Sanderson Elimination: Questions & Answers and Game Meta Discussion

[Kasimir he/him]

7 hours ago, Araris Valerian said:

Wilson might be able to comment a bit more on this later, as she had some experience with a player names Gears around LG74.

As the GM for that game, I can probably fill in the gaps of the historical record a little as I still recall the incident. Gears made RP of his character choking Quinn's—Quinn was due to be exed. A different player filed a complaint to me about the inappropriate content of the RP and I forwarded the complaint to the IM for action. My recollection is that the decision was to speak to Gears about it, but I was really notified more or less to close the loop, as I was GMing and thus still the primary line of contact with the complainant.

Edited February 4, 2025 by Kasimir

[Arraenae]

Quote

The report should be mentioned in the SE Admin channel on the server, which I and several other 17th Shard staff have access to. Whichever staffer noticed the report first would take it to the 17th Shard staff in the other server to discuss there.

Thank you for the response! It's useful to know how this should be handled.

I'm sorry to say that this does not line up with my experience. Across multiple points of time in 2021, 2022, and 2023, I contacted one subforum mod and three separate Discord mods about a case of sexual harassment that happened in Discord DMs. You should know, Wilson, because you heard about this in February 2021. The other three Discord mods who I spoke to about it later, Young Bard, Burnt, and BrightnessRadiant, all acted like it was the first time they had ever heard about it. None of them seemed aware as an option that my report could be forwarded to 17th Shard staff to be judged properly. The way they spoke about it, their options were to keep a closer eye on the perpetrator named, speak to them privately about it, or to privately ask you why you decided not to act further. If reports like this are supposed to go to 17th Shard staff, and subforum and discord mods are expected to bring this information to them, why did that not happen?

I hope I am the only person that fell through the cracks like this. I suspect I am not. I say this now because I have been watching and waiting to see if SE would get any better at this, and it seems like staying silent will only encourage the de facto reality that local level moderation does not feel that they can act on anything they hear or escalate it to a level of moderation that will actually do anything meaningful about it.

[Kasimir he/him]

42 minutes ago, Arraenae said:

I contacted one subforum mod and three separate Discord mods about a case of sexual harassment that happened in Discord DMs. You should know, Wilson, because you heard about this in February 2021.

I am going to regret saying this, probably, for reasons that have to do with detesting being lobbied about as a political playing piece by seemingly everyone involved in this when I'm probably one of the biggest problems in SE from 2023-2024. I am going to regret this no matter what.

I will only state this:

A. I do not consider myself in a position to litigate a moderation decision from 2021. I am not a particularly insightful person or a mediator, and these issues are generally not things I can deal with. I do not agree with Rae's decision to take, at every step, the most aggressive and scorched earth approach possible to resolution. However, I do not consider myself willing to police the behaviour of a victim, nor to silence her.

B. Rae's experience emerged in her interview. I was appalled because who could reasonably want to believe this has happened in our community? For the record, I will state: I have seen the transcripts. I have spoken to a number of the people involved. I do not agree with the judgement it was a messy break-up and I agree with the assessment it was a case of sexual harassment. I have identified some factors* that could be regarded as confounding, but in general, still cannot in good conscience dismiss it as not constituting sexual harassment. I note that others have seen the transcripts as well in the process. Whether they choose to stand by this account or not is between them and their own honest read of the situation.

I cannot in good conscience say anything else here, and damned one way or another, I guess.

52 minutes ago, Arraenae said:

None of them seemed aware as an option that my report could be forwarded to 17th Shard staff to be judged properly. The way they spoke about it, their options were to keep a closer eye on the perpetrator named, speak to them privately about it, or to privately ask you why you decided not to act further. If reports like this are supposed to go to 17th Shard staff, and subforum and discord mods are expected to bring this information to them, why did that not happen?

In general, my read of Shard policy would require me to say on grounds of conscience that this would not be consistent. It is entirely possible I'm not well-versed in it. Certainly I've never been anything more than a consistent moderation problem where SE and the Shard have been concerned. But:

1. Even if one thinks I am entirely wrong in my read of sexual harassment, I would say that there is a prima facie case to be made out of violation of the Shard's 2020 harassment policies.

Quote

• Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they’re not appropriate.
• Simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “*hug*” or “*backrub*”) after a request to stop.
• Unwelcome sexual attention. Remember: it’s not just that ‘no means no’ - coerced or reluctant agreement, as well as silence, does not mean yes.

I note that in only one point is an explicit request to stop required.

2. I think my perspective at this point is: "Is there something we can do about this to improve the community?" On face value, if this wasn't forwarded Shard-side, that's a violation of currently-stated policy. We can't change the past. If we could, there would be so much more we could change. I don't know what would constitute justice by this point in time and I can't even begin to work that out. But my question is, can this be tightened up to bring us into full compliance with how the Shard's harassment policies are supposed to work? Training? IDK.

I don't like that any of the other three didn't seem to think this should be escalated. I note that at least two of them expressed in subsequent conversations with me that the content they saw made them feel uncomfortable. One of them directly told me, "We can't police DMs", and that's directly not compliant with Shard policy at all, where one moderator mentioned that DMs can be taken into account, and:

Quote

This code of conduct applies to 17th Shard spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of the 17th Shard community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by community members. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The staff reserve the right, at their discretion, to exclude people from the 17th Shard based on their past behavior, including behavior outside 17th Shard spaces and behavior towards people who are not in 17th Shard.

3. I would note that, in my view, the most damaging situation would be for members of SE to believe they need to bypass SE mods and to approach 17s mods when experiencing harassment or anything else. Because this just represents a total lack of faith that SE's mod team will do right by them, and that's not a good reflection of the health of the community.

4.  If we're doing a major recruitment drive, I think there's an imperative to get this right, for the sake of the new generation of players and the ones after that. We need to do right by them.

 

 

 

*Feminist philosophy teaches us we do not require perfect victims. Similarly, pointing to relationship status doesn't really change this: sexual offences can be committed within relationships, outside of them, during messy break-ups, etc. And whether this was simply a poor sense of boundaries or actual malice changes the severity, rather than whether an offence did or did not occur. Finally, one may argue Rae had too much curiosity for her own good. I don't deny this, but I think that anyone who knows Rae enough to make statements about her for her ostensible good, as the other person did, should also know Rae enough to recognise that Rae is curious and to take this into account when regarding any interaction as explicit, robust consent.**

** There's a deeper point to be made here about what constitutes consent, and how those DMs very quickly began to assume a de facto 'opt-out' model of consent, which is deeply disturbing. I'm choosing not to litigate the rest of this at this point.

[Ookla de los Cuervos he/him]

5 hours ago, Arraenae said:

Thank you for the response! It's useful to know how this should be handled.

I'm sorry to say that this does not line up with my experience. Across multiple points of time in 2021, 2022, and 2023, I contacted one subforum mod and three separate Discord mods about a case of sexual harassment that happened in Discord DMs. You should know, Wilson, because you heard about this in February 2021. The other three Discord mods who I spoke to about it later, Young Bard, Burnt, and BrightnessRadiant, all acted like it was the first time they had ever heard about it. None of them seemed aware as an option that my report could be forwarded to 17th Shard staff to be judged properly. The way they spoke about it, their options were to keep a closer eye on the perpetrator named, speak to them privately about it, or to privately ask you why you decided not to act further. If reports like this are supposed to go to 17th Shard staff, and subforum and discord mods are expected to bring this information to them, why did that not happen?

I hope I am the only person that fell through the cracks like this. I suspect I am not. I say this now because I have been watching and waiting to see if SE would get any better at this, and it seems like staying silent will only encourage the de facto reality that local level moderation does not feel that they can act on anything they hear or escalate it to a level of moderation that will actually do anything meaningful about it.

It depresses me to know that this has been an issue in the past. Please stay safe, and I would probably just trust the admins on matters of this, I’m fairly new to SE so I can’t necessarily comment. 

[Jo and the Bush all/any]

What is the training process for new SE Mods/IM's/Admins? I'm not sure I've ever heard of one, other than simply trying to choose people with good judgement to be them.

[Araris Valerian he/him]

3 hours ago, A Joe in the Bush said:

What is the training process for new SE Mods/IM's/Admins? I'm not sure I've ever heard of one, other than simply trying to choose people with good judgement to be them.

Currently there isn't much of one. I'm not a discord mod, so I can't speak to that side of things, but what I was told about was largely administrative stuff; how to use subforum mod powers, what the practical side of IMing looks like. Perhaps in part because of a lack of training in regards to bad actors, I'm very comfortable forwarding on stuff to other mods.

[little wilson she/her]

I've spent the majority of today (RIP work) reading back over the 2021 report Rae has referenced, summarizing it for the Shard staff, and bringing it up to them for discussion. There is nothing I can say to defend 2021 Wilson's actions in not taking this report seriously, but 2025 Wilson is truly sorry for how this was handled, @Arraenae. I'm sorry. I know that's a pittance and 4 years too late, but I apologize.

This has laid bare the fact that training for these types of situations was and is abysmal for the server moderators. It probably didn't help that for a long time, we were trying to keep the server separate from the forum. Now that we're trying to re-integrate the server with the forum community officially, I'm hoping we can take this as a learning experience, and implement training among the server moderators so they know what to do if anyone comes to them privately about a similar report.

I hope no one else slipped through the cracks, but I honestly don't know if other moderators had private reports that didn't make it to the general modchat. We'll do better going forward.

In that vein and with that mission: do you Rae, or anyone else, have any suggestions on how we can better improve compliance with the Shard's policy?

[Arraenae]

I'm happy that moderation wants to address this problem. I view what happened as a structural issue rather than outright malice on anybody's part, and luckily there are solutions for that. Harassment isn't a unique problem in online communities, and there are lots of strategies to catch and deal with it that can be ported over as appropriate.

Some suggestions:

One person should not be able to stop a report going anywhere, no matter how well-intentioned or personally virtuous they are. If the spreadsheet can be believed, SE has had 400+ people passing in and out for a decade, so it's inevitable that one person with sole discretion over judging everything would make a mistake. What doesn't have to be inevitable is that one single person's mistake will make the whole system fail. Restructure the chain of command however necessary so that one person isn't the bottleneck for all reports going in and out. Publicly announce what changes are being made.

Post the rules of what moderators will act on in the rules thread, the SE discord rules, and wherever else people are likely to look for this type of information. Post what is the normal process for dealing with this in the same place. Overall, I got the impression that nobody involved knew the rules that were actually supposed to be in place. Burnt and BR wanted to act further, but they felt they didn't have standing to act and were effectively powerless. If they had known that they could act on DMs or incidents in the past, the situation would have turned out very differently. Same if I had realized that going to 17th Shard moderation directly was a possible option.

Look for other possible cases. When speaking to other SEers in the past, I got the impression that multiple people felt that SE had a culture of silence that didn't take harassment seriously (sexual or otherwise), and this contributed to them drifting away. Some of them were quite angry over it. I can't prove that my case was the only one sat on for multiple years, but I think it will be worth asking around to see if there is anything else worth investigating.

I hope that this will bring a significant improvement to the community. I made an official departure in 2023, but I came back because I heard that members are considering what needs to change in order to keep it alive. I figured that putting this out there in public would either demonstrate to incoming members that this is not a safe community, or catalyze some change to make it safe. Luckily, it seems like this is the latter case.

SE was a good experience for me between 2015 and 2020. I hope that future members will be able to enjoy their time here too.

Edited February 5, 2025 by Arraenae

[Jo and the Bush all/any]

7 hours ago, Arraenae said:

Look for other possible cases. When speaking to other SEers in the past, I got the impression that multiple people felt that SE had a culture of silence that didn't take harassment seriously (sexual or otherwise), and this contributed to them drifting away. Some of them were quite angry over it. I can't prove that my case was the only one sat on for multiple years, but I think it will be worth asking around to see if there is anything else worth investigating.

While talking about this with @xxGaea last night, I learned that this is exactly why they left SE. They had brought up multiple cases of harassment, and each time it had been brushed off as jokes in good fun, even by me. They gave me several examples over the years of the normalization of lesser members not being taken seriously by staff, including me, who. So I agree with this. SE does have a culture of tolerating at least minor abuse and harassment, and in certain cases tolerating much higher levels of abuse if it comes from members who have much higher status in the community, as was the case with Arraenae.

I think all of Arraenae's suggestions are good ones. I also think that members should keep a better eye out for people who are feeling pressured to stay silent or forced to not make a scene.

[Biplet she/her]

Hey! I’ve been kind of watching this on the periphery (courtesy of my lovely husband) and thought I’d throw my hat in the ring. While never experiencing sexual harassment, there have been negative experiences in the past that have left me with a bad taste in my mouth. While my lack of playing is mostly attributed to work life getting too busy, I will admit that reports not being taken seriously was something I noticed before. 
 

I moderate a fairly large (4200 member) discord server with robust policies regarding discipline and harassment. We’ve had our fair share of very serious cases (some criminal), so I have a lot of experience handling this kind of stuff. I’d love to help out in whatever way I can with the changes SE is wanting to make!

[Ashbringer he/him]

To toss in my relatively oblivious hat:

The SE Rules post does say that we follow the general 17th Shard rules, and provides a hyperlink to them. However, the link is simply on the word "here" at the end of a sentence on Player Etiquette, and that link also takes you to a set of 3 other links as the Forum rules are somewhat split. It's there, but could be much clearer. Especially if this has been a recurring problem.

It would be a good idea to explicitly restate the forum rules concerning harassment and similar things in the SE rules, as well as saying that yes we follow the greater 17th Shard rules, instead of just saying that "we do that" and leaving it to the people who need support to learn more about them. The SE rules themselves, on a quick skim, don't say much about when something needs to be escalated any higher than the IM.

And while the IM can adjudicate during the game, and I assume the IMs do discuss things that require intervention amongst themselves to look for patterns, it can dilute things when someone is asking multiple IMs across multiple games if something is a concern versus going directly to a (subforum or forum) moderator for something that is above a single game of SE. I agree with Rae's point that there should never be a single individual who make a final decision on things, but there could also be specific people to contact in the event of possible harassment, or a direct link to where one would report something that is clearly marked, whether that's directed to go to the subforum mods or the official forum system.

On 2/3/2025 at 6:39 AM, little wilson said:

For both general harassment and sexual harassment, we refer to the 17th Shard Code of Conduct, specifically the post about harassment. This post also covers harassment that takes place off of the Shard and Discord. Reports of this nature should go to a 17th Shard moderator or admin, as further discussion will happen among the site staff and not the subforum moderation team. The fact that the harassment is game-related does not change this. Harassment of any kind for any reason will not be tolerated. 

Even just... copy-paste this into the SE rules page. 

 

Like it or not, and whether we're trying to change it or not, SE is a very insular community, which means that people will be more reliant on the subforum rules and moderators than the forum ones. I'm fairly fortunate in that I've had very few issues with SE myself, but I also know that I probably wouldn't notice an issue in front of me: anything involving Gears went right over my head, and when Illwei left they addressed me as a reason why, to my major surprise. As far as I know, nothing came of that, but maybe something should have.

[Arraenae]

Looking back on things, I feel that the SE discord created a far more permissive environment than anyone really anticipated. It was an extremely common thing for server members to publicly "ship" SE players together. Multiple people under 18 expressed discomfort with it at the time, but that didn't stop other people from shipping them or discussing ships around them. Several ships were knowingly across minor-adult lines. This involved basically everyone active on the server between 2016 and 2017, including me. (I'm sorry to say that I was one of those people shipping other people.) After that it declined in frequency, but still got mentioned as a storied bit of community history and ingroup status. Overall, I think it created the impression that it was acceptable to talk intrusively about the romantic status of server members regardless of age, that people saying no weren't to be taken seriously, and that this type of behavior was not only allowed but encouraged.

Considering all of that, it's not a surprise that private conduct between server members followed suit.

[little wilson she/her]

I and the other subforum moderators are paying attention to this thread. We haven't directly started discussing it as a group yet, but we are watching and will be using many, if not all of the suggestions that have been brought up here. Also, I would be very interested in talking further with you @Biplet about your expertise with this subject.

Other things, briefly: I've opened a discussion up to the server mod team, and one of the things we're talking about is using a bot in the server for user-reports, so any reports made through the bot go directly to the whole mod team and won't get lost/dismissed. I also plan to make the changes suggested to the Rules thread and will be updating the server rules as well, since they are *very* outdated.

[Kasimir he/him]

I think this might be a good point in the thread to remind people that the Lylo Group is still taking interviews from SE players, both current and former. (Honestly if you're just SE-curious, get in contact with us anyway, we'd still like to ask you a bunch of questions, just different ones from the ones the SE players get.)

We comprise players in the community who first sprang to action when we noticed SE's dire demographic state, and are collecting both qualitative and quantitative data about the situation. While we are a player-formed group, we try to work with the mods and deconflict certain avenues of inquiry. Our short-term aim is to allow the community (and not just the mods) to discuss SE's predicament on solid, data-driven grounds, and to hopefully issue recommendations for improvement. Our long-term aim is to hand over an SE in recovery/in improving shape to the next generation, as most of us are likely on our way out.

We aim to share the collated data with the community publicly, in the form of a preliminary report, and then a more complete final report. (The structure is subject to change, but fundamentally boils down to: we don't want people to be caught in analysis paralysis but we do want theories of change to be grounded in data, whether qualitative or quantitative.)

All interviews will be kept strictly confidential. We only share findings, rather than interview transcripts or results. This is because a moderate number of players have shared fairly personal information with us.

If you are willing to offer an interview, and we haven't already interviewed you, please contact: @Kasimir or @|TJ|.

If you're interested in helping out, also contact us! No amount of help is too small. We've already gotten volunteers who offered to review/rewrite threads or bits and pieces, volunteers who want to try to work on SE's competitiveness problem, and so on. We're all lending what we can as members of the community, in whatever capacity we can. We could always use people with the time and energy to help. We want to make SE a fun community we can all be proud of

Edited February 6, 2025 by Kasimir

[Furamirionind They/Any/All]

I just want to pop in and say I'm really happy to see this conversation being had and taken seriously. I know that in my case when I was active here I was in my teens and could be rather immature and overreactive at times, but when I was active, there were times when I felt targeted and bullied and, broadly speaking, those feelings weren't taken seriously by admin. But I kept trying to have these conversations and people would push back and say we didn't need them. That push back came both from admins and community members. I do want to remind everyone that if someone feels bullied, you should take that seriously even if you disagree. Maybe it was a "harmless comment" or maybe it was a misunderstanding. But when someone comes to you and is vulnerable about their feelings, we as a community have an obligation not to tell people their feelings aren't valid. There were definitely times with me that misunderstandings blew up into big issues. But if I had trusted the people telling me I was being unreasonable to actually see my POV and listen to me, i would have been way more likely to calm down. And I didn't trust people because times when my issues were legitimate they were brushed off.

I went through a period of constantly leaving and coming back to the community due to these issues drastically affecting my mental health but not wanting to lose the people I felt I had strong connections with.

In my last game here, there was an instance I remember as being... on its own it wasn't bullying but incredibly rude and disrespectful. However in greater context I definitely think it was bullying. It did also have to do with the person brought up earlier in this thread. I tried to call it out in game and then followed up in this thread about as a community we need to be willing to call out problematic stuff whether or not you're an admin. Whether or not you know if it hurt someone. I was really disturbed by people telling me this wasn't a concern. Or that admin was already doing their job when from my perspective that blatantly wasn't true.

As a reminder though (not to this thread/convo but SE at large), its on a community to keep the community healthy not just admin. If something problematic happens in public, community members should be calling that out and supporting each other. If you're unsure, you can follow up with the target to see how they interpreted it or just err on the cautious side as it may or may not have been bad to one person but definitely would to another. Especially how, from my non-data-driven experience many people in the community tend to be high school/young adult age where social skills can often be very lacking.

In addition to what Rae said, think it would be good to make sure all SE players know the best way to address these kinds of things. For instance, in the context of the issue I'm talking about Alv mentioned I should have made my post responding in game in blue text to draw IM attention and make it clear it was an out of game comment.

Edit: tldr I completely agree with Rae and think these conversations need to be had publicly with the community and not behind closed doors.

Edited February 7, 2025 by Furamirionind

[little wilson she/her]

I have made updates to the Rules & Etiquette thread - specifically the Player Etiquette post - to highlight the harassment policy. I've also re-done the server rules so they are current and include a section on harassment reporting. Please let me know if, when reading those updates, something is still missing.