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[Hawks]

36 minutes ago, kabLe said:

I agree with the sentiment but I think with each newer generation of staff the focus on what is important is getting more and more obscure. In my head its simple, you don't need to "crackdown" on gay jokes. Use common sense. If someone is bullying someone because they're gay or whatever their sexuality is and that person is genuinely bothered by it then it should be dealt with accordingly. When you make a rule that says "no homophobic slurs" it turns into one kid saying "gay" and every single person within ear shot screaming "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HE SAID IT OH MY GOD REPORT REPORT".

 

Taking a step in the right direction doesn't come with adding superficial rules to look good, it comes to the people who are administrating the servers to make a conscious effort to see normal online banter from genuine hate speech. If i hear someone on a server saying "you dumb faggot, go suck dick you gay piece of shit" than I should have the ability to discern if the people are joking and if I can't then I should send a message to that player asking if he is feeling harassed or offended. Maybe the best way to  tackle this is to empower the current staff who administrate the servers to mediate issues as they pop up. You don't need to be combative with people you can easily just be like "Hey man that wasn't cool I don't mind some banter but your starting to cross the line. I'm gonna have to ask you to chill out a bit or I'll have to start doling out some punishment" 

 

This is the internet not your public community center. It's for gamers to come together and have a good time and play games. While there should be a general level of respect between everybody I don't think you need to have a crackdown on homophobia. Just recognize a genuine asshole when he or she appears.

Oh I completely concur when I was saying be more harsh I meant when these situations appear to respond more harshly and treat them with more severity on a case by case. Naturally introducing rules to completely negate a word such as "gay" is too much especially when I call multiple individuals gay everyday. Obviously the ability to discern a joke from a legitimate insult is from individual to individual and some will accidentally take a teasing gesture as a genuine insult. Personally a word is a word till used in a negative context an as a intended attack on an individual.

 

The internet isn't controllable I understand that, but every individual has the ability to quell hate when they see it.

[Gator]

On 6/2/2021 at 3:58 PM, Gentoo said:

There are no formal rules to protect players on the servers from homophobia and bigotry. While there are rules in place against harassment, they require it to be reported by s player, or a repeated history of harassment for admins to take action. I have been called a faggot, twink, and glizzy gobbler on the servers with no interjection from admins active on the server.

On 6/2/2021 at 5:21 PM, Gentoo said:

I think the answer here is fairly cut and dry. In the past, we've made our stance in racism very clear - jokes and teasing are acceptable but slurs and insults are not, and should not be directed towards people. We are all fully aware of what constitutes a hateful slur - these should be strictly forbidden. The staff should be able to compile a rough list if needed 

23 hours ago, Kieran said:

Should we have specific rules cracking down on homophobic/transphobic slurs, just like we do with racist ones?

I think you're both misunderstanding how we handle harassment situations here. It's impossible to define a stance on every form of prejudice which include homophobia, bigotry, racism, and many more. These are all forms of harassment though, which is why our stance on harassment is clearly defined as not being tolerated.

 

On paper specific or formal rules seem like a great idea, however they don't work in practice for multiple reasons.

1. It's impossible to create an exhaustive list of slurs which moots the purpose of a list. An example of this can be seen with the amount of racial slurs out there.
2. If you're too detailed you risk exclusion and if you're too vague, you just end up with a blanket harassment rule anyway.
3. Rules aren't flexible, and you need flexibility in this environment. This was a primary reason for the change in our racism rules. When we had strict racism rules, it was pretty much a joke because someone who isn't racist and a slur in racist context (i.e. doing karaoke on a song) was labelled as a racist and could be banned.

 

3 hours ago, Hawks said:

Maybe it's time SG started cracking down on things like this and more actively and harshly start defending these instances of hate and bigotry

2 hours ago, kabLe said:

Maybe the best way to  tackle this is to empower the current staff who administrate the servers to mediate issues as they pop up. You don't need to be combative with people you can easily just be like "Hey man that wasn't cool I don't mind some banter but your starting to cross the line. I'm gonna have to ask you to chill out a bit or I'll have to start doling out some punishment"

1 hour ago, Hawks said:

Oh I completely concur when I was saying be more harsh I meant when these situations appear to respond more harshly and treat them with more severity on a case by case. Naturally introducing rules to completely negate a word such as "gay" is too much especially when I call multiple individuals gay everyday. Obviously the ability to discern a joke from a legitimate insult is from individual to individual and some will accidentally take a teasing gesture as a genuine insult. Personally a word is a word till used in a negative context an as a intended attack on an individual.

 

The internet isn't controllable I understand that, but every individual has the ability to quell hate when they see it.

Like I said above with creating specific rules, cracking down or pushing server administrators to get involved doesn't work like it does on paper.

 

Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part our server administrators are pretty much kids. Expecting them to confront these situations would be inappropriate. This isn't to say they can't though as it's within their reach to enforce.

 

On 6/2/2021 at 4:47 PM, BoM said:

As for your specific situation, there is nothing saying you specifically have to make some formal report to deal with a player harassing you. If you actively are being harassed and telling someone to stop or that you don't like them doing that and they are being socially disruptive (this is important you can't simply say someone is harassing you by existing or playing the gamemode) and an admin is in there they are more than free to act. You are also welcome to message an admin in game or out of it stating that it makes you uncomfortable and they are also free to say something.

 

23 hours ago, Kieran said:

Keep regurgitating the whole "just report them" stuff; reality is the community as a whole has really turned a blind eye to some of homophobic/transphobic stuff being said.

Grow the fuck up.

 

We keep repeating to report harassment (which it is), because people like yourself downplay the importance of it. A chunk of this community would have likely been banned at some point if we just punished for every instance and not received context that reporting provides, regardless if they were joking or not. It's especially important to emphasis for when it all starts as jokes and fun between friends and evolves into something serious.

 

Until everyone knows they have a way of getting help (victim or bystander), it's hard to handle the issue effectively.

[delirium]

First thought when I saw the change was that it felt a little virtue signal-ly considering my knowledge of the community and the people that inhabit it. 

 

While I can get behind the equality for all sentiment I don't think hopping on a recent trend that has already been massively criticized by the public in recent years as virtue signaling to the alphabet community is the move here... If anything it's just going to create a more "hostile" environment for people who get offended easily since you'll have a bunch of teenage and young adults being apes about it because you as a community have decided to make it the flavor of the month.

 

Also, while it's nice having something to actually read on the forums I think you should probably stop being a faggot about this issue @Gentoo. Who cares? What do you have to gain by calling not only the leadership of the community but also a sizeable portion of the community overall out over a stupid logo that will be back to normal in a month? 

[Kieran]

49 minutes ago, Gator said:

Grow the fuck up.

 

We keep repeating to report harassment (which it is), because people like yourself downplay the importance of it. A chunk of this community would have likely been banned at some point if we just punished for every instance and not received context that reporting provides, regardless if they were joking or not. It's especially important to emphasis for when it all starts as jokes and fun between friends and evolves into something serious.

 

Until everyone knows they have a way of getting help (victim or bystander), it's hard to handle the issue effectively.

I think we're getting a bit off topic here, but I'll respond to this anyways.

 

Sorry if I came off wrong here. This wasn't me trying to dog on reporting system and how you guys handle reports and such. I know you guys take this stuff seriously and I know complaints aren't ignored. However, let me just say you're not going to get many people reporting if they see people of staff ranks ignoring it or actually participating in it. That's where the standard for many people will be set because, as you said, it's hard to really define what is acceptable and what isn't. People won't report something if, based on how other people react, they'll deem it's considered as acceptable in this community. That's typically my problem when people just respond with "just report it lol", because there's a bigger piece to the problem. Plus, I think we're talking more about rule changes/new standards here more than anything, not individual incidents.

 

Anyways, let's get off harassment specifically, because you don't have to be harassing someone to be acting transphobic/homophobic, just like being racist. Back to the point I was talking about.

 

I think the only thing I asked is that whether the community wants to treat some transphobic/homophobic stuff like racism. Do you want to prohibit select words such as f*ggot just like we do with the n-word? It's not impossible like people are making it out to be and it's not a foreign concept, plenty of other communities do it. That's a decision you higherups can make or discuss at their next CA+ meeting if you guys choose to do so.

[Gentoo]

It's pretty baffling to see that many people seem more concerned with the legitimacy of a thread rather than addressing the rather serious issue at hand.

 

Moving along, while having a "just report it" policy can make sense, there a few noticeable holes in this modus operandi. Primarily, it fails to acknowledge situations that aren't report or don't have enough context. Many players may feel uncomfortable with a certain environment due to the language being used, but don't feel the need to report something as it isn't specifically directed towards them, or it's coming from a community member that may be considered higher than them in experience, rank, etc. A lot of times people like this will just leave. There's numerous examples of this that you could poke into if you were so inclined, but rather than scrutinizing details you can look at the bigger picture. Almost every substantial community is more diverse than us - looking at our rules and the general atmosphere, it's not likely a coincidence that certain people may choose a community with a culture and ruleset that seems more catered towards protecting them. Choosing to cater what language can be used and fostering a more welcoming culture will most likely allow this community to foster a more diverse community. It's not always about harassment, it's about making sure that people don't feel uncomfortable even from things that aren't pointed at them.

 

Additionally, the "report it" policy introduces a substantial amount of bias. Reporting, by nature, only gives one side of the story. While looking into both sides could improve this issue, it's clear that this amount of effort and diligence is not always put forth when resolving conflicts. Even when looking into both sides of a story, having rules aimed exclusively at harassment introduces guesswork that must be done to find out someone's intentions, their history of behavior, context behind the interaction between the players, whether or not the interaction even happened, who's side of the story to believe, etc. Having hard and fast rules on things removes much of this guesswork in many situations and keeps people from toeing the line of what is acceptable while also ensuring staff aren't punishing those they shouldn't by misinterpreting intentions etc.

 

Maybe it would be too much work to write out an exhaustive list of slurs - I don't think that means having any sort of list or policy on it is without utility. This seems like avoiding working towards a solution altogether because the perfect solution wouldn't be feasible.

[20 scrolls]

Reviewing 

[oSen]

3 minutes ago, 20 scrolls said:

Reviewing 

[kabLe]

See y’all next month

[destroylonelyfan2011]

this is so gas