There’s a difference between stopping a convo for being disruptive and stopping a convo for being disruptive and then grabbing the person who is responding to their bully and putting them in the public eye as the aggressor.

Before their response, JerryJohn wasn't actually addressing Kinch or Hippo though. Scratch this, JerryJohn was involved in egging on harassment.

What’s worded above is essentially putting kinch on public blast for an understandable response, as an example of a completely unacceptable behavior.

I'm not sure what to say to this. Even with context, I'm not sure if sarcastically asking if someone would enjoy something more if it had racial slurs an understandable response, especially when the conversation before that wasn't hostile.

I'm not saying we should ignore context, but asking someone to avoid starting arguments isn't 'putting someone on public blast'.

This isn't letting JerryJohn off the hook either, by the way. They were involved in harassment, apparently. ARD put it best below:

The takeaway should be that we need to be more proactive and aggressive about punishing harassment and making our users feel comfortable with reporting harassment to us, so that they don't feel the need to respond to harassers to begin with.

2) The takeaway shouldn't be that we need to treat both sides equally. The takeaway should be that we need to be more proactive and aggressive about punishing harassment and making our users feel comfortable with reporting harassment to us, so that they don't feel the need to respond to harassers to begin with. To extend Leveritas' analogy, we need to pull the kids apart and then ground the one who started the fight.

I’m not saying to just let them fight it out and that kinch is 100% fine.

Has she been approached by staff in order to sort things out?

I’m saying it’s a poor example of “our members are lashing out” and “this is completely unacceptable” because there’s a lot more context here that’s being ignored to show one specific behavior without the context of the behavior.

I'm not aware of the context in detail, and we should take context into account, of course. My issue is that the arguments that Kinch and some other users are starting is understandable, but also not something we should turn a blind eye to.

In short it’s completely misrepresenting the situation and making he assumption that it doesn’t matter if there are extenuating circumstances, a victim must always take more care in responding to abusive people while the abusive people can continue to be as such without any repercussions because they’re more polite about abusing people.

Abusive people should face disciplinary action according to the severity of their actions, I'm not disagreeing on that. This isn't a black and white situation, it's not a decision between ''let abusive users do what they want'' and ''ban anyone abusive and victims do what they want instead''.

What I'm saying is that we should consider at least approaching victims and say something along the lines of: ''I know what you're going through right now, but sarcastically asking someone if they would like an article better with racial slurs isn't helping the situation'' while continuing to do whatever disciplinary actions are required against abusive users.

It is important that, while her response is imperfect, kinch is merely responding to already existing harassment.

If we're not disciplining someone (which I can get behind, given the context), we can at least try to reel them in somewhat, because they are actively starting arguments that go absolutely nowhere.

By refusing to apply context to her behavior, we are in essentially condescending her responses and dictating how she can respond to her own harassment, while not punishing the harassers.

I don't feel comfortable just standing on the sideline either, to be honest. I don't want to do nothing, because being a member of the offshoot wiki doesn't automatically make you a monster that deserves what they get. Operator and some other users absolutely deserve disciplinary action though.

The way I see it, an action like this is like a parent pulling two fighting kids apart. We can let them fight it out because the bully hit first, but will that really solve anything?

It is important that, while her response is imperfect, kinch is merely responding to already existing harassment. She is the victim here, and her responses should be considered in context of that. By refusing to apply context to her behavior, we are in essentially condescending her responses and dictating how she can respond to her own harassment, while not punishing the harassers.

"Please do not even joke about downvote brigading or posting your shitty shit or otherwise negatively affecting RPC" in our various social channels. Enforcement would be up to the mods of the channel in question, and would still be distinct from actual calls to brigade them.

Agreed. We need to show that we're the bigger 'person', if you will. It's an issue when another party is calling you out, and they don't have to lie. While I don't think the screenshots in the other post are actually calls for downvotes, it's still a shitty attitude.

We're better than that. And if we're not, we should be.

I had to call a stop order on the discussion page of a tale because two established authors found it necessary to provoke reactions from a user with a different opinion. Not one I agree with, mind you, but this was baffling to see. I usually refrain from calling out specific users, but comments like this:

Oops; sorry! I didn't realize you were this sensitive about your work.

I'll try to show more consideration for your feelings from hereon out.

or this:

Would you like it better if we added some racial slurs to it? Since that seems to be the kind of writing you produce.

Are not acceptable, especially from our own users, who should know better. So far, I've been standing on the sideline about this issue, but if we're vouching to stay neutral on issues like this, we need to show that we don't apply favoritism to our own users.

Edit: Kinch's response wasn't a random aggressive post, like it first seemed to me, that's my bad. With added context, I feel that we need to steer the discussion away from specific users, and instead focusing on making our users feel comfortable with reporting harassment to us, so that they don't feel the need to respond to harassers to begin with, as ARD put it.

I propose making it official that if we ever do catch one of our users fucking around over there and downvote-bombing their site, that the user should be banned or have their site membership revoked.

I've been keeping semi-tabs on the RPC downvote-bombing issue they've been having, and had a similar thought.

So, yeah, supporting immediate ban from our site if we ever catch someone trying to brigade another site, not just RPC. Not because it falls under existent rules¹, but because it potentially damages the reputation of our site.

Also.

In addition, anyone talking about doing that shit in IRC chat needs to get shut down by a mod. Thoughts?

I already rail on people who even suggest anything remotely like this in any of the chats I'm in. I'm all for this.

Still, in the spirit of "Not being total dicks about this," I propose making it official that if we ever do catch one of our users fucking around over there and downvote-bombing their site, that the user should be banned or have their site membership revoked. In addition, anyone talking about doing that shit in IRC chat needs to get shut down by a mod. Thoughts?