[Foxka]

The amount of people that are okay with this just because they like the person is highly concerning. Some of you are staff. Please stop and think about the actions and stuff that's being carried out, and why. As staff, you guys should not be okay with threats of that nature, even as a shitpost.

The difference is that we KNOW he's joking around, doesn't mean it, and the punishment was escalated to a permanent ban. Also, i wouldn't call myself his friend by any means but even I can see the punishment doesn't fit the "crime" that occurred.

To add on to your point, if this was said in VC i can almost 100% guarantee people would sense the sarcasm and tell it was a joke.

Text is a different beast and you can't always tell tone, but here you could clearly tell he was joking... +1 unban him i'm sure he knows he made an oopsie

[thaye]

The main argument I'm seeing here is that everyone here could tell it was sarcasm, but that doesn't matter; Discord doesn't care. Discord will purge the whole thing if you don't moderate this kind of stuff. If we had 100% authority over the Discord, this will be a no brainer to instantly unban, but we don't and it puts the whole community at risk.

+1 reduction, dont be dumb next time

[Jammin]

The main argument I'm seeing here is that everyone here could tell it was sarcasm, but that doesn't matter; Discord doesn't care. Discord will purge the whole thing if you don't moderate this kind of stuff. If we had 100% authority over the Discord, this will be a no brainer to instantly unban, but we don't and it puts the whole community at risk.

Thayr's comment here does a great job of summarizing the main issue here.  If that comment was made in one of the gaming servers, where the only oversight external to the community (Steam and Garry's Mod) don't really care, then it would have been ignored. The joke is clearly that - a dumb joke of a vague threat against a non-specific mall. There is no specific threat here - the actionable threat is not specific, there is no specified target, there is no plan and/or time included within the supposed threat, it was made with reference to a rather annoying discord punishment that an abusive discord admin enacted, and was overall a troll more than anything. The entire community was trolling in that channel - that's why the slowmode was activated - and this was just one more dumb joke on top of the other dumb jokes.

If this was on the forums, this would also not have been as bad of an issue. We control the vast majority of the aspects on the forum website, with our only dependency being the server host - someone who won't care unless we are dedicated to illegal activity.

However, discord is controlled by, well, discord. They have strict terms of service and have set up the expectation that the server's local moderation team, aka Dink's discord staff team, are to enforce it to the best of their ability.
Because our discord is a Community Server, we are REQUIRED to abide by, as a server, the discord Community Guidelines. This includes all content therein - it must align with what discord wants. The top three categories under which discord removed servers are, accoridng to their 2021 transparency report:

• Cybercrime (hacking into accounts, etc.)
  
• CSAM/Exploitative content (anything sexually explicit that can damage subjects in psychological/reputational/economic way)
  
• Violent Extremism (including mass shootings and "violent extremist ideologies")
  

This is why we take violations of TOS so seriously, and act so harshly on stuff like the comment stoked made. Had discord discorered it using one of their "proactive" methods, they may decide to take unilateral action on our server and just wipe us out.

To prevent this, I, as the person who banned stoked (it wasn't anyone on my team, blame me), issued a permanent ban and filed a Discord TNS report. These reports are what discord uses to determine whether a violation of their TOS necessitates further action. By my doing this, I am taking the discretion out of my hands and into discord's hands. While this was an obvious joke in the context we have available, I don't trust discord to dig around for that context with their proactive moderation. I'd rather up-front report it to discord, let their reactive TNS team review it (and get all the context to go with it) and decide what to do from there. Then, whether stoked is punished or not, is none of my business. What is my business is whether dink's gmod discord remains up or not. And given discord's increased aggression towards server deletion this past year, I'm going to try and stay on their good side.

This is why we made the ban a permanent ban (essentailly to be appealed) and why we took the action we did. We let a LOT slide in the discord (take any kind of gander at the banter that occurs in #general on a daily basis) - you cannot say we over moderate the discord. The vast majority of actions we take are verbal warnings that don't involve any action. The vast majority of corrective action we take are on obvious trolls/raiders/hacked accounts. But, we have to uphold the guidelines where it matters most.

Given that stoked understands/has apologies for his comment, and given that discord TNS has had adequate time to review, with no obvious action taken from them, stoked will be given a reduction to time served; he is now UNBANNED from the server.

Stoked, don't say stupid stuff like that in general. It may not matter too much long-term in our small community, but I guarantee you if you say anything of that sort in school/at a job/in real life, that is a great way to get kicked out of school/lose a job/get into a real life jail cell.

Ban appeal ACCEPTED with a reduction to time served.