[Petition/Discussion] Harassment and Off-Site Evidence

[Todd McCloud]

The moderation team is not at fault. There is nothing they can do to stop offsite activities, and they cannot ban people without evidence from reliable outside sources showing that they would be damaging influences on the NS community. Perhaps this line of thought has been echoed by others in this thread and beyond.

Literally no one has been arguing the mods are at fault. They're merely following policy, and are doing their jobs. The crux of the argument is a change of policy, one that allows moderation to review reports of offsite harassment, investigate when necessary, lay down consequences, and report them as they are ruled. The point everyone here is making is that where we are right now is insufficient, and we have explicitly laid out where we believe this could be fixed.

[Astarial]

In this country, The truth is a defense against a libel su8t. Just sayin.

While that might be relevant to established historical facts like my role in the Civil War, it can't be applied to accusations made on offsite forums unless we get into the business of vetting offsite evidence to check its accuracy.

I'm surprised you don't see how absurd this claim is. Of course truth being a defense to defamation applies to statements on off-site forums - the whole notion of somebody filing a lawsuit about such a statement depends on legal definitions, and legalities don't care about the medium.

NS moderation is not required to prove before a court of law beyond all reasonable doubt that a statement is true before they allow it to be said on the site, nor can they reasonably ask users to prove the same before letting them post it. NS moderation is not required to preemptively vet all statements of fact lest they risk a lawsuit that will bankrupt the company stamp industry.

At most, they might be required to prevent the spreading of obviously false information... but even that's a stretch, given some of the nonsense that goes on in NSG, where people can seemingly get away with stating nearly anything as fact... even things that have been outright proven to be false, or which are false statements about another player that don't rise to the level of flaming. And yes, I can cite posts if necessary to illustrate the point.

Finally, the "defamation" rule is still tangential to this petition, and I would rather not have either this thread or the other one closed for being a duplication of the same topic, because they really are separate issues and deal with separate policies.

This thread: Don't let predators off the hook for their off-site behavior.
The other thread: Let us talk about the predatory behavior of others.

[Greater Cesnica]

I wholeheartedly support this proposal. I think that we should really start to pay attention to off-site harassment. It is untraceable by moderators and is not actionable under current policies.

[Malashaan Colony]

Allowing the community in question to then speak on why they removed said player from their space, instead of gagging them via the current rule set, is a compromise that allows the site to still say at the end of the day that it never made any accusations themselves.

I still find that idea problematic. If the comments are something that would open you up to legal liability for defamation, and we make a decision to allow such discussion, that would also open us up to liability. Even if we're not the authors of a defamatory comment, we'd still be the publishers.

This is incorrect. As a forum provider, the mods and NS are protected from liability (relevant quote: "What liability does the forum have for Mark’s statements? The good news is – none. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides 'Internet service providers' with immunity from defamation claims based on statements made by members of a forum. The term 'Internet service providers' includes forums. Even better, you don’t have to take any steps to obtain this protection – it applies automatically."

[Oakrugia]

I petition to sign this as a matter of fact, that I was affected by these results of harassment a long time ago, and wish that this would be resolved as soon as possible.

-Oakrugia (WA Delegate, Founder, and Head Administrator of Krasnodar; Concerned NS Member)

[Greater Cesnica]

I petition to sign this as a matter of fact, that I was affected by these results of harassment a long time ago, and wish that this would be resolved as soon as possible.

-Oakrugia (WA Delegate, Founder, and Head Administrator of Krasnodar; Concerned NS Member)

Hey, I signed up too!

[Ethel mermania]

I still find that idea problematic. If the comments are something that would open you up to legal liability for defamation, and we make a decision to allow such discussion, that would also open us up to liability. Even if we're not the authors of a defamatory comment, we'd still be the publishers.

This is incorrect. As a forum provider, the mods and NS are protected from liability (relevant quote: "What liability does the forum have for Mark’s statements? The good news is – none. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides 'Internet service providers' with immunity from defamation claims based on statements made by members of a forum. The term 'Internet service providers' includes forums. Even better, you don’t have to take any steps to obtain this protection – it applies automatically."

No

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section ... ecency_Act

If someone else says it moderation is not liable, if moderation say it they are


A good site to learn about these laws is techdirt. It is in fact the site that brought me here.

Edit: I got my acts confused.

[Kyrusia]

One post has been removed for Bad Faith posting. Players are free to discuss this topic, including their agreement or disagreement, without quote-spam and/or meme imagery.

As always, the post has been sequestered to the Evidence Locker where it may be reviewed as necessary.

[Malashaan Colony]

This is incorrect. As a forum provider, the mods and NS are protected from liability (relevant quote: "What liability does the forum have for Mark’s statements? The good news is – none. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides 'Internet service providers' with immunity from defamation claims based on statements made by members of a forum. The term 'Internet service providers' includes forums. Even better, you don’t have to take any steps to obtain this protection – it applies automatically."

No

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section ... ecency_Act

If someone else says it moderation is not liable, if moderation say it they are


A good site to learn about these laws is techdirt. It is in fact the site that brought me here.

Edit: I got my acts confused.

I'm not sue what you're arguing here. It sounds like you're disagreeing with me (no), but everything else you said supports my position. USS monitor claimed that if NS moderation allowed discussion of these topics, it could open them up to liability. As you correctly noted, that it categorically incorrect. As long as it is not a mod saying it themselves, there is no risk to NS moderation (at least under US law - I believe Australian law actual applies - but I think it's similar).

Edited to add: did a little digging, and it's less clear cut under Australian law, but it still seems like NS moderation would not be liable.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

...which is why I advocate for a combination of allowing the communities willing to take that on to speak (kill the gag order), and moderation making an internal decision to handle a safety issue (ban, etc, as they see fit), which handles it without putting them in a place of what I will only say tiptoes around liability, to avoid excessive amateur law. I’m an engineer, not a lawyer

[Unibot III]

I'm certainly in favour the petition and its argument - I want to thank those involved with the OP.

I will just add that, if NS Moderation comes to the conclusion that responding to well supported accusations of sexual harassment and abuse with bans is simply going too far with regards to the remit of what NS Moderation believes it can responsibly execute, the Mods should look at alternative options available to them before dropping the matter altogether.

A required system for self-reporting of NS identities to NS Moderation, for example, for those on a harassment "watch list." This would create a 'layer' of procedure for which non-compliance could be strictly enforced.

Or a kind of NS version of a "Restraining Order" to create space between players after reports of outside harassment. Again, a system that would create a procedural 'trap' for non-compliant users.

I think there's a whole umbrella of policies that moderators could consider as, at least as a stop gap, until we've found the best system for NS.

[Ethel mermania]

No

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section ... ecency_Act

If someone else says it moderation is not liable, if moderation say it they are


A good site to learn about these laws is techdirt. It is in fact the site that brought me here.

Edit: I got my acts confused.

I'm not sue what you're arguing here. It sounds like you're disagreeing with me (no), but everything else you said supports my position. USS monitor claimed that if NS moderation allowed discussion of these topics, it could open them up to liability. As you correctly noted, that it categorically incorrect. As long as it is not a mod saying it themselves, there is no risk to NS moderation (at least under US law - I believe Australian law actual applies - but I think it's similar).

1. The whole thread is about moderators taking action against bad actors. If the moderator is incorrect the site is liable for that moderators actions.

2. Also a moderated site does not have the same protections under 230 that an unmoderated one does as far as user posts are concerned.

How that gets monotized (as most of this is civil and not criminal) I have no idea.

[Northwest Slobovia]

A question which may help Moderation think about the subject: what do other sites do when faced with the same problem? If a Facebook user complains that somebody is harassing them on Twitter, and that person is also on Facebook with such and such an account, what action does Facebook take?

If the person posts "X is harassing me on Twitter" on their Facebook account with screen shots and other evidence and says that that person is the same as a such and such on Facebook, what does Facebook do?

I don't actually know, having not been on either end on either other site, but maybe some other NS user does know the answers.

[Malashaan Colony]

1. The whole thread is about moderators taking action against bad actors. If the moderator is incorrect the site is liable for that moderators actions.

Part If the issue is that the discussion about this and the defamation rule necessarily intertwine. USS monitor's statement was specifically about the necessity of the defamation rule because otherwise NS moderation could be liable for defamation based on what users said if they failed to prevent it.

2. Also a moderated site does not have the same protections under 230 that an unmoderated one does as far as user posts are concerned.

Mostly, it doesn't. The whole balance if the CDA was that it exempted service providers while attempting to encourage self-moderation. When it comes to defamation, it doesn't matter what moderation action could or could not have been taken. There is a lot of case law out there specifically in this point; forum moderators callout be held liable for posts of users (e.g., Zeran v. AOL). That is not the case for IP clams (usually copyright) because the DMCA modified the law to require service providers to remove infringing content one aware of it.

However, as Australian law likely applies, the CDA and DMCA don't really help. It looks lime under Australian law the analys would fall around truth, opinion, and/or ability to control pre-publucation. But to bring this back to the specific issue of NS mods taking action, so long as the explanation was clearly stated as "we believe x because Y do have done Z," there would be no defamation. That is the classic distinction between opinion (we believe X) and defamation (X is true).

[Luziyca]

Honestly, I think that off-site evidence for harassment should, unless if provided by law enforcement bodies, be restricted to sites oriented towards NationStates (i.e. regional forums, regional discords, regional IRCs if they're still a thing, NSwiki, IIwiki, etc), especially as these play a far larger role in the NS experience than some obscure forum that is only tangentially connected to NS by the fact that both the harasser and the victim are on that forum, while the discords/IRCs/fora of regions tends to be more closely connected to the NS experience than that.

That being said, I shall sign the petition.

[King HEM]

Hi. Want to chime in really quick.

I think we are conflating two separate questions here, especially in some pushback from NS staff.

(1) What is the right thing to do?

(2) What is practical?

The first speaks to a moral principle, the second speaks to logistics.

I hear a lot of people saying that altering this policy would be hard. I agree, it would be hard. It would be tremendously hard. It would absolutely be a burden to a great number of volunteer staff who make this game operate. That doesn't mean it's still not the right thing to do.

For those who don't know me, I'm HEM. I'm the Chief Administrator of Europeia, a region that has banned several well-known players over the past year. I'm not going to go into the sordid details, because I am not super familiar with the rules surrounding such and would prefer to not accidentally overstep the line and get warned (I have a few warnings on my record from the early years ).

But the bans we have executed in Europeia over the last year have been hard. They've been hard investigations, they've been hard emotionally — I've banned people who I once considered friends. They put a tremendous burden on a small group of people. But Europeia is a better region for it.

So, if possible, I would like to remove the second question from consideration here for a moment, leaving: What is the right thing to do?

Here's the facts: the offsite forums and offsite properties that contribute to this game are a part of this game. We can split hairs until we are left with electrons, but they are. Some players don't venture onto offsite properties, some players forget all about the "issues" and exclusively focus on offsite properties. We are all NSers. It's all integrated. The only time we talk about offsite properties not being apart of Nationstates is when we have to have difficult conversations about moderation and responsibility. Max Barry himself has said, "I keep getting amazed by what people have done for their nations -- from wiki pages to RPs to calculators, offsite forums, medals."

What people have done for their nations. What people have added to this game. We can't draw the line at Nationstates.net, certainly not now, if we ever could.

Beyond all of that, there are deep real life implications of what is decided here. To be frank: as the rule stands right now, Nationstates is a dream for a predator. It is possible to infiltrate communities, cause tremendous abuse, and then fade into the night and re-emerge with a different persona. Rinse, repeat. This would still be possible if moderators were helping local administrators, but this "hear no evil, see no evil" policy makes is all the easier. I don't want to rehash what has been said in the petition, because it was well-stated, but I encourage people to apply what they are seeing in real life to this game. When famous people get away with abuse for long periods of time, it is usually in part because well-positioned people didn't see it as their place to intervene. I can't help but draw comparisons between that, and our current policy here. That is not to accuse any game staff member of negligence, but that the policy itself is negligent. It is not a glitch, it is the design, and the design needs to change. I hope everyone agrees with me that we should protect our members. I hope everyone agrees with me that Nationstates should, as much as possible, be a safe place.

If we all agree, then the only question that remains is practically.

To be painfully direct: If it proves to be logistically impossible to protect our members - as has been suggested by some - this website should shut down. If it is too hard, too stressful, too challenging to even try to protect our members, we need to call it quits. I've invested over a decade in this game, I care for it more than any person should over a game, but if it is literally impossible to stop predators from abusing members here, it's not worth it.

But I do not think it is impossible. Far from it. I think it is very possible. But we have to try to know for sure.

A Phase 1 approach could look something like this:

— Game moderators create an offsite investigations team of 3-5 mods.
— Offsite investigations team has a list of regional administrative teams, who are empowered to make reports to Offsite investigations team
— Regional Administrative teams will make full reports to Offsite investigations team, who will verify the information and react accordingly
— Retain game administrators for appeal process

This setup has several benefits:

1. Separate out game moderators who want to take up this portfolio away from moderators who do not
2. Leaving the bulk of information gathering in the hands of Regional Administrative teams, reducing the amount of workload for game staff
3. Encouraging certain behaviors in regions with offsite properties, like having a static administrative team that exists outside the regional government.
4. Reduce the likelihood of false reports by having a report be represented by an entire region vs. an open submission like Game Help Requests

This is just one initial idea. I am sure there are plenty more, perhaps better ideas! But I think we should start thinking of ideas, and stop thinking about why this will be too difficult to implement.

I want to say, closing on a personal note, that as a regional founder I never expected to be handling issues like this. I never knew that being an administrator of a fun offsite forum would mean being exposed to the stressors that I have been. But sometimes we are called not to defer or demur, but to rise to an occasion.

Honorable site moderators, our members are being abused, harassment, and attacked. As a game, let's rise to the occasion.

[Isaris]

NS moderators cannot verify that a poster on another website is the same person as a poster on this website. They would have to "trust" people moderating external sites that the information they have provided is valid and not a smear campaign resulting from a falling out. Some of these external sites are "splinter" sites from NS set up by people with a particular agenda towards moderation and particular posters who post here.

They can verify that the poster has the same IP address. While this may not necessarily indicate explicitly that they are the same individual, it should be up to the individual to provide evidence that they are not the same person, not up to the moderation team to prove that they are. The simplest explanation for one poster who has posted on two sites having the same IP address is that they are the same individual. I should hope that the NS moderation team has the capacity to use Occam's razor.

[Dumb Ideologies]

NS moderators cannot verify that a poster on another website is the same person as a poster on this website. They would have to "trust" people moderating external sites that the information they have provided is valid and not a smear campaign resulting from a falling out. Some of these external sites are "splinter" sites from NS set up by people with a particular agenda towards moderation and particular posters who post here.

They can verify that the poster has the same IP address. While this may not necessarily indicate explicitly that they are the same individual, it should be up to the individual to provide evidence that they are not the same person, not up to the moderation team to prove that they are. The simplest explanation for one poster who has posted on two sites having the same IP address is that they are the same individual. I should hope that the NS moderation team has the capacity to use Occam's razor.

Depends on the site that things are alleged to have happened on as to whether this can be supplied, and it is by no means watertight "proof". EDIT - see Phydios' post below - EDIT. When you're dealing with huge things like this you shouldn't tar someone's names based on a collection of maybes and probablys. Besides, as i went on to say in that post, matching IP address is not the same as verifying all the external evidence or documentation provided by an untrusted third party, which may be selective, faked or below the standards under which NS operates. It also creates precedents for NS mods having to review external content, which has the potential to become difficult to bound and increase the moderator workload considerably.

Far from this policy being an application of Occam's Razor, it should be obvious from my wider post and Ethel's, as well as from a dispassionate application of common sense, that external activity can't be the responsibility of this site's moderation team to review, even if the people involved originally came from this forum. NS moderators can't be expected to police an entire ecosystem as that is simply not practical.

[Luziyca]

Hi. Want to chime in really quick.

I think we are conflating two separate questions here, especially in some pushback from NS staff.

(1) What is the right thing to do?

(2) What is practical?

The first speaks to a moral principle, the second speaks to logistics.

I hear a lot of people saying that altering this policy would be hard. I agree, it would be hard. It would be tremendously hard. It would absolutely be a burden to a great number of volunteer staff who make this game operate. That doesn't mean it's still not the right thing to do.

For those who don't know me, I'm HEM. I'm the Chief Administrator of Europeia, a region that has banned several well-known players over the past year. I'm not going to go into the sordid details, because I am not super familiar with the rules surrounding such and would prefer to not accidentally overstep the line and get warned (I have a few warnings on my record from the early years ).

But the bans we have executed in Europeia over the last year have been hard. They've been hard investigations, they've been hard emotionally — I've banned people who I once considered friends. They put a tremendous burden on a small group of people. But Europeia is a better region for it.

So, if possible, I would like to remove the second question from consideration here for a moment, leaving: What is the right thing to do?

Here's the facts: the offsite forums and offsite properties that contribute to this game are a part of this game. We can split hairs until we are left with electrons, but they are. Some players don't venture onto offsite properties, some players forget all about the "issues" and exclusively focus on offsite properties. We are all NSers. It's all integrated. The only time we talk about offsite properties not being apart of Nationstates is when we have to have difficult conversations about moderation and responsibility. Max Barry himself has said, "I keep getting amazed by what people have done for their nations -- from wiki pages to RPs to calculators, offsite forums, medals."

What people have done for their nations. What people have added to this game. We can't draw the line at Nationstates.net, certainly not now, if we ever could.

Beyond all of that, there are deep real life implications of what is decided here. To be frank: as the rule stands right now, Nationstates is a dream for a predator. It is possible to infiltrate communities, cause tremendous abuse, and then fade into the night and re-emerge with a different persona. Rinse, repeat. This would still be possible if moderators were helping local administrators, but this "hear no evil, see no evil" policy makes is all the easier. I don't want to rehash what has been said in the petition, because it was well-stated, but I encourage people to apply what they are seeing in real life to this game. When famous people get away with abuse for long periods of time, it is usually in part because well-positioned people didn't see it as their place to intervene. I can't help but draw comparisons between that, and our current policy here. That is not to accuse any game staff member of negligence, but that the policy itself is negligent. It is not a glitch, it is the design, and the design needs to change. I hope everyone agrees with me that we should protect our members. I hope everyone agrees with me that Nationstates should, as much as possible, be a safe place.

If we all agree, then the only question that remains is practically.

To be painfully direct: If it proves to be logistically impossible to protect our members - as has been suggested by some - this website should shut down. If it is too hard, too stressful, too challenging to even try to protect our members, we need to call it quits. I've invested over a decade in this game, I care for it more than any person should over a game, but if it is literally impossible to stop predators from abusing members here, it's not worth it.

But I do not think it is impossible. Far from it. I think it is very possible. But we have to try to know for sure.

A Phase 1 approach could look something like this:

— Game moderators create an offsite investigations team of 3-5 mods.
— Offsite investigations team has a list of regional administrative teams, who are empowered to make reports to Offsite investigations team
— Regional Administrative teams will make full reports to Offsite investigations team, who will verify the information and react accordingly
— Retain game administrators for appeal process

This setup has several benefits:

1. Separate out game moderators who want to take up this portfolio away from moderators who do not
2. Leaving the bulk of information gathering in the hands of Regional Administrative teams, reducing the amount of workload for game staff
3. Encouraging certain behaviors in regions with offsite properties, like having a static administrative team that exists outside the regional government.
4. Reduce the likelihood of false reports by having a report be represented by an entire region vs. an open submission like Game Help Requests

This is just one initial idea. I am sure there are plenty more, perhaps better ideas! But I think we should start thinking of ideas, and stop thinking about why this will be too difficult to implement.

I want to say, closing on a personal note, that as a regional founder I never expected to be handling issues like this. I never knew that being an administrator of a fun offsite forum would mean being exposed to the stressors that I have been. But sometimes we are called not to defer or demur, but to rise to an occasion.

Honorable site moderators, our members are being abused, harassment, and attacked. As a game, let's rise to the occasion.

This seems like a pretty good concept.

[Calvin Coolidge]

Great petition, always something that needs more attention across forums. I'm signing on.

[Dumb Ideologies]

I also fundamentally disagree with the view above that if it is impossible to protect players entirely from harassment the site should be closed down. If that happened the predators would simply go elsewhere and nothing would be solved. This is the internet, 100% safety is impossible, and under these criteria the whole internet would need to be taken down (as well as almost every institution in society).

If that silliness is the sort of principle that is needed to try to justify these extreme measures - moderators ruling on unverified external content, reducing the burden of proof, moderators being expected to police things that have happened on other forums - that's just more evidence that this petition business is foolish.

The very idea of a petition to demand that volunteers do more work for you, some of it emotionally demanding, for free and police your external forums just because neither you nor the actual police has managed it is also extremely entitled - the idea that if a large enough number of players sign up it should automatically happen, no matter the demands on the moderators or the practicality, is fundamentally flawed and - frankly - no matter how politely phrased at it's core it's pretty bloody rude.

[Phydios]

The simplest explanation for one poster who has posted on two sites having the same IP address is that they are the same individual. I should hope that the NS moderation team has the capacity to use Occam's razor.

An IP address is not an SSN. It's not an infallible proof of identity. It's not even a reliable proof of identity. Some people share computers, and no one on the other side of the Internet has any idea who's fingers are on the keyboard. Some networks have one and only one external IP address, so you might have many, many people and devices associated with a single IP address. If User X on reddit and User Y on Facebook have identical IP addresses, the simplest explanation is not that they are the same individual. The Internet does not work that way.

An example: if I type my public IP address into https://whatismyipaddress.com, then the result gives me...my university. That's it. Now, this is a pretty small university, but we still have over 3000 students right now. How many of those are on the university network? How many faculty, staff, and guests are also on the network? I don't know exactly how my university's networking infrastructure is set up, but I currently have no reason to think that different people on this network have different public IP addresses. You cannot use an IP address as a person's digital fingerprint- it's more like a person's red shirt that can be traded or discarded at any time.

-snip-

Note: the following is based on the information I have gleaned over time from this forum. I have no special knowledge or authority, and I could be wrong. Moderators may very well contradict anything that I say.
You simply cannot remove logistics from the discussion. This is, as you say, a volunteer staff. They have lives and jobs outside of NS. That fact alone severely cuts into the time that each moderator spends moderating. Then you have the number of moderators- I hear that the criteria are pretty strict, and that it's difficult to find someone who will stick with the job even when it's lost its novelty and is no longer fun. So limited manpower is another factor to consider. The number of man-hours available for moderating is limited, and there's an entire site to run, including a back-end that we players know almost nothing about. I hear that much more work is done there than here on this public front-end.

Therefore, I doubt that the staff are willing to increase the load on current moderators (causing burnout, which is a vicious cycle) or neglect other duties for this offsite moderation proposal. Moderation's jurisdiction stops when the start of the URL no longer matches "http(s)://*.nationstates.net". That's been policy for as long as I know of, and I'm pretty sure that's not just because they want it that way. Now, you can make beautiful speeches with achingly emotional appeals, but there will still be the same number of mods with the same amount of time to devote to modly duties. Duties that you want to drastically expand just because you think this is a immediate problem that must be addressed at any cost, even if the cure is to kill the patient.

I have no doubt that the staff cares about a safe and friendly environment for every player. So do I. I hope they can find a solution which can adequately address this problem. But this particular problem, no matter how severe or widespread, will never be the only or the most important thing for them to manage. I seriously doubt the site will ever drastically reform or shut down over it.

There, that's my $0.02. Take them as you will. I just had to get this off my chest ever since this discussion started in the Defamation rule thread.

[The Bruce]

I would like to add my signature to this.

People do need to learn to both be better people and show better judgement in their online behavior. Over the years, of being involved in NationStates, it’s been my pleasure to meet many players and make many long term friendships through the game. I’ve also come across a few creepy and disgusting individuals during my time here. I think when you have any social based game community it attracts a few sexual predators and people recruiting for extremist groups.

A lot of the offsite activity of NationStates was established due to the earliest forums being so clunky that they were barely usable. It made people who wanted to do more want better forums and forced them to do their own. Having a regional forum soon became an expected standard for a regional community, instead of something out of the ordinary.

Moderation and administration of those forums by NationStates players varied widely. Some offsite mods were vigilant, others lazy, and some were the kind of people that most needed moderating.

A case and point was a time when defenders were warned not to post real pictures of themselves online (either on NS or offsite regional forums), because invaders were downloading them to be altered with crude comments and obscene Photoshopping in the worst traditions of 4chan. They would then share them with their particularly unpleasant corner of the NationStates community on offsite forums. Under the proposed extension of moderator rules this would have been grounds for some pretty major repercussions instead of the allowed trolling by a group of invaders and their acquaintances.

If they do pursue this line of using offsite evidence for moderation, to protect players and cull the worst from the social herd, they need to figure out where the line is, state it very clearly, and stick with it.

[King HEM]

I also fundamentally disagree with the view above that if it is impossible to protect players entirely from harassment the site should be closed down. If that happened the predators would simply go elsewhere and nothing would be solved. This is the internet, 100% safety is impossible, and under these criteria the whole internet would need to be taken down (as well as almost every institution in society).

If that silliness is the sort of principle that is needed to try to justify these extreme measures that's just more evidence that this petition business is foolish.

There's a difference from having a system that periodically falls short and fails to protect people, and having an entire segment of the game go effectively unregulated because there's nothing we can do / it's logistically hard / too much work etc.

Not sure when expecting an organized internet community to fight abuse became "silliness", or when actually protecting players from harassment became "extreme measures", but what do I know?

You simply cannot remove logistics from the discussion. This is, as you say, a volunteer staff. They have lives and jobs outside of NS. That fact alone severely cuts into the time that each moderator spends moderating. Then you have the number of moderators- I hear that the criteria are pretty strict, and that it's difficult to find someone who will stick with the job even when it's lost its novelty and is no longer fun. So limited manpower is another factor to consider. The number of man-hours available for moderating is limited, and there's an entire site to run, including a back-end that we players know almost nothing about. I hear that much more work is done there than here on this public front-end.

Therefore, I doubt that the staff are willing to increase the load on current moderators (causing burnout, which is a vicious cycle) or neglect other duties for this offsite moderation proposal. Moderation's jurisdiction stops when the start of the URL no longer matches "http(s)://*.nationstates.net". That's been policy for as long as I know of, and I'm pretty sure that's not just because they want it that way. Now, you can make beautiful speeches with achingly emotional appeals, but there will still be the same number of mods with the same amount of time to devote to modly duties. Duties that you want to drastically expand just because you think this is a immediate problem that must be addressed at any cost, even if the cure is to kill the patient.

I have no doubt that the staff cares about a safe and friendly environment for every player. So do I. I hope they can find a solution which can adequately address this problem. But this particular problem, no matter how severe or widespread, will never be the only or the most important thing for them to manage. I seriously doubt the site will ever drastically reform or shut down over it.

There, that's my $0.02. Take them as you will. I just had to get this off my chest ever since this discussion started in the Defamation rule thread.

I didn't completely ignore the logistics, I suspended them for the first part of my argument and then actually proposed a concrete idea that may or may not be viable. My point was that we should decide what our core beliefs are, and then move to how we practically implement them - not the other way around (i.e. think about how easy/hard something is, and then base what we should do around that).

You say that moderation's boundaries stop at "http://Nationstates.net," but that's the policy only because they say so. I say the policy is wrong, and I'm leaning on a bit of experience here. I make my argument about the nature of Nationstates in my post above, so I won't rehash it.

You say I am using "achingly emotional appeals," and I will say that this is an emotional issue. Again, not to wave my ego around, but I've been Chief Administrator of one of Nationstates' most active forums for a long time. When you see the stuff that happens to your friends, people you care about, it isn't a theoretical consideration anymore - It's real. The abuse is real. People get hurt. And when you juxtaposition that real harm against, "Well, there's nothing we can do"; "It will be too hard"; "This is how we've always done it", it doesn't quite sit right.

I'm not here to be rabble-rouser. I don't want a revolt against the admins or start some insane populist revolt of the local admins. I trust our game staff, and I know they work their tails off to make this game a fun place. I don't doubt their integrity, and I know they want the best for all of us. I don't like the rule they are following here. I speak out only against the rule, not against any person - be it player or game staff.

I truly do think there are strong ways forward here. I would love to discuss more ideas with people who have ideas of their own.

[Dumb Ideologies]

I also fundamentally disagree with the view above that if it is impossible to protect players entirely from harassment the site should be closed down. If that happened the predators would simply go elsewhere and nothing would be solved. This is the internet, 100% safety is impossible, and under these criteria the whole internet would need to be taken down (as well as almost every institution in society).

If that silliness is the sort of principle that is needed to try to justify these extreme measures that's just more evidence that this petition business is foolish.

There's a difference from having a system that periodically falls short and fails to protect people, and having an entire segment of the game go effectively unregulated because there's nothing we can do / it's logistically hard / too much work etc.

Not sure when expecting an organized internet community to fight abuse became "silliness", or when actually protecting players from harassment became "extreme measures", but what do I know?

They're not a segment of the game. External forums need to be policed by separate moderators, and what happens there needs to be their job to deal with, simply because our moderation often barely has the resources to police *this* site. There are many, many external forums spinning off from NS. Yes, things being logistically very difficult and too much work for one set of volunteers to coordinate is a very good reason for things that happen away from here to be unregulated by our moderators, as well as other things like unverifiable third party evidence, misrepresentation, malicious false reporting, defamation etc etc. They literally can't do it. It's an unreasonable and extreme expectation. The complete refusal to see this and to instead stomp feet and make entitled demands by making an "I want" petition is silly, absolutely.