tl;dr: We’ve locked the Aura Clash thread and banned the author of Aura Clash, @cultivator-anon, due to behavior on cultivator-anon’s Discord.
Last week a user sent us a few screenshots, which I’ve included below. There are a lot more messages like this. The screenshots depict blatant racism, misogyny, and homophobic hate speech on the Discord, which cultivator-anon seems to find amusing.
Aura Clash’s Discord is created in cultivator-anon’s image. It’s full of alt-lite gamers, never taking themselves too seriously, enjoying racist/homophobic/rape jokes for their perceived shock value. We get a steady stream of folks coming here from their Discord, forcing us to waste valuable time banning them when they behave like our forum is (or should be) 4chan.
As of right now, the thread is locked but not yet hidden. We’ll hide the post next week; it will appear to be deleted, but we’ll continue to have a record of the thread that staff and moderators can access.
A new forum rule about behavior on your own forums/chats
We’re adding a new forum rule:
If you link to a forum/chat that you control, you will be responsible for moderating that space
Some authors link to other forums or chats (Discord) that are under their control, to continue the conversation elsewhere. That’s allowed, but when you do that, we’ll require you to moderate that space.
If your forum/chat is full of blatant racism, misogyny, homophobia, harassment, or other material that would be clearly unacceptable under our forum rules, we’ll ban you from our forum.
Historically, we’ve been hesitant to take action here on our forum based on off-site behavior, because we don’t want to act as worldwide internet police. We don’t want to invite users to send us links to problematic Tumblr posts, prove whether users are/aren’t the same person on X as on our forum, etc.
Under this rule, we’re not going to look everywhere for bad behavior, but we do expect you to behave like decent human beings in spaces that you link to from our forum.
Under this rule, linking to your own account on X (formerly Twitter) would not be bannable, even though X has lots of hate speech, unless you yourself were posting or in control of that hate speech. (I suppose we would ban Elon Musk if he wanted to post here, but of course he never would.)
I apologize for not doing this sooner
Over the last couple of years, individuals have alerted us that Aura Clash’s Discord has been bad. In January, we removed the link to Aura Clash’s Discord, and we hoped that would be enough. It was not enough; the Discord has, if anything, gotten worse.
If we’d had this rule about offsite behavior in place, we would have banned cultivator-anon a long time ago. I apologize for not putting this rule in place years ago, and for not banning him sooner.