So, there is this person in the general discussion section of the world of warcraft forums that is constantly being followed and harassed by the same couple people. But to my knowledge the response if one would make a ticket on the issue is to just flag the posts. Why is there no way to report continued harassment towards one individual? This seems like a massive oversight…Flagging doesn’t help because in the event that they do end up getting a short silence they’ll just be more tactful and sneaky about it once the silence is up. Stuff that a moderator would think is fine from a glance but from context shows that there is an overlying issue of harassment of the same person. It’s getting out of hand, I see it happening literally all the time in GD now.
If the same people are repeatedly violating the forum code of conduct and are being penalized, penalties tend to escalate for subsequent infractions. If the posts that are being reported are legitimately in violation, the moderators will notice a pattern of behavior, and react accordingly.
The problem is they either aren’t being silenced, or they have multiple WoW accounts.
And the people defending the person mentioned are being actioned, so it’s extra frustrating. Heck, one of the harassers started targeting me last week, and I was essentially told because I made a targeted post asking him to stop trolling and harassing, I violated the CoC and got a 4 day silence. (Yes, I’m well aware that mentioning actions isn’t allowed, but it’s frustrating. I got punished for defending someone else, defending myself, and trying to stop someone from making a plethora of troll threads.) I’m not the only one who got actioned though. I won’t mention them because I don’t want to risk them getting in trouble for me talking about actions on the forums. (I really hope the CS CMs don’t action me for this, because I’m just trying to show how messed up this situation is getting, but if I have to endure another silence to get rid of the person stalking said person, I will.)
Multiple people have opened tickets about it, and were told the same thing: The GMs can’t do anything, it’s up to the CMs and us to flag them. Worse yet is most of us can’t flag the posts because they’re doing dozens a day, and we get like 5 flags a day. I physically watched two posts get unflagged by a CM as well, when they VERY MUCH violated the CoC and were harassment.
But instead of actioning the person responsible, the CMs are actioning the people defending the person being harassed, instead of the harasser. I even included links and evidence of the harassment and stalking in my ticket, and it was ignored. (As have the other people who opened tickets)
And we have nowhere to report what’s going on, hence this post.
I’m not even really friends with the person being stalked. But I don’t just sit by and LET someone get stalked and harassed. But the fact the CMs aren’t doing anything is disturbing. Especially in light of the lawsuit about harassment of their employees. Yet they’re letting harassment run rampant on the forums.
(I purposely avoided mentioning any name but myself to avoid having someone accuse me of targeting them)
Or they aren’t doing anything wrong.
You don’t need to jump in and turn it into a bar brawl. If you see someone violating the forum code of conduct, report the offending post and move on.
Literally am reporting them. They get flagged. (So it’s not just me seeing the harassment), then they get unflagged.
They are very much harassing and violating the CoC, and it’s being swept under the rug by the CMs who are modding the forum.
One of the newest posts was literally a real life threat.
For your own sanity, i advise you simply ignore the poster.
Not pretend you didn’t see the post, straight-up ignore them via the forums.
Then you never need to see their posts again
To bounce off of Mastadon, the forums are not necessary to play the game. While it’s fantastic you want to champion someone, sometimes it’s better to be the bigger person and just step away. The person being harassed, they need to step away.
People are sometimes jerks who get off on bothering other people. You and this other person, you’re feeding into it by reacting rather than ignoring them outright. In-game and here, if you interact with a person who is harassing you, it demeans your case because you are willingly speaking and interacting with them, no matter the context of what you say.
This kind of throws it into a general ticket queue, but you can try and submit a ticket here?
https://us.battle.net/support/en/help/contact/322/ticket
Still, personally, I would put them on ignore and just go about your business or step away from the forums entirely. As in-game, there aren’t any specific rules about people not being jerks for the sake of being jerks. There will always be those types.
Hello.
If it is the person I’ve seen, yes, keep reporting. I’ve seen this set of ‘individual(s)’ instigate trolling of people in non-relevant threads targeting a particular forum poster that did not participate in that thread. That should be a clue to the moderators that something very unhealthy is transpiring with the antagonist.
I do hope our regulars here are correct when they say action will be taken. I trust them but sometimes we don’t see eye to eye on somethings (ie. I don’t always agree on the ‘ignore’ suggestion for resolution). Maizou, I’ve watched this behavior for a while. I’ve reported posts for what I believe are infractions. I’ve seen little progress towards cleaning it up.
Keep reporting.
Happy adventuring.
So, I looked into this. Yeah, this is an example of where the reportign system fails us.
- The WoW forums use chars, not Bnet accounts, so people can have 8 X 50 chars per bnet account to use for likes, reports, and posts. Much sockpuppeting can happen.
- We can’t explain patterns of behavior in a report. So while an individual post might look sort of ok alone, when it is taken as a pattern it is directed and targeted harassment.
I know who some of the folks involved in all this are. It makes me want to just grab people by the ear, put them all in time out, and tell them all to IGNORE each other on the forums - with the ignore feature.
The targeted harassment is not ok though, and I don’t know how to get a message to mods about it.
Edit - yeah, one of the posts involved does come off as a personal threat. I see it has been reported though.
If at ‘first glance’ the posts don’t look like they break any rules, the question is - are they?
That truly is what ignore is for, Kamaelse. You don’t want to see what someone else has to say - you don’t have to. That really is a pretty powerful tool, sorely underutilized.
Except for the fact that quite literally ignore can be overturned at the flip of a button by switching to an alt. Something the mods quite literally won’t notice either mind you. And alts can repeatedly be created and deleted using the boosted character system because they pop up as a character you can post on the forums with. And yes, if something doesn’t look like it breaks the rules at first glance it most definitely can still be veiled harassment towards someone…
In this case, yes. It is targeted and directed harassment. Some of the posts are blatantly bad (calling out a poster by name, insulting them, threatening them), others are a problem in context of the larger pattern of harassment.
If mod looks at one of the posts that is grey, they don’t see the pattern overall.
I have a pretty good idea of what is going on and who is involved. One of them very badly needs a long time out. There are so many insulting and trolling posts by that person, not even including the targeted harassment - my 5 reports don’t go far. Same for everyone else.
To be fair, the blue posters can’t really go about and action anyone whom basically request it. I get what’s happening, but the blues here can’t be really be told to just action this person and that.
Ignore can be circumvented by other accounts, true enough - but they aren’t overturned by US. It works much the same as ignore ingame, that is something under a player’s control, not ours.
Oh I know that. The Forum Support Agents are not moderators and don’t tend to go outside this forum. The most they can do is advise on the proper use of the tools we do have and/or pass things on to the Forum Moderators.
There IS an issue though and there are limited ways to actually bring up the topic right now. That is an issue with the system, not the mods specifically.
- Bnet account wide Trust/likes/flags to prevent sockpuppeting and false like/flags.
- Ability to like/flag needs to be linked to posting ability. Right now ANY Bnet account can do so, even if they don’t have a posting char or a game license.
- Comment field for reports to point out patterns to mods
Of course, this is not the place to make suggestions. However, the thread that was made in GD for said suggestions turned into a thread that was part of the harassment problem. https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/moderation-update-request/1093749
Not at all. Ignore in-game at least blocks entire accounts if one attempts to respond to you on alts. While someone on here can just keep pressing that switch character button once they realize that the ignore feature has been used on them. This makes it useless against people that are intent on harassing people, the only time it’s useful is to block posts from people that you just don’t like.
It really does not.
In game if I ignore a player on Mirasol (this char), Mirasol will never hear from any of their alts on the license either. No mail, no grouping, no nothing.
If I ignore a poster on Mirasol, it only ignores that single character. They are free to keep going on all their other chars on the account 8 X 50 of them per Bnet account. And of course they can delete and remake the chars to their heart’s content. The forums don’t have the ability to ignore a whole Bnet account (for WoW). This is also why people get away with all the sockpuppeeting.
Of course, Cogshanks used the Bnet wide Ignore to determine who alts were, which might be why Blizz does not do it. Chars are not private though so…
To be frank, it feels like you’re dog piling on Orlyia for something they can’t do anything about. You and I both know that explaining this to her isn’t going to change anything, let alone change what’s happening on the general forum.
Yes, I get you’re trying to help but it sounds like you’re exacting miracles out of her.
I am not expecting anything out of her. Stop reading into things. I know the FSRs don’t cross moderate. I know they don’t forward suggestions. I know they can’t do anything but explain the current tools we have.
Orly is mistaken though about the way forum ignore works. If it worked the way in-game ignore worked that would be super helpful.
This is not an attack on anyone, esp Orly. Our FSRs are fantastic. They have limits though and the topics being brought up here are valid.
And yeah, “go post on GD” - people did and that turned into a thread that is a trash fire of the same people causing the problems.
Cogshanks was based upon the old forum where every posting character was tied to an account ID.
That ability was lost when the new, third-party, forum was rolled out.
It was a very effective way of identifying sock puppets. Many of us would use a particular browser just for WoW forums because Cogshanks had an add-on for that browser.
Back when this incarnation of the forums was new (3-4 years ago?), there was talk by Blizzard of compiling a list of changes for it to recapture some of what was lost in the transition.
While there have been a couple of minor tweaks within the framework of the new forum data model, there have been no fundamental changes to either the new system architectural foundation or its supporting data model.
I haven’t seen a Blizzard reference to a forum change list for quite a long time. I get the feeling that grouping data at a higher level than just a posting character isn’t supportable within the exiting architecture without an extensive rewrite of the code. If it was going to happen, enough time has passed for it to actually happen.