Bailey (baister09) · @baister09
8th Jul 2020 from TwitLonger
Message from the Portal 2 community mods
The Portal 2 Speedrun Server started out as a fairly small community in 2011 mainly servers via Teamspeak or Mumble, and as well as some Twitch.tv direct messages. The old internet culture of 2011 was very consistent with edgy content being “funny”, and some people grew out of that phase of their life as the years went on. Unfortunately, a lot of people still have this immature mentality and have continued to act this way in a modern day environment. These edgy comments of racism, sexism, and homophobic or transphobic messages are a thing of the past. The Discord moderation team has realized how laid back we’ve been with letting conversations regarding these topics happen without punishment.
The mod team has reflected, and we’ve seen that we have become desensitized and complacent in the completely inappropriate content shared in this server. In the future, it will be a core element of our moderation to maintain a space where everyone is encouraged to participate. We would like to personally apologize to anyone who has been a target of the unacceptable messages of some of the users in our server. We cannot undo the damage that has been done, but we will work as strongly as we can in the future to ensure that events like this never happen again. We are ashamed of ourselves for not acting in the moment and letting these situations continue to spiral out of control. We have failed deeply in moderating and building a safe and open space for everyone involved, and look forward to changing that.
We want to take this time to completely change how we run our Discord, so anyone from any background can feel comfortable and welcome in our community. We have had some extreme cases of toxic behavior in the Discord and dealt with them accordingly, but the problem stays relevant in the Discord to this day. We are beginning to revamp our rules, and will begin to punish users much more frequently for their actions. Some people were often overlooked for “joking” or “being ironic” but this never should have been an excuse to be openly offensive in the Discord. Everyone will be treated and held up to the same expectations with no special treatment towards anyone, moderators, top runners, no one.
There was an incident brought up about “active and known pedophiles being a part of the community” which we had previously dealt with before, but would like to mention it in this statement for clarity. There was a user who pressured two of our members to share nudes with them and even going as far to ask where one of them lived. They threatened them “jokingly” about looking up their IP address after refusing to tell the offender where they lived. After that, they stopped trying to make advances onto this specific user who came and talked to the moderation team, but that doesn’t mean they stopped at just these two people, and there’s no telling how far this person went with other minors of our or other Discords. This user’s name is Nan0kub, or Nan0.
The reason we’re okay with saying their name is because they were publicly banned from the SourceRuns community for their pedophilia, and are clearly proud of it for often making their nickname in servers “SourceRunsPedo”. Despite this, the user was involved in the Co-op TAS of Portal 2 which the mod team had no idea about. The leader of the project had known about Nan0’s past and decided that if they were to act that way again, they would remove them from the project. The user was already kicked, and now banned, from our Discord. We will do a better job of reaching out to any speedrunning related projects and make sure no banned users have any involvement in them. We don’t support pedophiles being awarded with participating in the Portal 2 Speedrunning community or anything related to it after targeting members of our community. To those who shared their stories, we thank you deeply for letting us know about your experience, and hope that you can also feel more welcome in the Discord.
We would like to especially apologize to @royalpeaches_ for the awful comments made during their run on Frame Fatales. Even though we know one user always is trying to joke about the matter, it wasn’t funny, nor will it ever be. We’re sick of people being condescending and directly offensive towards other runners by singling them out because of whatever it may be. Often this is the result of mob mentality, where one person does it and everyone else follows, especially newer runners that don’t know any better, and would rather fit in instead of speaking up. Everyone, including moderators, have most likely fallen into this type of mob mentality at least once before because we didn’t want to be cast out or made fun of ourselves. This has been the norm for too long, and we’re going to end these types of “bully parties”.
As actions speak louder than words, we have taken a good look at our rules and updated them to more accurately fit our goals for the community. Here is what we came up with, if anything is missing that would help ensure we keep the discord safe for everyone, please let us know how these can be improved:
1. Don’t be toxic - Bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, sexism, racism, and all other nasty -isms will not be tolerated anywhere on this server. This includes memes in #random that use objectively offensive language or make their humor at the expense of a particular group as well as NSFW or suggestive content.
2. Be nice - This server is for speedrunning video games, and video games are supposed to be fun. Don’t spam @ anybody, don’t harass anybody in DMs, don’t dox anybody, don’t intentionally make people uncomfortable for any reason. Once again, this is a speedrunning server; if content is questionable, take it elsewhere.
3. Try to stay on topic - In channels dedicated to a specific purpose (#help, #resources, #routing, etc.), don’t stray too far from the intended topic of the channel. “Off topic” conversations in #general are acceptable, but just posting random memes or videos should stay in #random.
4. Use common sense - Skirting the rules on a technical basis will not be allowed, and the mod team has the right to timeout/kick/ban anybody for violating the letter or the spirit of these rules. You can @ mods or DM a mod individually if you have a problem with a decision we’ve made, and you can do the same if you are having a problem with a user on our server. We want to have a safe and fun environment, but we can’t see everything.
This will be a large turning point for how the Portal 2 Speedrun Server functions inside and out. Thank you everyone who has shared their stories and experiences with the toxicity of the community in this thread.
-The Portal 2 Speedrunning Discord Moderation Team