The Xenforo "Discourage" Feature

Close enough for government work!

So, I went and got actual timestamps. Looks like xenforo does Unix epoch timestamps, so, the discourage was turned on at 1504393568, and turned off at 1504443928, which appears to correspond to about 6:06 PM Central on September 2, 2017, and 8:05 AM Central on September 3, 2017. This seems right.

From chat logs:

[6:10 PM] seebs: she's specifically stated that she's spamming the mod queue with duplicates of posts "until they go through" despite clear reasons for them not to go through.
[6:10 PM] Deleted User: Achievement Unlocked: get blocked by seebs
[6:10 PM] seebs: with the intent being to punish us for not approving them.
[6:10 PM] seebs: so, like. yeah, i'll stick with "being an abusive asshole at the moment"
[6:11 PM] Deleted User: Being an abusive asshole gets results. People give in at some point. Eventually.​

That was me commenting on you spamming the mod queue, which you specifically acknowledged you were doing, and you said you were doing it with intent to be abusive. That is why you were put on discourage at that time; then you started having trouble posting, so you gave up and went to bed, and you were at all calmer the next day. And all of this was after a DM conversation I don't have a copy of, where you also confirmed that you were intentionally being abusive to try to get your way.

So, the order of events is:

1. You got mad about shit. (We can take this as read. This is the start of every problem involving you in any way.)
2. You posted some creepy fanfic in an attempt to make some kind of point.
3. Around 4:32 PM Central time, you told one of the mods to kill himself, "cleverly" disguising this by stating it indirectly.
4. Around 4:39 PM Central, you responded to the Wiggler thread: "Hey, people who have been keeping that in the mod queue: thanks for not letting it go through, since it is fucked-up, but also thanks for proving the point I was trying to make: a sufficiently obvious euphemism should get treated in a similar way to the real thing."
5. Continued spam, which you stated directly yourself was abusive, which you were doing on purpose because you believed that being abusive would Get Results.
6. Discourage feature turned on at 6:06 PM Central or so.
7. Continued chat about this, in which you affirm that you are being an abusive asshole on purpose to compel people to give in.
8. You go to bed around 7:17 PM Central time.
9. Overnight you complain about the forum being slow a bit.
10. Around 8:05 AM Central the next day, I turn off discourage.

You may have "lashed out" on Discord after being hit with the thing, but you were absolutely lashing out before it, which is why I did it. I was tired after a road trip and did not have the spoons/capacity to deal with the bullshit and drama, and the active spamming of the mod queue was making a lot of completely pointless work for people.

You tried to hurt people to punish them for not yielding completely to your whims, you said you were doing it with the intent of being an abusive asshole, and you were smug about it. There's this similar quote later:

[6:33 PM] Deleted User: I mean, to be fair, I recently decided to completely give up on recovery. Turns out, again, being an abusive asshole gets you stuff done.​

Not seeing how any part of this is surprising, or how you think it excuses the behavior in question. You weren't being an abusive asshole because you got discouraged, you were smacked with the discourage feature because you were already being an abusive asshole and actively harassing the mods for a couple of hours before that.

 

Hey, remember how Athol would do the thing where she downplayed whatever objectionable thing she might have done in private and framed things so that mods were SUPER harsh and mean to her for no good reason (as long as you don't look at the original content). Remember how that got really old, really fast?

Yeah, I'm the one who went and found that ~not that objectionable~ post, then went and looked through its entire originating thread up to that point. Chrissake. I had no idea the discourage feature was a thing, but in that context? Posting material THAT OUT OF LINE without spoilers or warning? To a thread about consent? Posting it to what was at that point a tense but civil conversation? And then you were considerate enough to confirm that you were trying to be abusive. I didn't know the discourage feature was a thing and I approve of seebs agreeing not to use it, but I would have 200% supported using it in that context.

So, yeah! Fun times! I just got to read a fic that made The Morning Aftercare look tasteful and restrained, but don't worry, it wasn't that objectionable (it was), and anyways she totally had a good reason for doing it (she did not) and it made a valid point (it also did not)

 

It was deleted.

Here's a special link for you. I went and manually retrieved the spam, including the many copies of the exact same post you made, once with an explicit comment that you were going to repeat it until it went through.

https://kintsugi.seebs.net/threads/from-the-mod-queue.7972/

(Thread is in wiggler, link won't work for other people.)

Since then, we've become more consistent about actually moving things to the wiggler and approving them, instead of just hitting the "delete" thing. It's sorta pointless in cases where it's mostly spam, and honestly a ton of nearly-identical posts isn't gonna show much, but there you go. You'll note that most of these posts are from about a 15-minute window.

I don't think the "without any mention of it whatsoever" qualifier makes any sense. The feature is by its nature completely useless if it's mentioned.

I think "which can hardly be interpreted in any way that isn't punitive" is sorta bullshit, and also, I didn't "acknowledge" it wasn't actually useful. It actually did work the first time. You had been actively spamming and harassing people, you stated in your own words that you were aware that this was abusive and were doing it in order to be abusive because you wanted to hurt people until they complied with your demands, and then you stopped.

So, like. In the immortal words of some deleted user: "Turns out, being an abusive asshole gets results." That was the only time anything anyone did other than "just wait it out" ever actually resulted in you ceasing to actively behave in a way you knew at the time was abusive.

I'm not gonna "acknowledge it wasn't actually useful", because obviously, it was. It wasn't a punitive measure. It was not intended to harm you, and even resulted in an improvement in your state, because it got you to disengage from something you were getting ridiculous about (seriously, telling people to kill themselves is actually still shitty!), get some sleep, and come back in the morning.

A lot of people say the Internet needs a thing that lets you punch people over the Internet, but it doesn't. What it needs is a way to give people a little cup of apple juice and a couple of graham crackers, and then make them lie down with their eyes closed for 20 minutes even if they don't feel tired.

That said: Yeah, I think on the whole it was a bad choice. It had undesired side-effects, and had negative effects on other people's comfort and safety, and it's a lot more gaslighty and broken than I realized. I'd probably still use some kind of sane throttle mechanism if we had one, which we don't, but the discourage feature is sorta bullshit. Sorry. I fucked up on that part.

 

Seebs already said they weren't going to do this earlier in the thread.

I mean, they could change their mind, of course, and I don't want to speak for them.

In the general case, I'm just confused why you'd continue to ask for a thing like the other person forgot you asked, when in fact the other person saw you ask and said no.

I just don't see the point.

Edit: oh hey, I stand corrected. I think the general case still stands tho

 

Christ's sake, this conversation already happened.

The fuck is wrong with you? Are people going to have to start conversing with you entirely in quotes like I did Athol?

 

Of all the nasty, entitled-

Seebs does owe an apology, for continuing to enable your bizarre obsession with getting his attention.

 

When you're at the point where your stance is that posting graphic unspoilered parent/child necrophilia gross-out fic to a thread about minors and consent is sooo much less ~~objectionable~~ than using a gaslighty softblock feature in response to openly abusive behavior, maybe you ought to step back and look at your priorities. And it doesn't even stop there! 'Yes, I told someone to kill himself, but then seebs softblocked me.' 'Yes I was talking openly about how being deliberately abusive gets me results, but then seebs softblocked me.'

And all this for an issue that was resolved nine months ago, in the way you wanted, mere pages ago, in a thread you started. If your only real goal is to rehash that tired old ground, this is the least effective possible place you could have pulled this nonsense. If it weren't for your history of minimizing your own past misbehavior and distorting history, I'd have trouble believing you were really serious about this.

Fake edit: Wait, refusal to backread while being insistent you remember everything right despite being corrected multiple times on inaccurate fact claims? One, wow, that sure is a pattern some other people have tried before. And two, thanks for confirming the this whole thing is pointlesssssss