WET Community Lounge #Eternity

Lore World's End Tavern: Role-play and Fan Fiction
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YAY DISCOURSE

I admin’d a Discourse for a while for this gaming group I’m no longer a part of. Discourse Forums are awesome.

Enjoy the emojis! :smile::smile::smile:

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@Morician

Can you hear me? Just checking to see if this tag worked. :smiley:

Also here’s your daily dose of :fu: haha

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It did not work but keep that up and I’ll give you a reason to flip me off :stuck_out_tongue: lol

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plops her draenei booty on an empty couch seat

sees Morician’s 313 posts

gets up and takes a seat in the corner

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A piece of forum software that doesn’t provide basic protections like an ignore feature is not awesome.

:peacock:

1 Like
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Sadly the Discourse developers decided not to go with an ignore feature citing a poll in which the majority of heavy forum users rarely used the ignore feature if at all…not saying it’s the right decision, but it’s the one they made nonetheless. For smaller communities like the one I admin’d (EVE Online alliance), Discourse was perfect because if someone got out of line, we just blew his ship up. :smile:

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I thought ships getting blown up was a normal EVE thing?

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It is, but when your teammates are blowing you up, you know you screwed up. haha

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I’m a tank. It’s my job to make things try to blow me up, then point and laugh at them when I survive.

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you don’t just survive, you also blow them up.

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Eh…depends on the fight. I generally end up a martyr on Zul.

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One of the things I’ve been dealing with for the past five years is ongoing harassment from a malignant narcissist, it has spanned social media. I use tools like block EXTENSIVELY to protect myself.

The modus operandi of narcissists in online RP is that they fashion themselves as community leaders. They’re charming and people gravitate to them, they become really popular really fast. They pick one or two people that they shower with attention and put on a pedestal, then engage in the standard idolize, devalue, discard cycle with these RP partners to assure they’re getting enough attention.

Once they have discarded a partner, they ostracize that partner and since they are super popular no one will believe the partner that they’re abusive or anything.

Narcs in online RP communities not only target ex RP partners but also other roleplayers who are movers and shakers–people who write guides, w ho do positive things for communities, who lead guilds. People who want to do their own thing instead of kowtow to the narc. People who are competition or otherwise a threat to the narc’s ego.

Anyone in their crosshairs, be they an ex RP partner or competition, does not get left alone. The narc may pop up at any time, responding to any trigger.

The narcissistic abuse cycle for this type of behavior is the Feels Threatened - > Lashes out - > Plays the Victim - > Is Vindicated. They’ll seek the victim out wherever they aren’t ignored and start taking jabs at the person they find threatening to their ego. They may do this subtly, and try to evoke a reaction. The moment they get a reaction that they don’t like they swap to crybully mode, and a bunch of people who like them because they’re popular and charismatic, jump on their victim and pound them into submission. Narc is vindicated, their victim is bullied and silenced.

Other methods used include gaslighting. with a forum like this where you can’t really tell people apart due to post count, they can easily post on several characters to harass and bait their victims, artificially inflate their own takes with liking using alts, and so on. They make you question yourself, they make you wonder if things are your fault.

They also use things like triangulation, where they will try to cause disruptions between friends or whatnot, to turn people against each other. I had one narcissist who tried really hard to befriend my RP partner and best friend, convince her that I was a terrible person, and even use his guildmates to try and pull my best friend away.

And the moderators? They aren’t going to recognize the warning flags. They’re going to roll their eyes and think it’s stupid RP drama. In fact, because narcissists are charming, they may think that the victim is the perpetrator.

Basically, one of the best ways to shut down and protect yourself from this abuse is to ignore them. Especially when the ignore blocks all their alts, too. You can’t see their baiting to react, you can’t see their artificial inflation of crap takes, you aren’t as susceptible to the gaslighting, etc.

One of my abusers has posted on WET. I happened to see his name, recognize it, and ignore them. Now I can no longer ignore them and that’s a huge problem.

I have little recourse: I can stop using the forums entirely for my own comfort and safety because there is no ignore feature. That’s basically it.

He has infinite power to encroach on places I go.
I have no power to protect myself.

:peacock:

3 Likes
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You do know you can report posts that you don’t like, right? When you click the little flag icon by the person’s post, you get a few options. Select the one that best matches your complaint.

This sends a notification to the actual moderators and admins of the forums, so if you’re being harassed, take action to stop it instead of blaming the tool that the person harassing you is using.

I’m sorry you’re begin harassed by someone, but you still have the power to do something about it, even without the ignore feature.

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Somebody in General Discussion already has over 1000 posts.

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Ignore Remaris. She’s a scrub who doesn’t know how to play her class

(She’s also me testing out the alts feature.)

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I still think that’s a feature they’ll likely add in the future. Either that, or the trolls will suffer from tanking their rep over time, or be subject to more swift moderation. Remains to be seen. The option to ignore users, that is.

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It’s very interesting how each alt has their own post count now though.

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Oh, yeah, yeah for sure. Discourse keeps score. If you get reported a lot, it remembers. Eventually it will prevent you from being eligible for different trust levels…which will prevent you from accessing certain features.

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How well does it prevent brigading? Because the forums have had issues with that in that past, of people getting banned purely because they were brigaded. General Discussion was worse on that but still, it’d be nice to have a more solid idea.

1 Like
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A lot of times it’s subtle and moderators can’t and won’t act on it. That’s part of why narcissistic abuse is so insidious.

There’s nothing in the rules that prevents a narcissistic abuser from posting on the same forum, or the same thread, as their victim, even if they’re doing it to make the other person uncomfortable.

Reporting does not work for this type of situation.

:peacock:

1 Like