So I ran out of likes, so just went to the end of the thread.
First of all, I thank the mods for not locking the thread and disallowing dissenting opinion. Some of us work for a living, and given the amount of discussion, it takes time to work through
Second, I like that acknowledge those that care can investigate further, and make their own decisions on if Aura Clash actually aligns with their their values,
Third … I might get to third later. This thread seems to be working too quickly for a third post in my first in a thread of a game I didn’t even realise existed a day ago
now that i noticed there no proof of members of that discord showing here to make trouble no one print only for the discord where is the proof on the members of that discord going out of they way to cause trouble ?look very much a way to police a place that they have no power
Look, I don’t want to keep posting on a site I dislike. But I feel it’s important to note that I have been banned for “wasting moderator time”. Twice. For years. I didn’t say slurs. I just wasted time. Do I agree with it? No, and certain mods didn’t either. But that’s why I’m doing other stuff elsewhere.
It’s entirely within the company’s rights to ban anyone for anything. This is their own company space. If you have a problem with something, vote with your attendance, and your wallet, and leave. Because putting undue stress on the unpaid volunteer mods by going mask-off or complaining is only going to cause more suspensions in the long term, not less. Hopefully this is the last I’ll say on this matter.
I wasn’t referring to anyone in particular when mentioning hateful behavior. No, I don’t think the mods are being hateful for banning someone.
It’s a cycle we see online and in real life that I dislike and see. Where a disagreement is enough reason for individuals to dehumanize and disrespect one another. It would be sad to see the blind hatred in that discord mirrored here.
I believe in common decency with everyone.
As for the mods and Anon issue, didn’t they already remove the discord link from his post? I believe I read it earlier that they’d made him remove it before, and if so that should be enough separation between the discord’s activities and this forum. Again, if they behave here like they behaved there they deserve what they get.
They said they banned him not because he broke rules here but because they grew tired of people messaging them about his discord.
That concerns me most of all, being banned when you don’t break rules. What’s more, they said they intend to continue and will ban other authors if they don’t like what’s on their discord servers?
Is it not clear how easily that could be manipulated? Like I mentioned in my post, an author who’s not been active for sometime doesn’t open discord, one or multiple people could very easily make it appear as if their absence means such malicious behavior is condoned.
With that reach it’s not far at all from being banned over a minor disagreement over something silly like the direction of one of the stories posted here.
As someone who has been a moderator back in the day, I think I can safely say that a regular user of this site would not have seen most of the things that eventually gave rise to the ban, because it’s a moderator’s job to make sure those are cleaned up as soon as possible. This is why it often comes as an unwelcome surprise when someone is banned, and might seem unfair to people who have not seen anything/likes them.
I hear you but I just don’t think it’s as simple as. Firstly correct me if I’m wrong but I was under the impression the “waste of time” was people from the discord coming here repeatedly and behaving inappropriately and mods kept reaching out to Anon to try and get them to make their discord server behave so it doesn’t keep spilling into CoG forums. Getting rid of the discord link was one step towards that but apparently didn’t help enough and the mods gew tired of having to rehash these issues with Anon- that’s my understanding of the situation at least.
As for the rule.. Firstly, when you create a public discord server I think the usual expectation is already that you would police it somehow, whether or not it’s tied to CoG or any other fandom. I certainly don’t come into a discord server excepting I’ll be allowed to say hatespeech and behave poorly. Creating that kind of platform is a committment. Pretty much every single public discord server I’ve ever joined has some sort of moderation that keeps it from becoming the wild west, so I don’t believe it’s that much of an ask and I in fact believe it’s only to be expected regardless of who created the server. Therefore If you believe yourself unable to moderate the discord for whatever reason, do not create it. Let a fan create and run it for instance! That way, as the mods stated, you wont be liable for whatever goes on there!
Secondly, even if there was a coordinated effort to make your discord seem like a shithole surely you would be able to prove it either wasn’t always that way or that some sort of moderation attempt was made. If as an owner you know you won’t be able to moderate the discord for some amount of time, leave the moderation up to a trusted community member. I have faith in the mods and I think they have shown they are willing to work with authors on this case by case so I’m of the opinion noone actually has any reason to worry and if they still do they can extremely easily sidestep it by having a friend or a fan be the owner of the server.
Why are so many people posting screenshots from the discord? Wasn’t the point of this ban to distance the forum from that discord?
Cause me personally I’ve seen more filth from that community (that I would’ve been happy going without seeing btw) in the day or so since the ban then I ever did in the year or so it was apparently a problem and that’s solely from people of this community posting screenshots.
I dunno feels like people are giving them the engagement they want but don’t deserve to participate in a flame war, when this was supposed to be about cutting them off
Don’t you think that freedom of speech has become less free? What they do on other forums should not affect this forum. As I understand it, COG’s authority should be limited to moderating this forum, particularly the WIP threads and their content related to praise and criticism of the author, as well as avoiding excessive “water” in these threads. By taking responsibility for the content of other forums, COG staff is essentially becoming the internet police they claim to avoid.
To be honest, I was attracted to the ideas of neo-Nazism when I was 11-13 years old, but I outgrew them when I realized that they were incompatible with reality. If someone has creative potential on one side and shows it to us, but turns away from us and showsothers ideas that was acceptable 90+/- years ago… Well, so be it. Perhaps by involving this person in the arts, we are preventing the world from having another Hitler.
The solution to all these problems may be a strict restriction/moderation of the content of the threads, in particular, a ban on external resources, as well as “water” that is not related to the content of the thread on this particular forum, without regard to other forums.
And, regarding those people that are everywhere and everywhere (везде и всюду): you can always unsubscribe/leave the channel, etc. Don’t come to another forum and complain like little children, causing headaches to staff.
А теперь немного от себя, а не от переводчика: время юности это время проб и ошибок. Понимание, что твои идеи могут разрушить тебя, твоих близких, друзей и просто окружающих - довольно отрезвляющее чуство. Кому-то дано понять, кому-то нет…
No, it shouldn’t. But that goes both ways. CoG isn’t going to spot-check random fan fora - even if they wanted to, they have more important things to do with their time. The only reason they would take an interest in what’s happening in another forum is because it is affecting this one.
Like, HOW? I was at one point arguing with three different mods about the same post. THREE. IN THE SAME DM THREAD (and I still stand by the post that sparked the argument). And I didn’t get banned for any amount of time.
As it turns out, it is. None of them is going to the Discord to ban users there.
JFC, THIS was your objection to Nazism? “We are unable to pull it off”? Jesus fucking all the Christs.
As for the people asking what the point of this thread remaining open, for me, at least, is related to something that @Cataphrak said above:
There were apparently people positively chomping at the bit to tell on themselves, and I’m very glad for this opportunity to find out who they are.
Well, you wouldn’t, would you? The ENTIRE POINT of having mods is that nearly everyone does not actually see the inappropriate behaviour. It’s why the mod position exists for. This is like saying “I’ve never seen anyone with measles, why would there be a vaccine for it?”.
Maybe Cultivator-Anon should use all the time and effort and money he’s planning to waste on a hopeless defamation lawsuit and use it to rewrite the game in Twine instead, I dunno
People are just trying to show how bad it is because there are way too many users in this thread who are downplaying or ignoring the content of the server because they’re more pissed about their beloved author getting banned then the fact that his fanboys are coming onto the forum to act the exact same way they do in those screenshots.
Oh, and here’s his shitty excuse for not moderating his Discord server.
So he won’t moderate his server because he doesn’t want to spend time banning people for shit-talking (Using racist and homophobic slurs and insults.), but he won’t create any mods because he’s “afraid” they’ll start a clique or something. So the solution is to just let people be the absolute worst because he can’t be bothered to find any fix for the problem because, my guess, he doesn’t actually give a shit about any of this and how it effects the forum.
Not entirely true. Aura Clash is one of the few games of its genre on this forum and it seemed fairly popular. And while I myself wasn’t aware of the Discord, there are people on here also on Reddit where the Discord seemed to be known and discussed. I think it’s good we are now aware because now we know the type of people Anon associates with, and who on this thread seems to having an easy time making excuses for him.
Evidence, I suppose, and an example of the things they talked about. Without the screenshots in the first post, people wouldn’t understand how bad the Discord is unless they go on the server themselves. So now everyone is going on there to find more examples because as I stated above, alot of people are downplaying the behavior in the server. No, it wasn’t just edgy jokes. No, it wasn’t just dark humor.
Maybe because the mods weren’t like “Oh, a slur/racist joke, let me screenshot it and then delete the post, which might make it more likely for other people to see it, upsetting them because it wasn’t removed fast enough.”
That you know of. You’re also making claims but can you prove they didn’t happen?
It’s not about forum members going into the Discord server, it’s about Discord members coming into the forum. We can’t have this discussion without the Discord. That’s the entire problem, it all goes back to the Discord server because that’s where the people causing trouble in the forum are coming from, and it shows that Anon is not the type of person Choice of Games wants to work with. Simple.
Not why he was banned, as was stated multiple times. And Choice of Games has the right to not want to work with someone who at the very least tolerates racist and homophobic slurs. Speaking of which…
Congratulations for not being offended, what do you want, a gold star? Five more minutes on the swing? Choccy milk? Check your privlege, not everyone can ignore things like that, other people do get hurt by those words, and no, this isn’t about an overreach of authority for the millionth time.
Good for you. Other people have noticed some questionable things. The Jewish World Order subtext with the demons for example.
That’s true, but COG mods aren’t going to the Discord server to try and enfore COG forum rules, are they? That’s not the point of any of this.
He isn’t causing people to come here, but he is responsible for the community he allowed to grow, and that is a community of assholes that think it’s funny to come here and act like, what is it? Assholes.
They did that, then a year went by and nothing got better. They were doing their “job” (Not their actual fucking job by the way, they are volunteering in their free time.) but because of Anon’s inability to regulate his community, this situation happened. And frankly, myself and many other people are glad to have been informed of why this happened, and what kind of people Anon and others in this forum choose to associate with. Sorry you don’t feel the same.
No. If you really want to make that argument, it’s censorship. And they are not censoring, moderating, or administering the actions of a private forum, they are responding to the PUBLIC actions of people coming to the COG forum. They have a right to moderate here, which they are because yes, they are doing their “jobs”.
Funny, neither did Anon in his Discord server. You know. The thing that caused this whole issue. Because his refusal to properly moderate his server ended up creating a community of racists, homophobes, and antisemitic 4-channers who started coming here, making the forum mods having to moderate even more thanks to a problem that was preventable.
According to your logic I don’t see why @Kaoru and many others were banned.
Also it’s weird that one of the reason states there were people who were coming from that discord and making trouble here. But where’s the evidence of this?
Most people in this thread didn’t even know about the game or the discord before this post was made and I haven seen any screenshots of inappropriate behavior on this site by people from the discord.
In fact it seems like the only people coming from his discord and “making trouble” for the moderators are the ones who took those screenshots.
Every single complaint posted here about Anon and about the people in the discord are about stuff that happened off site.
I haven’t seen one example of someone from his discord coming here and saying or doing something inappropriate on this site in the past.
It’s also strange that despite the fact everyone here seems to hate the discord. People from this site keep going in there, just so they can come back here and complain about it more? If you don’t like the game and you don’t like the people and you don’t like anon what reason do you have to to go to his discord at all?
I don’t necessarily disagree with the ban. But if the whole idea of the ban is to cut ties with Anon and the communities associated with him it seems like you would want to discourage people from this site going there.
I feel like so far this has only served to make that community more well known and caused people who might not have ever interacted with the community to do so. It also seems to be encouraging and rewarding people here for going off site and complaining to moderators and staff about things happening off site. That too seems like it would take up moderator time
We don’t debate moderation decisions publically. If someone feels their ban is unjust, they can appeal to the company at support.
Separately, PLEASE STOP posting screenshots from the Discord. I will be editing them out of your posts from this point. We’re not interested in a cross-fora flame war. This thread is here so you can tell us what tyrants we are, not to ridicule or debate the contents of the Discord.
I understand why the author Annon was banned, but why was the author Kaoru banned? Was he the same as Annon or what? I do not demand an answer, just asking if anybody is willing to provide a reason for the ban.
Edit:
I myself was at the beginning confused about the Annon ban
But after I understood when showed evidence of his behaviour and that of his fans I completely supported/support the ban for Anon
