Create a separate forum for trial characters and new players
The rest of the forums are subscription only
All silences are issued by mods aka real people
Post better
Report feature having a way to explain yourself would allow you to point out abuse.
If someone is willing to dump $30-60 monthly to harass people, then they’re definitely unhinged and should seek psychiatric help, but additionally patterns of behavior can be established and you should send in a ticket.
If silences are being issued automatically by the system, then that is a failure of the design and should also be changed.
Alt Jumping is the root of much abuse, evils, and toxicity of the forums.
There is a difference between participating and posting throw away spam threads or concern trolling threads.
If you are adding to the junk food pile of “silly” threads you might get reported as spam.
If you make threads to intentionally bring up a concern to spin people up and cause drama, that might also get reported. Not to say you can’t have an unpopular opinion, but some people do it as a game to see how many fish will bite.
Already done. It is called the New Player Forum (as well as Customer Support and Tech Support). Those do not require a paid subscription.
Already done. See above.
Already done. The people who issue forum suspensions are real people at the Austin TX office (mostly).
They are not.
The ONLY thing that is automatic is the grey “click to read more” when a post gets enough reports. It can still be read. Any action on a post is done by a live mod.
Not that they can’t make mistakes, but that is what appeals are for. I once got a suspension for a boring and dry policy answer and link on CS because the person did not like my answer and alt spam reported me. The mod meant to suspend them…and hit me accidentally!
Cool so thus with the various suggestions we’ve established, the only way to truly circumvent the system is to pay for multiple accounts.
Which you know, unhinged and concerning, but certainly makes pattern of behavior a possibility.
And translating in-forum harassment to in-game harassment is thus only possible via openly stating your characters and realms, since alts would not be visible with Battle Tag in this hypothetical solution.
Which admittedly may be an issue for the recruitment posts in the Realm Forums.
Battle Tags only allow users to send you requests. They cannot communicate with you unless you accept those requests. Nobody would be able to see what characters you are playing without accepting those requests. Nobody would be able to see who is on your BNet Friend List without accepting them.
Your constant, repeated claims are entirely false.
did you read what I said - people already have entire guilds on their friend list. you can remove all those people but you have to change your bnet tag in order for them not to associate you with that bnet tag. Plus I can also see all the bnet tags of all my friends friends as well.
so no, what I am saying is not false. you just need to spend more time thinking
I have been harassed repeatedly because of the forums, even extending to my twitter.
It is a simple reality of being online, and no matter what organized group tries to do to me over the years, I am still here, and they aren’t, because the mods and GMs are real people, and sometimes you just have to push a little to get your issue addressed because prior to this immediate moment the company culture was a flaming hot mess.
An organized group would only be able to harass you in-game however in this system if you chose to accept them as a friend because only your friends are able to see your characters via the BTag interface in-game.
Even when you can see your friend’s BTag friends, you cannot see their characters.
there has been various suggestions made in this thread - one is to have your character and bnet id connect
another is to just post under you bnet id
in both cases, people who know you bnet id can identify who is posting - they don’t need to even know your character because they know your bnet id.
I personally liked it better when you went off on your high horse, and said you weren’t talking to me anymore because this seems an awful lot like a waste of my time.
However, I mostly object to this system because the worse harassment on this forum actually occurs when you can’t just switch to an alt. The system you want benefits a group of people who decide to harass an individual because that player cannot escape from them.
this poster didn’t like my solution but they can escape from this situation now - they wouldn’t under the system you want
No, the suggestion was to pick a character whose “face” is used as the posting image under your BTag.
Your character proper would not be visible (i.e. their name, their realm, nada).
No most of the harassment occurs because of Alt Jumping, next question.
They would because False Flagging would be more easily punished since all reporting would require each single account to type out why they are reporting. False flagging occurs easily right now because Alt Jumping is possible.
lol, nothing would change - this forum made people type out why they were flagging before. The only thing that can happen now is people can flag on various alts but if they do that, they get a forum vacation.
The system he wants would eliminate being able to use 400 characters per Bnet account to falsely flag. It means the person has 5 flags per 24 hours per bnet account.
you are trying to turn back the clock - the request has already been accepted - there is no way to undue what has been done.
Now they could make an entirely different id, entirely separate from bnet for use on the forum and you would have a point but anything tied to your bnet can already be identified back to a person.
I know for a fact people get suspended for switching alts and flagging posts. Their system is set up so they can see that already.
I have been posting on this forum since MoP and with this new forum I have had to change my character a few times because a group of people decide they are going to flag your posts and sooner or later you start getting vacation after vacation. Switch to another character and that problem disappears.