While not being a mindreader myself, I think fake would like an apology moreso on the expectation that they were supposed to have been helpful and cooperative when in a clear crisis that was exacerbated by forced action by the mod team that was never mentioned as a possibility in writing.
cw harsh language ;) actually, I'm shit at letting things go curious to know how taking an alternative suggestion and cw'ing my post wasn't working with you, @Beldaran curious to know how I was meant to understand people were already being hurt when your first post only contained this information and for several posts afterwards it was more of the same with no indication that anyone was actually hurting I was not refusing to work with you to prevent harm, I was refusing something I thought was a choice and an arbitrary one at that in a general purpose vent thread, where I would figure people are used to seeing common triggers after it was made clearer that there were actual nonhypothetical people being hurt and my understanding of the norm was wrong but I had choices, I picked one that would involve both a middle finger to your (continually) terrible moderation skills and more safety for the people hurt, because I did not and do not refuse to work with you to prevent harm fuck you soundly for continuing to assert that I did how in the fuck did I manage to refuse to prevent harm if I didn't even know that harm existed
I'm not rehashing this entire thread again, so you can be mad and not let things go if you like but I'm not participating with you. I think that expecting people to be actively helpful while in crisis isn't reasonable, but that's not what was on the table. Allowing others to do the tagging thing on their behalf was an option that we exercised in that emergency situation, and which they then went and undid. Going from there, there was a whole discussion that included us asking how we could make the situation amiable to them while also meeting the need for a trigger warning of some kind and being rebuffed. Also, mods taking actions like this one in general was written about in the pinned "read this first" thread at the time all of this went down, it's just not specific about trigger warnings. I'm glad we have a more specific thing now, but mods doing things with posts isn't new. We've done a lot with the status post box in the case of triggering content, for instance.
What are you so mad about? I mean, in general, not just this thread. 'Cause you sure are posting angry.
Never did I state that it was new. Just that the possibility of, oh, 'We will force a change on your post while under the pretense of giving you an option in the matter, despite it being in a subsection of the forum devoted to potentially triggering things' was not mentioned or made sufficiently clear prior to this. As well, the disclaimer made by seebs that it would have been different had fake put it into a personal thread doesn't sit well with me. 'If only you decided to make an entire thread devoted to how much you want to kill yourself, which would have still shown up under 'new posts', the thread in the sidebar for all to click, and only been just one under the place you put it under, we wouldn't have forced action on you. Because clearly, since you were spoon-drained and didn't put a spoiler on it as a result, devoting more spoons to make a title and such for a new thread would be preferable.' Comes off... not quite victim blaming, but a close cousin to it. I am noticing that you're not apologizing for the expectation that fake should have cooperated (though agreeing it's not a reasonable expectation), and instead opting to blame them for a spite-fuelled action spurred on by the mod team's inability to effectively communicate when action might be taken. Shrugging and saying 'it's clear now' is all fine and dandy, but does little for the person who was actually affected by that inability in the first place.
Distinction: You initially refused to do the thing, and re-edited the post after editing it. That constitutes "refusal to work with". You later changed your mind. The claim was not "refused and persisted in refusing forever". I think I just realized what may be at issue. Beldaran's claim is that you refused to work with her on the thing, which you initially did, and that the thing was being done to prevent harm. It is not that you were asked explicitly using those exact words to help her "prevent harm" and refused "to prevent harm". Furthermore, you've said in passing that you've been here for a while, and I'm pretty sure you've seen things like that spoilered, and content warnings are a pretty common thing. So... What would cause you to look at a request that you provide a content warning for an upsetting thing and not think "this is probably aimed at reducing harm to someone"? There are reasons not to start by saying "this is hurting people" when dealing with people who are potentially-suicidal, because some of them will take "I am hurting people" as impetus to be even more actively suicidal, and including that information is risky without a clear sense of how you're likely to take it. But on the other hand... What about "hey maybe put a spoiler around this possibly-triggery thing" is weird or unusual? That's a pretty common practice, a lot of people do it, and I don't see any actual objection to the thing itself. Only to your perception that it was enforcement of a "rule" that you hadn't been informed of. And that gets back to the reason we have all those guidelines and things: To suggest that you shouldn't be doing things because a rule says so or because a rule doesn't say so, but because you care about what happens to people and are willing to try to work with them to accommodate them or others.
Different audiences. A shared vent thread will have lots of distressed people coming to it whether or not it has new posts. A personal thread tends to attract a smaller audience who are more likely to be familiar with the user. Furthermore, your characterization of this as "pretense" is massively inaccurate. Laist I checked, the post didn't have a spoiler tag, because F&G made it pretty clear that they really don't want one. Beldaran asked because in general if people are happy with changing things we're done and no decisions need to be made. When F&G said no, I looked at the information I had (including knowing about upset users) and made an edit, because my best guess was that hashing it out would take time and new people coming into the thread were hitting an unspoilered trigger quickly. But there was no "pretense". Even if F&G had not edited the post back, if they'd asked about this or discussed it we could have proceeded with information like "yes, people are upset about this". Or "in general, it seems like a pretty good idea, unless there's a specific reason you don't want the thing spoilered". I don't entirely agree with "it's not a reasonable expectation". Actually, yes, I think it is reasonable to expect that, if there's not a specific strong objection to the thing on its own merits, people should probably at least try to be vaguely cooperative. That doesn't mean unconditional compliance, but maybe something like "why do you think it should be spoilered?" rather than a flat "no" would have been peachy. I also have no idea what action you think was "spite-fuelled", and I don't actually think we failed to communicate when action might be taken. Have you read the "read this first" thing? Notice the fairly open-ended observation that mods will sometimes do things? It's been edited recently to make it even more explicit, but it does appear to have been reasonably comprehensible in the past.
I think I'm getting a better understanding here... I think the issue is not so much who is doing the asking or why, but the fact that after the request was refused, which f&g believed was their right (and correctly so, all else being equal), the fact that the change was then made without their okay. Like, there are all kinds of reasons why that decision was made, but to f&g I gather that it felt at the time like the request was secretly a command disguised as a request. Even if that is not factually the case, their feeling that their agency was not being respected is a valid feeling, and even if they can be convinced that the intrusion was genuinely for good reasons, their feeling of being intruded upon matters. Their autonomy and agency have been damaged and that matters. F&g, I don't want to put words in your mouth here, but does it seem like I'm expressing a thing similar to your feelings? (I know, I'm terrible at dropping topics when I mean to, I just can't stop thinking about this and trying to understand)
ohh. That would make sense. So on consideration, "right before I have to leave when I haven't got time to engage more and talk about it much" was probably a bad time to make an edit that might have been taken that way. I didn't think about that very carefully, I just thought about "okay do we want to leave this text up while we hash this out, or do we want it spoilered while we hash this out". I had reasons for making the choice, but I should probably have left it for someone who was around to follow up on it better. And it did create an additional layer of communications problems, so. Sorry, that should have been thought through more.
For the record, I'm speaking of reverting the edit and putting the image warning about it as being a spite-fuelled action. The phrasing still indicated that it was a choice to fake. This has been gone over to death, but intent not being a magical thing does go both ways. As well, people in a crisis situation are not going to be rational and are not going to be cooperative when their agency is taken from them after something was phrased to them as a choice. For the record, while waiting for a response, I decided to look at the first post of the Holler Closet: There is a blanket content warning for the entirety of the thread, as stating that the initial thread in Brainbent was a response to triggering profile posts. The same posts that keep getting brought up as an example of when mods would edit or remove damaging content against someone's wishes. Also, the assumption that I haven't read the post is dodging the message I was getting across with my statement, in that it was not sufficiently clear at the time of this incident and as a result, the situation was made far worse. Yes, the phrasing has been made more explicit as a result, but I still feel like that is ignoring the hurt that was done to fake as a result, and is apology-worthy.
I didn't assume you hadn't read it. I asked whether you had read it, because I didn't (and still don't) know whether you'd read it and concluded it wasn't clear enough, or inferred that it wasn't clear enough because someone didn't get the thing. Although I also don't know whether they ever read it. And if they hadn't read it, how clear it was or wasn't is entirely irrelevant. I'm still not even entirely sure whether the harm came from the thing not being clear enough, or from something else. For instance, a lot of F&G's posts look like they're convinced that there really are specific actionable rules; see the question about whether or not a triggery thing could in fact end up unspoilered in a public thread. Answer: Yes, that could happen. So the problem seems to me to be at least in part that we did state what is happening, but that it seemed sufficiently implausible that F&G concluded that actually it was something else entirely.
I think this incident has made clear that the praxis of THC has drifted pretty far from the original organic documents. Some work has been done on amending the documents, but I think kintsugi would be well-advised to take a good look at how THC is being utilized and come up with some new Rules-That-Are-Not-Rules about it.
I don't think the presence of a general warning precludes the use of spoilers for especially-triggery stuff, really. "Might be triggery" isn't a pure yes/no question.
Here's an issue that might be relevant? Might not be relevant to anything but Seebs suggested posting about it. Maybe chock it up to more mod transparency. When I asked for fake and gay to do the thing and was told no, my next step was going to be to give them a choice been a adding a spoiler and moving the post to the caring void. The top of the post warning hadn't been suggested yet, but I was in the process of offering them options and making it clear that "doing nothing" wasn't one of them. But then Seebs edited the post and from there I was on my back foot. Like, I actually made the post about options and deleted it because it was outdated and moot by then.
So, I feel like an update on this is in order. This was, in fact, mostly an elaborate troll. To clarify: This isn't speculation. The person told us. "fake & gay" was deliberately trolling on the rule topic. There was no harm done to them by the "unclear" rules. The claimed harm was part of the trolling. Them demanding an apology for something that didn't hurt them hurt other people. The actual issue here was that people were mad at me and thought trolling my forum was a good way to express this. That behavior isn't okay, and needs to stop. So far as I know, the people who did it agree and it is presumably gonna stay stopped. The feeling-suicidal part was not fake. Even if it had been, we're not going to suddenly stop taking suicidal ideations seriously. Yes, I know who was involved. No, I'm not telling. No, they're not banned or otherwise "in trouble". Any questions I didn't get to?
Spoiler: F&G Post I'm just... Gonna save this in case of poster's remorse deletion. Spoiler: My Reaction
I concur in the decision, but write separately to express my opinion that the policies and practices of kintsugi in general and THC in particular are not as clear as they should be. Some valid points were made in this mess of a thread. As I get a better idea of what has been happening both in public and "behind the scenes", I will continue to work on this. ~rigs
Oh, I absolutely agree that they're not as clear as they should be. I don't think that we needed multiple people triggered into suicidal ideations or depressive spirals to "prove" the point. (And I'd point out, all of the recent drama descends from that. There was no recent drama that did not originate with the trolling.)