#WP chat. Harassment or Trolling? Type @wpops

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thechameleon
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker

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Age: 30
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Location: South Australia

18 Apr 2015, 1:00 pm

Logs of recent happenings on #wrongplanet
I'll start by saying the chat room isn't usually as bad as these logs, it's a good place a lot of the time, but at times there's so much trolling, abuse, laws broken and more that it is unbearable. As a lot of people know, it was likely the latters fault for the live chat link being removed from the website. However, wrongplanet.net is still officially linked to #wrongplanet freenode chat.

Unfortunately, most moderators are now busy with work, school or just moved on. The only one left for a time zone has on multiple occasions directly abused users. In this case three regular users were banned for bringing a user abusing autistic people in general to moderators attention with a command designed for that. There is verifiable logs of this.

The first user who called for operators was the first banned, I was the next after I said 'Calling moderators when someone calls aspies ret*d is a bannable offence now?', another user was then banned for saying: "Apparently complaining about the poor opping in #wrongplanet is bannable offense?" The first user was unbanned after 5 minutes, 5-10minutes later the person calling aspies ret*d was banned, my ban is still applied and the other users ban is, too.

This is not the first instance of this happening, other times direct insults, bannings that the moderator made clear to be personal grudges rather then rules (justified by the "Moderators have final say and can do what they want" rule.) ETC. The line was crossed long ago and the lead operators with power are no longer active.

I'm posting here in a hope that some of the veteran moderators may see it, or that forum moderators/users will be able to notify them. Despite the chat link being removed from here, wrongplanet.net is still directly linked to #wrongplanet on freenode.
What makes this issue worse, is that the moderator is refusing to do anything about actual offences. I have on three recent occasions pointed out people bringing death threats or mass-slaughter recruitment into #wrongplanet, the reply was an insult along the lines of "I don't care, you're not an OP. And I don't have to." It is time for something to happen.



LuckyBunny
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27 Apr 2015, 5:16 am

Quote:
(justified by the "Moderators have final say and can do what they want" rule.)


I hold myself personally responsible for that one. I'm the one who suggested it and led to it being implemented. Foresight has never really been my strong suit, but at the time it seemed quite appropriate. The general gist of the situation back then was that ops would be trying to uphold the actual rules and users were arguing as to whether the rules were being used or not. I figured that the 'final say' rule would put an end to the arguments, allowing the op to explain the reasoning and the link to actual written rules, and then come out of it without spending a few hours getting migraines.

While I'm no fan of rules (in general), myself, enforcing them to the letter (as opposed to vagueness) is something I kinda believe in. Any ban I ever placed would be directly tied up to the written page. However, the way they had been written previously left so much room for argument it did need an update. Ambiguity is never good. Like, it's one thing to say 'don't troll people', but everyone has their own definition of trolling, so the rule is essentially useless. So yeah, I think the rules update back then was a good thing. The operative word being 'was'.

As for the topic of the thread in general, I have no answers for you. I personally have no idea where using the @wpops command to attract op attention breaks any of the rules. Then again, I haven't actually looked at the rules page in about a year, so it may have been added since. Back when I was op, the @wpops command had the simple function of calling attention, kinda like a beeper. Most of us had it set to highlight, so whenever anyone typed that in chat, we'd be highlighted to come and see what's up. Generally, this would involved cookies and medals for the person who called, as opposed to swift removal. Only when it was spammed without reason for ages would there be grounds for removal. More often than not, it was used specifically for the purposes of saying 'there's shenanigans happening. Get in here, guys'. Occasionally there were false alarms, people trying to call ops for something that didn't need ops, and quite frequently newcomers would type it to see what it does, but neither of the latter are exactly classed as abuse.