The Xenforo "Discourage" Feature

We don't do bans, but I have in the past used discouragement for dealing with trolls and spammers, or in cases where I wanted to nudge someone towards slowing down a bit. In the past couple of days, you've variously harassed, attacked, and generally directed abuse as well as multiple threats of real-life harm towards some number of people (I know of at least seven so far), mostly on discord. When I was on my way to bed, someone mentioned yet another instance of this, plus some threats of additional harm involving downloading private pictures from NSFW stuff. I was really tired and misread that as being about the forum, I didn't have time to do a clever or nuanced thing, so I set the flag that would at least slow it down with intent to get back to it "at some point", such as in the morning or after work or something. Note, the discourage flag was set in response to the harassment I already knew about; the drama did not result from or relate to the use of the discouragement feature, the drama predated the use of the discouragement feature. The ensuing shit-stirring isn't even on the radar compared to the actual bullshit. Which, to be clear, needs to fucking stop.

A couple of people have expressed a strong preference not to use that feature, so I'm going to stop using that, but I haven't yet figured out what to do for cases where I don't actually particularly want someone Gone, I just want them to fucking chill for a bit and they're unwilling or unable to do so. (And of course, it'd help if I'd have read the thing more carefully and noted the threat was directed at discord, not at the forum.)

Anyway, no, it's not "practically a ban". It is, however, arguably more annoying than a ban, and as such, I'm dropping it from the set of responses I will generally use.

 

Hey, real quick, just to clear up a potential source of extra confusion before it becomes an issue: Seebs is at the second day of a new job (yesterday was the first), which is part of why the execution and response on the discourage flag were less than ideal, and which may contribute to slow and/or erratic responses today. I can see value in having this conversation, but I'm not sure how actively Seebs is going to be able to participate during the workday until things settle out.

 

In this case, it was the night before first day of new job, it was something like 12:30 AM, and I needed to go to bed, and I was just pushing the "slow the fuck down" button figuring I could deal more coherently later. And I also have some concerns, because in general I don't announce that I'm restricting people's access, or otherwise reducing their ability to harass people. So an announcement that someone's harassing people, with no comment about what if anything I'm doing about it, seems pointless. An announcement that they're harassing people and here's what we're doing is a thing I'd rather not do, in general. And once the meltdown's started, there's nothing I can say that will not be interpreted as Time To Escalate. So I'm not sure what exactly I'd announce, in a case like that. I only commented on the thing because Alix had implied in another thread that the drama was about the use of the discourage feature, but she's been talking about murdering people for, I dunno, a week or so at least? And I wanted to clarify that, no, this wasn't about the use of the discourage feature, the discourage feature was used in response to something that predated it.

 

I'm not entirely positive, because I don't have a great memory for the specifics of phrasing, but I don't believe there was ever a mod policy put in place for the discouragement flag. I know there's been talk about circumstances for applying post moderation, but I don't recall the conversation extending past those bounds

(and at my work, I'm limited to mobile and with an accelerating workload, so I can't research and quote particulars right this moment)

 

There was never a policy of any sort about how we do or don't use discouragement. I've been really fucking clear about this: The ultimate policy is that if I think a thing needs to happen to protect people from harm, I'll probably do that thing, and I don't care whether people like it or not.

There is now a policy that, in general, I won't use discouragement. I might make exceptions if I think there's good reasons to, because I will always make exceptions if I think there's good reasons to.

And yes, I get that you "suspect" it was really just because I was mad, but I wasn't even actually mad, just tired. You've been talking about murdering people on Discord. At length. Talking about how you want to arrange to make it possible, and so on. That's not some kind of harmless internet japery. You're really, really, fucking far out of line, and now you're trying to spin it as something where your completely ordinary and harmless behaviors are getting these massively disproportionate responses, but no, you're actually escalating significantly beyond what you've done in the past. Oh, and also the threats to try to get someone declared incompetent and returned to their abusive parents, which were super classy of you.

You aren't even the tiniest bit "the victim" here. You're being abusive to lots of vulnerable people so you can claim I'm "just mad" if I react in a way you don't like, but the thing is, most of this has been happening in places like Discord where you don't have any kind of confidientiality shield, to say nothing of whether I'd consider a confidentiality shield to apply to threats to murder people. (Hint: It doesn't.)

I get that you want to make everyone finally see that I'm the bad guy, but it turns out that when your strategy is to suicide-bait known suicidal people, try to get people forcibly returned to their abusers, and threaten to kill people, in order to show that I might use an annoying forum feature temporarily and not immediately say I'm doing so, you are not making a persuasive case. To make your case, you have to be doing things less horrible than my responses, not dramatically more horrible than my responses.

Effective: You insult someone and they beat you up, you say they're horrible and abusive.
Ineffective: You beat a bunch of people severely enough that they require hospitalization, someone slaps you on the back of the head not even hard enough to leave a mark and says "hey knock it off, asshole", you say they're horrible and abusive.

Do you see the distinction here?

 

Maybe some of them happened after, but... Literally, I did this in response to someone quoting you saying you were gonna troll through a thing looking for personal NSFW pictures. That was part of the harassment. You had already done that. The ongoing talk about murdering people had already happened. I don't know which order all the harassments happened in. Maybe some of them only happened later. Fuck if I know. But the harassment was an ongoing thing prior to any use of the discourage feature. Maybe you escalated even more, because you usually do. I think someone said you asked elsewhere why I didn't just tell you to slow down. Answer: Because you treat that, too, as an excuse to escalate. So far as I know, there is no sequence of words in any human language which will make Angry Alix stop making things worse.

I don't see why you're reacting as though it's news to the general non-announcement of restrictions placed on users. That's been really clear since way long ago, and is a major part of why people were so mad that I wouldn't publically announce that I was restricting your actions. In general, I don't announce, as in "post publically where everyone can see it", that a given user's actions are in some way restricted. That doesn't mean I won't, usually, tell the user, or discuss it with them. The word "announce" is very different from "notify".

And given how much of your recent communication has involved murder threats, no, I don't think we'll be "permanently deleting" anything. I haven't looked at the Caring Void threads, so I don't know what's in them, but whatever.