On-going Guild Harassment

Hello,

I am the GM of a guild with 500+ individual accounts. We have someone that keeps deleting all of our player notes and replacing it with garbage. I do not know who is harassing us, but it is really ruining community. We rely on individual setting their player notes so they make groups and find teams within the guild.

When months of player notes get deleted for so many people, how do we recover ?

Please add the ability to restrict the modification of player notes to the individual player, not every single person in the guild. These overly permissive permissions make this type of harassment non-stop.

Unfortunately CS and GM staff do not have feedback on in game changes such as this, best to use the in game suggestion and bug reporting tool, this would then be sent on to the development team.

Although I’m sorry your having to deal with that as well, my only other recommendations as a fellow player would unfortunately be to lock down those notes in the meantime time.

They’re only deleting the notes, not adding verbage that might otherwise violate the COC/terms of use?

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The CS forums are not a means to reach Developers for the game. You would be best off using the in-game suggestion feature to submit your thoughts.

In the mean time, I strongly suggest limiting the notes feature to yourself, and officers placed in trusted guild ranks.

That should prevent one person from revising all the notes.

Also, please note, that while that behavior is not nice, it is not considered harassment. They are using the tools granted by the game and given to them by the GM.

As GM you have control over who can set notes by guild ranks.

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Understood Marisol. Yet given such a large guild, its quite unrealistic for a small handful of officers to constantly be updating everyone’s notes. Really hurts our community every time this happens. I have attempted to further restrict permissions to higher ranks to combat this but its not helping.

I just logged in and checked. To give everyone ability to edit those notes, you are making them all Officer rank which comes with quite a few permissions.

It lets people do a lot more than mess with public notes. It is not something you want 500 people with access to. They can edit the guild info, private notes, add and remove chat in the guild channel, etc.

You can read more here.

You can create a rank in guild that has that permission and have them handle the notes. A selection of folks who are on a fair amount across various times of day.

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I guess " Nurture and Protect Social Experiences is just empty words. I am not making them all officer rank. There is a setting in guild ranks for “Edit public note” its either on or off. I tried moving this permission up to higher ranks, so new freshly invited people cant join and destroy our guild.

I don’t think anyone disputes your suggestion, only pointing out that you’re making that suggestion in the wrong place.

The developers do not see suggestions posted in the Support forum group. No Blizzard employee that reads this forum is authorized to advance them to the developer team for consideration.

If you truly want your suggestion to get the developers’ attention, post in a non-Support forum like General Discussion or use the feedback suggestions tool in the game.

Well, as GM it falls to you to ensure the tools in the guild are used by those you trust. Of course, you are also free to submit a suggestion that the Developers change the tools.

What won’t happen, is Blizzard reviewing your guild activity to find out who did it and tell you. Deleting guild notes is disruptive, but not against the game rules.

It used to be, but I don’t think so anymore. It is officer rank that has that baked into it.

The article I linked goes over that and I also did check on my GM char. The set public notes is turned on and off by setting that rank to “is officer”. You could have a rank called Newbie, but if the box “is officer” is checked that is what toggles the note ability on and off. It can’t be done by individual player.

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And to be 100% clear, you are the one giving them permission to do so. Restrict the ability to edit player notes to yourself and trusted officers, and your problem is solved. Not using the tools Blizzard has given you is not a cause for Blizzard to change.

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There is not problem solved . This is a community guild, where players are encouraged to share there professions, gear, rank, etc. There is no way, that any handful of officers can manage that many people. We will just have to move away from using player notes entirely. This will severely limit our members ability to share and communicate within our guild. But I am not surprising blizzard will do nothing, guess we just let the community suffer.

Ive managed people my entire professional career and I have at times (played since 2003) managed guilds in the several hundreds. This is how I would handle the situation.

  1. Make notes of everyones rank in the guild.
  2. Make adjustments to guild ranks that reflects what each role “NEEDS” to be able to clearly do to complete their tasks as a guild member.
  3. Demote everyone.
  4. Promote players to roles that they need… not want that they need to do w.e their position requires.

I would assume that whats happening is too many people have “power” in the guild because they want to be officers but dont understand what that role requires. Again im just assuming. If someone recruits players they do not need to promote make a rank that recruits make it rank 3 or w.e call it officer they cant demote/promote/kick or effect guild notes. If someone is a raid leader or mythic/event/rp w.e leader they do not need to be able to get into officer etc notes. Set someone up to be in charge of groups of people then that person can communicate with an officer who enters in the guild notes specific days of the week.

For example I generally run my guild by not having any officers be a raid/class etc leader because they are basically data entry and dealing with either positive or negative behavior. I do not want players that raid that may have had to have an unpleasant conversation with an officer also have that same officer be in charge of the fun activity i.e raiding that they do.

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There is a way, as guilds have been doing it for many years. The fact that you are unwilling to do it does not make it a Blizzard problem.

That is 100% your choice, as it is your guild to run.

Blizzard HAS done something. They have given YOU the tools to change it. YOU are refusing to use those tools.

Let’s leave the hysterics out of it. Guilds have functioned for many years with the current tools, using or not using player notes, etc. That’s not to say tools can’t possibly be improved, but there’s really nothing anyone can do for you if you won’t use the tools already provided.

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You are in charge of the Guild as the Guild Master. It is YOUR guild. It is your job to handle permissions, review actions, and add or remove people from guild.

If the tools in place are not enough, you can make a suggestion, as you were told.

I do understand you want to see who changed the notes, but that is not information Blizzard will provide you.

Your only current solution is to stop checking the “is officer” box for every guild rank and only give it to ranks you trust.

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Are we talking about the same game, there is no “is officer” selection. This is TBC i am referring not retail.

No, we are not talking about the same game then. I was talking about Retail because you are posting on a Retail character and did not mention Classic.

Either way, Blizzard is still not going to tell you who deleted guild notes, nor will they step in to manage your guild.

I am trying to see if there are any Guild Management addons that might help.

I used a spreadsheet for it when I was running a guild back then. I also made it mandatory that every invited person needed a note set up by the officer at invite time.

EDIT

This addon might be what you can use to help. It gives you a lot more tools for guild management and they have TBC and Classic versions of the addon.

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/guild-roster-manager

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Sad thing is, I am aware of the group of people behind these on going attacks. Pretty easy to skirt around any control. Just sucks a small group of people can ruin it for everyone.

No, it is not easy. You explicitly have total control over who can set public notes. You have total control over who is in your guild.

KICK them…

That addon I linked should help you as well. Be sure to grab the TBC or Classic version though. Those are at the bottom right of that web page.

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May I suggest to use a role play mod for inter player communication such as you suggested. An addon I believe is called TRP would do, players can only modify their own messages, and only those players using the mod can read each others messages.

Do keep in mind though the rules in regards to chat aplly as they do through out the game as another player recently suspended for disruptive game play recently found.

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I wish i could kick them, but I don’t know who they are ! People have so many alts today, very easy to hide.

I will check the add-on you linked, thank you and I appreciate the help.

Then why have you not removed this whole group from your guild??? Seriously, everything here is already within your control. USE THE TOOLS PROVIDED.

1 Like