Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2020 10:13 am Post subject:
Twisted Insurrection is back in Discord
Subject description: Dead and back Commander, dead and back.
Good day everyone.
As some of you may have noticed, TI's Discord server suddenly went down a few days ago. We're still investigating the matter with Discord, but it seems unlikely that the old server can be recovered.
Fortunately, we have a brand new server now up and running.
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2020 3:31 am Post subject:
Guys, I'm just watching it from a distance and I wanna give my discrete two cents about it.
I think that we, as the C&C community as a whole, need to be very careful when we provide spaces for political discussions of any kind. Unfortunately, military-related games like Command & Conquer may attract radical minds (some being extremely radical and intolerant).
Communities like ours try to aggregate fans of these games regardless of their physical features, faith, or prejudice of any kind. So, we can't filter these things. Furthermore, we allow people to be anonymous, which makes these things more complicated, giving the false impression for many of the visitors that they can speak around as if they were speaking with their drunken friends in a bar. Forums like PPM or Discord channels are public channels that store your words for a long time and propagates them to the rest of the world. So, unlike a bar, you can actually get sued for what you say here and the places that store this data may also have legal problems. Your words here do have a consequence.
As far as my experience with the political forums from PPM goes, it is not worth the hassle, the efforts, and the resources that need to be spent to provide a space for political discussion, considering that you could be using it into many more useful things such as developing the mod itself.
Regarding the old TI's Discord Channel and the recently created one, I'd like to call attention to one detail that may cause a lot of trouble in the future and it might have been part of the problem that you guys had. The ability of certain members to use similar colors than admins (like Crimsonum) used on that Discord channel, may have collaborated to some people to falsely associate the mod and its staff into some of the awkward ideas that were being propagated in certain parts of the old Discord channel. QUICK_EDIT
Communities like ours try to aggregate fans of these games regardless of their physical features, faith, or prejudice of any kind. So, we can't filter these things.
We never did. On the contrary, the server has always been open to people with widely different stances and opinions. Some more extreme than others, but all within the parameters allowed by Discord.
Banshee wrote:
Furthermore, we allow people to be anonymous, which makes these things more complicated, giving the false impression for many of the visitors that they can speak around as if they were speaking with their drunken friends in a bar. Forums like PPM or Discord channels are public channels that store your words for a long time and propagates them to the rest of the world. So, unlike a bar, you can actually get sued for what you say here and the places that store this data may also have legal problems. Your words here do have a consequence.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right, regardless of the medium, and it's one that's in constant threat of reduction. However, this freedom does not mean your words don't have consequences - they do, and you should be responsible for them. The problem here is guilt by association, and flagging an entire server because of the posts of one or two individuals (the server had hundreds of visitors in total). Imagine if PPM was shut down, without warning, because of one user spouting political conspiracies. We wanted to allow freedom of speech within the parameters of Discord's guidelines and terms, but perhaps we misinterpreted those guidelines.
Banshee wrote:
As far as my experience with the political forums from PPM goes, it is not worth the hassle, the efforts, and the resources that need to be spent to provide a space for political discussion, considering that you could be using it into many more useful things such as developing the mod itself.
Agreed, which is why we have decided not to recreate the political channel. Personally, I also prefer if the server is mostly/wholly dedicated to the mod itself. Unfortunately, as an admin/webmaster you can never fully escape the burden of having to moderate your platform.
Banshee wrote:
Regarding the old TI's Discord Channel and the recently created one, I'd like to call attention to one detail that may cause a lot of trouble in the future and it might have been part of the problem that you guys had. The ability of certain members to use similar colors than admins (like Crimsonum) used on that Discord channel, may have collaborated to some people to falsely associate the mod and its staff into some of the awkward ideas that were being propagated in certain parts of the old Discord channel.
We have discussed the problem of having two different color categories (staff roles and fun/misc roles) before, but I think the colors are sufficiently different now. Even if someone falsely flagged me because of mistaking someone else for an admin, Discord is still responsible for verifying such reports. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
I saw the reddit post, SJWs ruin everything if you let them. Ignore them and ban them if they make a fuss, your priority is to your userbase who likes the mod, not the person complaining about everything. _________________ http://www.moddb.com/mods/scorched-earth-ra2-mod-with-smart-ai QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2020 1:12 am Post subject:
Crimsonum wrote:
We never did. On the contrary, the server has always been open to people with widely different stances and opinions. Some more extreme than others, but all within the parameters allowed by Discord.
The part in bold is something you will never be able to confirm, because we do not filter this kind of thing. I've seen people in the current Discord channel whose username already violates Discord parameters (especially regarding sexual orientation). In this specific forum topic, there is already one reply from a user who I am 100% sure that clearly violates their parameters as well (*cough* G-E *cough*). His reply kinda denounces his incompatible profile (although his text doesn't violate it), if you see what does SJW means on Google.
Crimsonum wrote:
Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right, regardless of the medium, and it's one that's in constant threat of reduction. However, this freedom does not mean your words don't have consequences - they do, and you should be responsible for them.
Yes, I do agree with it.
Crimsonum wrote:
The problem here is guilt by association, and flagging an entire server because of the posts of one or two individuals (the server had hundreds of visitors in total).
I do understand that, although, we can't prevent these things from happening. People always do weird associations and some of them can be problematic and it will hardly be reported directly to us. So, sometimes, we will be attacked without giving a chance to clarify things. This is where proactivity and focus are required. Pro-activity to detect eventual bad associations and focus to prevent people from posting crap that may generate bad associations. This is why I keep my recommendation on a harder color differentiation of the admins and staff of TI from the rest of the public and restrictions to offtopic and, especially, political topics. Keep the content focused on your mod.
Crimsonum wrote:
Imagine if PPM was shut down, without warning, because of one user spouting political conspiracies. We wanted to allow freedom of speech within the parameters of Discord's guidelines and terms, but perhaps we misinterpreted those guidelines.
It happened due to false reports of virus, illegal file hosting, or hacking activities more than once.
For Discord and other companies, it is cheaper (financially, in terms of advertisements and in terms of lawsuits) to simply delete problematic accounts and channels than actually investigate them properly and clear the source of the problem. That doesn't apply only to Discord, but to any huge company. Your community is just another one in millions or billions of data that they store.
Crimsonum wrote:
We have discussed the problem of having two different color categories (staff roles and fun/misc roles) before, but I think the colors are sufficiently different now. Even if someone falsely flagged me because of mistaking someone else for an admin, Discord is still responsible for verifying such reports.
Different tons of red doesn't really distinguish that much. For some people, everything is still red and they will make no distinctions. Believe me, things much be more clear if you want to avoid problems.
G-E wrote:
I saw the reddit post, SJWs ruin everything if you let them. Ignore them and ban them if they make a fuss, your priority is to your userbase who likes the mod, not the person complaining about everything.
Banning this kind of people goes against the policy of freedom of speech that Crimsonum and I mentioned above. It is actually more comfortable in these situations to ban problematic people like you , source of political toxicity, since it is overall a cheaper thing to do. But again, it violates the same policy. Also, there is a chance that the person who denounces the situation doesn't actually post/participate, so it would be hard to detect who the hell did it. In short, the banning approach, regardless of who is banned, wouldn't protect your community from this kind of situation.
But I reiterate: focus on the mod and proactivity to detect problems before they escalate, and solve them, also clarifying the rules of what can and what can't be done and shifting the focus to what matters.
The act of managing a community is quite a challenge, underestimated by most people. QUICK_EDIT
Split the discussion about freedom of speech / hate speech in general and moved it to the political subforum. You can continue the discussion here. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2020 5:04 am Post subject:
The way you just posted makes it sound like that it is one thing or the other. And this is not the point. There is always some freedom in any post. So, I have renamed the topic there, because the problem and the polemic are all about Hate Speech. QUICK_EDIT
That's fine, although I'm not sure why you replied here instead of the split thread. I want to keep this thread focused on the news itself, not the politics extended from it.
Nevertheless, hate speech and freedom of speech are concepts that are closely intertwined. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
In a somewhat related note the "Main" Website also disappeared recently(?) as well. The one with a compendium of the Arsenal,Buildings,etc. I'm guessing that one cannot be recovered? _________________ ~ Excelsior ~ QUICK_EDIT
Yeah, it's been gone for a while now. The guy t couldn't afford it anymore. We went back to the site hosted here at PPM (ti.ppmsite.com). Admitedly, it's very bare bones right now, but it's also a low priority.
The units/building stuff can be found here, on the TI subforum. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
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Twisted Insurrection is back in Discord
, source of political toxicity, since it is overall a cheaper thing to do. But again, it violates the same policy. Also, there is a chance that the person who denounces the situation doesn't actually post/participate, so it would be hard to detect who the hell did it. In short, the banning approach, regardless of who is banned, wouldn't protect your community from this kind of situation.
