i<3 wolves678 wrote:What personally bothers me about this rule is that a lot of the “offsite bullying” I have seen is in regards to actual problematic users either potentially/actually exposing minors to dangerous content, being blatantly homophobic/transphobic, or in general being someone who causes a lot of issues in the community (scamming, ninja trading, etc.)
Many of these things get reported to staff by the users complaining and are often let slide, and that’s why people are angry. CS is considered a safe space for many minors, but seeing users get away with harmful actions without rectification simply for being popular or well known is upsetting to say the least. This website means a lot to me and has helped me get through a lot of difficult times growing up, I only want the best for it and for other users to have the same good experiences I have had, but in more recent times, it feels like things have changed a lot. I don’t want this message to be taken the wrong way, I just want what’s best for the website moving forward, and feel like this needed to be said.
I would like to clarify something here, this is not directed only at you, I've seen several people interpreting the situation this way. Some of the other staff have already said this but it keeps getting brought up.
Before this announcement we did not take off-site actions into consideration because we do not have jurisdiction outside of CS, and so long as users followed CS rules on CS, they were allowed to stay. That means that if you or anyone else previously reported someone for off-site behavior and was told we would not do anything about it, that has now changed as of this announcement, and we may do something about it now. There seems to be an assumption that because we didn't do anything about these users before this announcement, that we won't now, and that is not the case.
And regardless of all of that, contributing and participating in off-site harassment of CS users isn't the way to go. Even if those users are 'problematic', that doesn't give you a free pass. It is still bullying regardless of who it is directed at. Participating in such a thing is harmful to CS and its users, whether you believe it to be or not. So yes, this rule also opens up people involved in off-site harassment to be punished, but that is not sole objective of it.
We truly do want to make this site a better place for out users, that is why this rule has been established. So that we can start taking action against people who are a danger to our users, even if they didn't do anything directly on-site.
As ZEL and others mentioned, you may not see us directly respond right away, but that doesn't mean we haven't seen and are not investigating on the back end. Personally, I have never seen anyone get a free pass for being popular. Our decisions in tickets are formed as a group, not by a single user. Personally I do not care who is or isn't popular in the adopt community or who is buddies with staff or any of that. If I saw another staff member actually being biased about something I'd definitely tell them. But I've been a GM for a year and a half and I've yet to see that. We also do not stalk specific users waiting for them to make a mistake. People like to forget that we have our own lives outside of CS, and we are free to enjoy CS outside of our moderating duties. We aren't going to spend our free time refreshing someone's profile so we can nitpick what they are doing. If you really do have a concern over us being unfair about something, send in a ticket asking for a second opinion, and we can be sure to re-examine what happened and make sure the decision we reached was correct.
//again just a disclaimer that this isn't directed specifically at you but just users as a whole who have been voicing these opinions.