The Xenforo "Discourage" Feature

Temp-bans are in principle an option, I just hadn't been thinking about them. It's totally possible someone suggested them before, but we've only used them by request previously, and I wasn't thinking of the thing.

Mostly, the real problem is that the harassment was happening on discord, where the options are a lot more restricted; we can't actually control "private messages" there because that's a per-user setting, so I kicked Alix from my discord server so it wouldn't be providing access to a large pool of people with known vulnerabilities.

 

If memory serves, you were "Discouraged" for some amount of time on May 14th, 2018, because you were being really active and moving really fast and I was going to bed and wanted to slow it down. Poor choice, as several people have pointed out. I think anonymous was also hit with it for a while back when we hadn't figured out why they talked only in memes. Not sure whether there's any other cases.

I don't understand the question, really. Why would I use the discourage feature on someone whose primary problem is "getting hyped up and then rapidly doing really bad things that they are then miserable about having done six hours later", but not on someone whose primary problem is "not gracefully handling complaints about mildly creepy behavior which only happens occasionally, and probably wouldn't even seem very creepy without the bad handling of the complaints"? I don't know, maybe because only one of them is a problem that would be best solved by "slow the fuck down"?

 

perhaps the real discourage feature was the friends we alienated along the way

 

I was gonna be all smug about "I looked at the logs and it's not there", but I checked again and you're right. Sep 2-3 sometime. Went and re-read the list more carefully (the structure of the changelog makes it harder than I'd like) and that seems to be it.

She could get nasty, yes, but she didn't drastically escalate and constantly/rapidly spam atrocious behavior for a few hours, and then stop and be pretty tolerable again. There weren't short intervals during which she was really awful surrounded by times when there was no big deal.

Your fundamental problem is that you get into a state where you absolutely positively need to fucking stop or you will wreck your shit and then blame everyone for it being wrecked. Anything that could cause you to just take a fucking break would, in fact, largely fix this. Her problem isn't some transient emotional distress; she's calm and methodical in general.

You have cause and effect reversed. You were already upset and lashing out at people, which is why I wanted to see if I could nudge you away from constantly acting up and hurting people.

This isn't the first time you've tried to convince me that your shitty behavior was caused by something I did in response to it. You did that with the May 2018 stuff, and eventually I presented enough logs that you grudgingly conceded that maybe timestamps were evidence. But you don't seem to be able to retain the information that effects generally have to happen after their causes.

Cool?

Yeah. Except that the other thing you need to do is stop reading the shit that you're mad about, because once your reading comprehension has gone to zero, it's just gonna wreck things.

Oh you fucking turnip. The idea that I would "pretend" anything is just frankly fucking stupid. I mean, genuinely, mind-blowingly, dumb. It does not make any fucking sense. Why would I care? I constantly talk openly about the things I do, and why, and whether they're nice or not, and what my goals are. Sometimes they're stupid and don't work out well. But that does not mean they're not my goals. We've long-since established that I am sometimes poor at making choices that achieve the desired results.

At that point, your lashing-out on my server had mostly been mild enough that I was putting up with it despite complaints because on the whole I thought it was a moderately-acceptable risk and after all, people could just block you. Eventually you convinced me otherwise, and that you would actively escalate to attacking random unrelated people.

It was a quip. It was not particularly intended as a remark about you personally.

You utter fucking turnip, if I had any control over whether or not you flew into "uncontrollable" rage, do you seriously think I'd use it very sporadically to make you do stupid shit that wastes hours of my time and accomplishes nothing I want, in order to "control" a "narrative"? You fucking idiot! If I had any control over your rages, you wouldn't be having them. I don't give a fuck about "controlling the narrative". I spent a couple of years trying very hard to convince people that possibly the rages were outside your control and you should not be blamed for the things you do during them. At this point, though, I'm obliged to grant that while you may have trouble with control, you demonstrate enough control that it's completely reasonable to consider you to be effectively deciding how shitty you want to be.

During the holocaust fight, you were calm and in control enough to go to another discord and spin the story so it made you look good, and get everyone to agree with you. You know, getting everyone to agree with you when you've now made it clear that you were completely, utterly, in the wrong about your primary claim. Because you were reading things wrong, or you misremembered a thing, or for whatever reason. And that means you had enough control to be planning and considering spin, reporting selectively with misleading screenshots, and all that.

If you have that much control, that's enough control that you could say "I'm mad, I need to stop and read things when I'm not mad." Instead, you went out of your way to find the most ludicrously hurtful and false accusations you could make, and lie about people to whoever you were talking to so you could get the egoboo from being told you were totally right and they were totally actually holocaust deniers, not just innocent people who happened to be able to read a fucking table correctly.

New plan: You fully disclose that to the people you were talking with. You show them the errors in your claims. You show them what you were doing, like the name-calling and abuse and harassment. And you provide proof that you did that, and that you've made it clear to these people that you were presenting them false or carefully-edited information to make them support you. And then, and only then, do I talk to you about anything other than that.

Your problem isn't the "honeymoon period" bullshit Wiwaxia was always on about, but it is that you never actually engage with how fucked up your behavior is. You never quite go all the way to simultaneously understanding what it is, and that you did it, and that you chose to do it at the time. And maybe in the past you were out of control enough that the last one might be debateable, but not in this case. That was slick, polished, deceit you engaged in. You need to own up to that, and you need to do it in a way which makes sure the victims of the deceit are protected from it next time.

 

(edit: postmod ninja'd, as is my wont :p)

I can't honestly tell what you're even looking for here. Seebs used discourage. Seebs got caught using discourage. Seebs openly admitted they used discourage. People criticized the use of discourage and questioned its effectiveness. Seebs agreed they made good points and agreed to stop using discourage. This was covered in pretty exhaustive depth... nine months ago. What's left? If you're trying to make a point here, I sure can't see it.

And the issues with cT's conduct had a dramatically different flavor from what led Seebs to discourage you, and the comparison really makes no sense. If you're deathly curious you can always reread one of the many other cT threads with this question in mind, but I'm super not a fan of having a conversation about her (again) dissecting her old habits (again) when, again, this whole conversation has no clear point.

 

I was not kidding about "I am not going to talk to you about anything else until you fix your goddamn shit on the holocaust denial thing."

You told a bunch of people edited and selectively-filtered things to convince them that various people, including me, were engaging in holocaust denial. You have since stated that you got the wrong number you were arguing for by misreading a table. I'm waiting to have confirmation that you've come clean about the errors and omissions to the people you made those representations to, including the personal attacks and harassment angle of your behavior at the time.

You tend to sorta skip over the "make amends" phase. You're asking me to put in a lot of time and effort to try to track down conversations from something close to a year and a half ago for no apparent reason, and without any apparent relevance to current events. Okay. I'll go look for those after I have confirmation that you've done something about lying about me and other people to whatever pool of random strangers that was.

 

I haven't seen it yet. You gave screenshots showing that you'd told people names of at least one of the people you were accusing of holocaust denial. I've seen no details of the retraction.

Yes, that's true.

Great!

So, you did clearly state to them, at the time, what the specific factual disagreements were? Because I didn't see that. And you've now told them, whether at the time or after the fact when clarifying/retracting the accusations, that you'd told one of the people in the conversation to kill themselves, and that another of them was a Jewish person who had already told you that more than half of their extended family were killed in the Holocaust, too. And about the other harassment and personal attacks involved, right?

Because if you didn't, you absolutely did omit crucial and relevant context for your attempt to rally support so you could tell me that you talked to people all of whom agreed with you. And I think that context is absolutely 100% relevant in how people would understand the initial claims.

Okay, I'll go start looking for the evidence.