Agree 1

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Celebrating 3 wonderful years!

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Tell the member to save the messages in future. Death threats of that nature are dealt with accordingly.

 

It's amazing some bad eggs of the RP community behave this way and say such horrid things. I hope things improve for that poor member, and either they never hear from that fool again, or the fool gets banned when they slip up a second time.

  • Preach it! 1
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Hi everyone. Thanks so much for the advice on this matter. This entire ordeal is shocking and upsetting, which I’m sure is what this individual was going for in the first place. We have shared your advice with the member in question, and will all be adjusting our personal settings as well. We will definitely be looking into some server security options as well - we honestly had no idea that these types of things existed, and I definitely think that they will prove useful (or, at least, reassuring) moving forward. 

 

We have no intention of actively pursuing or escalating anything, at least not without any sort of evidence (screenshots, usernames, IDs, etc), especially not in a public way - as you've noted, this sort of thing is much better handled by the organizations whose TOS have been violated. We consider ourselves a ‘mature’ community - mature not in terms of explicit content, but in the age and maturity levels of our member base. What we have always wanted was to just have a fun, safe place to pursue our writing, our character development, and our world building. We have no interest in engaging with these types of people more than is necessary, so having a sense of next steps to take in terms of protecting our site, our server, and our members is exactly what we were hoping for (though it was not phrased nearly as well last night, so thank you for sticking with me). 

 

Beyond the technical aspects, this member is a friend. We’re going to take some time to make sure that they know that these words and accusations are cruel and completely unfounded, and that we love and support them. No one should ever have to deal with this type of toxic immaturity; our goal right now is to ensure that our member is not dealing with it alone. 

 

Any further wisdom or insight is certainly appreciated, and I really am grateful to both of you for chiming in. It really means a lot to all of us, and the outside perspective is immensely helpful. 
 

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From the sounds of things, you've handled things the right way so far. To add on, however, I'd suggest advising all of your members to change their settings to only allow contact from friends and people they're in servers with, and bump up their message filtering. Neither of those are entirely foolproof, of course, but it'll help mitigate issues down the road. Additionally, if you haven't purged the problem member's messages from the sever, you can always go back and retrieve their Discord ID to ban them from the server and have the person they've been going after block them. I also have YAGPDB in my server, and plaster the commands everywhere for how to open a private help ticket that only the member and server staff can see, and its set to export a copy of the help tickets to a staff-only channel when the ticket is closed. I've not had to use it yet in my own server, but having it set up in other servers I've staffed has helped immensely. 

 

Unfortunately, due to the nature of Discord being an Electron app, there's always going to be exploits. While Discord is generally secure, its not foolproof, and a determined/talented scripter will be able to get around most bot-based solutions and even a few of the Discord-side ones (gaining read access to channels a member doesn't have the appropriate role for comes immediately to mind). This is not to say that you shouldn't put these things in place, as that alone will act as a deterrent in many cases, or to scare you/anyone else, but more to say that vigilance is key. Make your members aware of their options, and not only kick but ban problem users as they arise in the server so they don't simply change their name/icon/ID number and come back later. 

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Candide: An original dystopian RPG

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 We just had to deal with this sort of situation recently ( earlier this year ).

 

First its imperitive that you without malice make sure that as admin or moderator you will listen ( type talk etx) when the members have something that might be objectionable. It is also important for members to grasp that to do something about the occurence we need to know what was said- its very easy to blur words and take things in and out of context when its printed word. If I am going to straight up remove someone from our forum/discord/ writing spot, I want to see the conversation so I know what I am dealing with.

 

Granted there are times when that does not happen and you have to work it out with your other admin based on gut instinct - YOU Have that. If you have spent any amount of time writing , rping, chat play, or every other medium - after a time you just can get a good feel about the typists. I am not saying its always right but I have not been on the wrong yet. 🙂

 

It sucks when you have to consider possibly losing a writer. We try and work a three strikes system- the first two usually a discussion trying to find resolution and hell maybe even an apology between the typists. Failing that they are asked to leave. Because at the end of the day- while we are writers We are also the yard dogs guarding this nice playground and its up to us that it stays idiot free if we can.

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  • 1 year later...

Encouraging your members to be open in their communication with you as admin is key here. Maybe make a thread explaining what to do when they're the victim of this sort of thing so there is a clear plan of action for them to follow?

 

Another good one is some how setting up some kind of anonymous reporting system? Some people are so scared to come forward that keeping it anonymous helps them step forward.

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