[Jammin]

Hello there!

As some staff are aware, I have been inactive from staffing since the incident on Tuesday involving the community banning of another member. If you wish, you may relive the experience here. 

During the discussion here, certain legal yet vague threats were made by a community member over the inaction taken by both game and discord staff, over the actions of the now-banned member’s words – words that involve illegal activity. While it continues to be my belief that absolutely no crime occurred, by any involved party (talking about it does not equate taking action), none-the-less the threats made by this person, for lack of a better phrase, shook me.

I value nothing more than my privacy and anonymity in this community.
Having a lawsuit and/or police report filed against the server could potentially involve my anonymity being lifted – with identifying information that the server owner has available possibly filed to law enforcement and/or the court system to appropriately document the situation. While this is unlikely to actually occur, any threat to my privacy and anonymity I take as a matter of life and death. Most things in this community won’t affect me IRL, and I can safely leave if things ever get too toxic.

But having my involvement in this community, especially my involvement in taking action against a pedophile, revealed publicly could propagate to actual real-life consequences for me (employers aren’t going to look at “oh, he banned a pedophile”, they will look at “oh, he was affiliated with a pedophile, lets ignore his application to work for us”).

Over the past 2 days, I have been contemplating my next move – I have seriously contemplated resigning from discord staff and TTT server staff. I contemplated departing the community entirely. I do not want to be under legal threat for not answering a discord staff ping. I do not want to be under legal threat for being really busy, and having only 5 minutes to address a situation. I do not want to be under legal threat for not launching a full and instantaneous investigation, Warren-report style, the moment I get directed to something.
All of that being said, I have reviewed my situation with regards to my interaction with the community, instituted certain protections to ensure my own online safety and privacy, and evaluated my own personal policy with regards to staffing.

As of this moment, I will be resuming staffing immediately for both discord and TTT. However, I will only be doing so under the following conditions:
1.      I staff on my own hours, when I am free to do so. If someone pings discord staff, I will go into the discord server to check out what is happening IF I AM FREE. If I am not free to do so, I will handle the situation when I am free to do so.
2.      If I am available, I will staff. If I am not available, I will not staff. I am not going to feel obligated to staff just because there is an “emergency” situation. And I am not going to be threatened/coerced into staffing when I am not available. I feel that I have been very responsive in general to on-call pings for discord and ttt staff, but I am not going to have my generosity in that manner abused.
3.      This is a non-nsfw discord. If someone posts anything NSFW – including pornographic imagery, extremely explicit conversation, or so much as mentions the term “loli” with respect to underage exploitation – whether it be in a joking manner or not, I will permaban that person immediately and follow up with the admin team on a discord TOS report and a community ban. In the case regarding the banned player, I should have done a permanent mute instead of simply issuing a strike to the offending player.
4.      Most importantly: I am not going to be legally liable for any “inaction” taken as a staff member. I made a quick response and tried to take brief action to stop the conversation about illegal activity. While the player needed to be banned, my actions of getting the conversation about illegal activity to stop was successful – both the player and other members who were discussing the pedophilic activity ceased the discussion at my request in the situation outlined above. But I’m not going to tolerate legal threats for not taking an extreme action.

In Summary:

• I have taken personal action to ensure my safety and privacy, and I believe I have mitigated my concerns keeping me away from the community.
  
• I recognize that I did not take enough action with regards to the situation. Re-reading the evidence posted on the forum thread, I do agree that the player should have been community banned for his actions – they went well beyond the threshold of “weird.” I should have issued a temporary mute until admins could authorize a discord TOS report. I will take these much more seriously in the future – as I mentioned, any mention of “loli” will result in a permaban/discord TOS.
  
• If I don’t have time to deal with a discord issue, I’m either not going to deal with it, or take temporary action (e.g. muting those involved) until a more thorough investigation can take place. If that means 4-5 people are arguing about something, 4-5 people may get temp muted.
  
• I’m not going to be intimidated into staffing/not staffing.
  
• I will care for me and my own above the server when necessary.
  

I want to thank @Prince Nicky La Flama Blanca, @La Flama Blanca, and @"MurderAdminPrince" for their support and advice, as well as @"Nicol" and @TheUltraFish for handling the situation with the now-banned member. I also want to thank @synthray and @Noire for their support. Thanks to @"(j)ax" for keeping me accountable the right way, and to @JesseTheUndeadCowboy for alerting me to the incident initially.

Note: This isn't meant to re-debate the incident that occurred. This is just stating how my approach will be moving forward.

Edit: I'm hoping to move onwards and put this behind me, that's my point in making the thread. Not to revive old/past drama, but to move forward.

[Mana]

Nicky doing so much of God's work he gets pinged thrice

[Damien]

I personally think there could be legal action taken, not towards the server but towards the predator.

[La Flama Blanca]

Discord Staff have lives too and it's important that people recognize that. With all the other servers, we regularly utilize ban requests that can be handled hours later. Yet, some players expect that the 3 Discord staff members to immediately respond to each and every ping within seconds. That's not realistic and it's not fair.

Now if there is actual illegal conduct being posted in the Discord, you could also ping anyone with the Mod+ role, or any of the admins, so they can delete it and remove the person immediately.

I personally didn't interpret the comments made in that thread to be threatening legal action, but I will address that briefly - this is a staff team comprised entirely of volunteers. They aren't omniscient and they aren't going to be perfect every time. We do not tolerate illegal behavior on our servers, but we also won't tolerate anyone making serious legal threats against the community.

[fanta]

You guys really banned Craig???

[⋆ Fx ⋆]

Legal action is a bit far to take for being salty over a server on a 16 yr old game. No one was sent nudes, no minors have sent nudes, no one was sexually assaulted or groomed. I honestly feel they were just a poor choice of jokes that went too far. This ex community member has no bases or grounds to take legal action and if they were, the only person who can be held legally responsible is the predator in question which of whom I don't genuinely believe is a predator just a person who made stupid edgy "jokes". I don't think you guys have anything to worry about.

[Lexxx]

Hey Jammin, message from Lex. The situations in which you actually went through were very complicated but I admire your maturity to deal with all of this was 100% perfect. I've had a lot of bad experiences on the internet,especially as staff on a server in Brazil. All that I hope for everyone in this community is personal security. because all players deserve to be safe from everything that happens on the server and in the community. I would like to welcome you back to the TTT server and Discord.

Huge Hug :D