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Strong point aside... based on historically similar cases, this is probably best served by emailing Community, rather than going public.
In any case, don't expect significant response until Monday, when moderation staff are back in the office. The lock may only be temporary, meant to keep the situation under control until such time.
A politely worded email explaining your point of view in this matter probably wouldn't be a bad idea either. It would be unfortunate if a misinformation-peddling troll ruined things for everyone else.
What kalindlara said.
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Why lock threads with racist posters rather than banning the racists?
Well...
First, if you do that, you lose the ability to educate the racist poster. Given time and exposure, people can become enlightened. When someone you view as otherwise reasonable calmly shows you that your views on a particular topic are... primitive... you may clue in. If you're simply shunned, you never will.
Second, people who post racist views may not be entirely responsible for their actions. Mental illness - and simple ignorance - are things that may not be choice. Being raised by a heavily racist family and culture may be something that is massively difficult to overcome. This doesn't make such views forgivable, but it may make them understandable. And such a person may be otherwise rational. Is it right to ostracize someone entirely because they have one unacceptable view that is deeply entrenched?
I know - and am related to - some people who have specific views that I find abhorrent. I know from experience that these views aren't something I can change. We - collectively - have learned that these are hot-button topics that if brought up, I cannot tolerate or endorse. Otherwise loving, functional, beneficial relationships are at risk when and if these topics come up. We've learned to avoid those topics so that we can cherish one another's company, sharing the many, many topics we share that aren't mutually frustrating.
Point is, I kinda think "ignore buttons" and blanket bans should be things that are reserved for exceptional offenses. Maybe it's easy for me to be tolerant because I'm a straight atheist white male, but maybe I've just seen enough reasons for people to hate one another that I don't accept "hate" as a good enough one.
Embrace and educate says I.
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Tammy isn't racist.
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Thank you for editing it.
Consider previous flag and posts rescinded. :-)
I will delete my posts. :-)
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Poster 4 is not a real person. Poster 4 is a generic made-up example of someone who posts spam and insults others.
EDIT: Wait, is "Tammy" seriously just your alias? I thought it was a forum-wide meme that lots of people posted in random threads. I guess I'd seen it so many times I thought it couldn't just be one person. Had I known it referred to a particular person, I wouldn't have used it. I'm sorry, I have edited out any references to your alias.
Oh! You don't know the story of Tammy!
So, there was this thread about why there are no good Lichs in Pathfinder, and James Jacobs chimed in with the reasons and a bunch of people started getting rude so to diffuse the situation I made up a name off the top of my head and started saying stuff like "Tammy's complicated" or "Tammy doesn't mind getting her hands dirty" I figured if I did it long enough someone would actually make a Lich named Tammy. I started it on a Friday morning and decided I'd give it the weekend.
But Friday afternoon someone had, James Jacobs himself. It's something I have a lot of respect for him for doing as it was getting super negative, and it's something I need to remind myself of more often in my own interactions.
I didn't use her as an alias until I needed a record breaker for most aliases and had given up on someone actually writing her into something.
But hey, if anyone ever does I cede complete control.
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Thanks for informing me:D
Now I like Tammy a lot more now, knowing that Tammy is you.
Hmm, I wonder if anyone else is secretly a Captain Yesterday alias. Am I really a Captain Yesterday alias?!?
No need to apologize, it's all good, that's what communication is for! Thanks for asking why. :-)
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How do you propose to do any of that in a locked thread?
A locked thread is a locked thread. A banned user is a locked community. As long as the user is not banned, they are still present, participating, and exposed to "our" discussions, such as this very one.
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How do you propose to do any of that in a locked thread?A locked thread is a locked thread. A banned user is a locked community. As long as the user is not banned, they are still present, participating, and exposed to "our" discussions, such as this very one.
And are still free to harass others who have done absolutely nothing to deserve such treatment. I rather Paizo be a welcoming place rather than accommodating bigots.
How do you propose to do any of that in a locked thread?A locked thread is a locked thread. A banned user is a locked community. As long as the user is not banned, they are still present, participating, and exposed to "our" discussions, such as this very one.
If all threads dealing with certain topics just end up getting locked, then I would argue you are preventing any actual discussion from ever taking place anyway, especially if it leads to a complete ban on certain topics to begin with.
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And are still free to harass others who have done absolutely nothing to deserve such treatment. I rather Paizo be a welcoming place rather than accommodating bigots.How do you propose to do any of that in a locked thread?A locked thread is a locked thread. A banned user is a locked community. As long as the user is not banned, they are still present, participating, and exposed to "our" discussions, such as this very one.Bigots might be hard to define in any given thread.
Look, just don't post while cranky and it'll all be good.
No posting while cranky? I guess I'm out of here, then.
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I rather Paizo be a welcoming place rather than accommodating bigots.
And yet, part of not accommodating bigots is being welcoming. The premise of this thread is advocating banning, which is as not-welcoming as can be.
Next, there's a massive difference between "accommodating bigots" and "locking threads that get racism-bombed". Paizo's current procedures do not accommodate racists. They just don't apply a digital death-sentence to the unenlightened.
Look, I get it. Hot-button topic. Horrible behavior. Unconscionable, sociopath, acts. Got it. Agreed, no less. I'm not arguing for tolerance here, or even saying that Paizo is tolerant. I'm merely putting forward my personal view that outright banning is... not the right action for that crime*. I don't expect you to agree or even - truth be told - want you to agree. The OP asked "why", and I posited some reasons that I think might answer the question.
*So what might Anguish consider ban-worth? How about threats to a person? Yeah, that'd do it for me. Or stalking, which is much the same thing. Or - get this - repeated infractions for lesser violations (which Paizo does ban for).
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When a Paizo staff member locks a thread over the weekend, with a note that we will revisit when we return to this office, it generally means we're in the middle of some non-work thing and cannot devote the time to address it. I'm assuming that this is in reference to a thread locked on Saturday afternoon (while, to be perfectly honest, I saw by chance while running errands). We typically only respond in-depth on off-hours if we have determined a thread or post to be an "emergency" or if we can tell it's probably going to be even more off the rails by the time we walk in on Monday.
It may be relevant to indicate that we've now made the decision to restrict political threads. You can find information about that in this sticky thread.
RE: banning individual users. We don't discuss goings-on with individual accounts publicly, out of respect for our users' privacy. If you need to report an individual account, pinging us via email at community@paizo.com is most helpful.
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Congratulations, I suppose?
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To be perfectly clear: this is not a decision made by one person on our staff, but a decision made upon the feedback from multiple staff members, by multiple staff members. It is also based on the feedback of a number of community participants (many of them who have chimed in over the course of years), both in Website Feedback threads and in places that crop up site-wide. It was certainly *not* an easy decision, thus our trial period for political threads. We understand not everyone will agree, but feel it is necessary to put in place to move the community forward.
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Based on the forum rules, people should just flag and move on. Railing against racist posts is, at least from my understanding of the website rules from about two weeks ago, against the general forum rules. Flagging racists posts is not, in my estimation, silently supporting them. It's a more efficient way of undermining them, one that keeps the drama down to a minimum. All calling people out on the internet does when you have a 'flag post' option is just facilitate an argument.
This isn't even addressing what each individual person defines as racism. While I think we can all agree that saying 'all of X race are bad people/criminals/genetically inferior/whatever' is racism, there are some definite grey areas and more personalized (And sometimes ridiculous,) interpretations about racism.
I know at the college I used to go to, it was considered a racist microaggression that could get you suspended if you asked where someone was from, because it supposedly disenfranchised minorities from lower income neighborhoods.
So, before saying that all racist posters need to be banned, you need to consider the implications of that. In my aforementioned college experience, nearly anything can be considered racist if we take into account microaggressions or things that people are not even conscious of that they say.
To use an example, I remember a situation on GiantitP where a person once used the term 'g***y' (Censoring in case of sensitive people,) to refer to the Vistani character he played and their lifestyle. Now, to most people, that is not even remotely racist. It refers to a certain type of nomadic lifestyle, often replete with mysticism and romantic notions. Many people nowadays view it as being a positive term, something synonymous with a Bohemian lifestyle. Someone took offense at the word because of the word's origins in being a slang term for the Romani people in the 1600s, something that many actual Romani nowadays neither know nor care about. The poster ended up getting banned despite not using the word offensively. Someone just read way too much into what he said and took offense with it. I knew the guy pretty well. He didn't have a racist bone in his body. He just, like most people, did not know about the word's origins and did not consider that it could even remotely be racist. When confronted with hyperaggressive people about it, he tried to defend his position and was banned.
Using the above example, saying that racist posters need to be banned is a slippery slope to get on. Nearly anything can be interpreted as racist if you scrutinize it too much. I remember a controversial blog a while back about Paizo itself being racist because 'oh they just had to put talking monkeys into the Not-Africa continent, the dirty racists'.
See my point on why banning anyone saying remotely racist is problematic? You should look at the intent people are posting with, not just say 'hey, it's racist to me, so ban them'. I am not sure what thread prompted this thread, so I can't say for sure whether it was, in my opinion, a ban-worthy instance, but it's important to realize that not everyone who says racist things are cross-burning, sieg heiling bigots. Some people are just misinformed or possibly are not the most delicate people at wording things.
Based on the forum rules, people should just flag and move on. Railing against racist posts is, at least from my understanding of the website rules from about two weeks ago, against the general forum rules. Flagging racists posts is not, in my estimation, silently supporting them. It's a more efficient way of undermining them, one that keeps the drama down to a minimum. All calling people out on the internet does when you have a 'flag post' option is just facilitate an argument.
This isn't even addressing what each individual person defines as racism. While I think we can all agree that saying 'all of X race are bad people/criminals/genetically inferior/whatever' is racism, there are some definite grey areas and more personalized (And sometimes ridiculous,) interpretations about racism.
I know at the college I used to go to, it was considered a racist microaggression that could get you suspended if you asked where someone was from, because it supposedly disenfranchised minorities from lower income neighborhoods.
So, before saying that all racist posters need to be banned, you need to consider the implications of that. In my aforementioned college experience, nearly anything can be considered racist if we take into account microaggressions or things that people are not even conscious of that they say.
To use an example, I remember a situation on GiantitP where a person once used the term 'g***y' (Censoring in case of sensitive people,) to refer to the Vistani character he played and their lifestyle. Now, to most people, that is not even remotely racist. It refers to a certain type of nomadic lifestyle, often replete with mysticism and romantic notions. Many people nowadays view it as being a positive term, something synonymous with a Bohemian lifestyle. Someone took offense at the word because of the word's origins in being a slang term for the Romani people in the 1600s, something that many actual Romani nowadays neither know nor care about. The poster ended up getting banned despite not using the...
Indeed. To sum it up who gets to decide what is racist?
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The people it's racist against. And slurs are as worse as you can get.
And that's not a "slang" term for the Romani from long ago, it's a slur. The claim that Romani today don't know or care about it now is absolute b~%*@$!*. It doesn't matter that a bunch of non-Romani have romanticized it, it's a slur. There isn't an un-offensive way to use that word. It's not that someone is "sensitive", it's that that word is a slur.
When you claim "try to defend his position" you mean he kept trying to justify his use of a slur. Intent doesn't matter if you keep throwing around a slur. That's not a microaggression.
What's to stop people from claiming anything is racist? There has to be some logic behind it. Which there often is...and there often isn't. Are all racial slurs equal?
My point is not everyone even the targets of said racism will always agree on what is racist.
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Yes all racial slurs are equally bad. This isn't that hard or deep.
I was expecting a different answer from you. I can accept this.
I have nothing else to add to this arguement before this thread spirals out of control.
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For those concerned about the flagging system's lack of nuance, I recommend emailing community@paizo.com with concerns about specific posts. This allows you to explain why specific posts require attention beyond "offensive/racist/sexist/etc.", while keeping the issue from boiling over on the boards themselves.
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After reading the posts I feel it was literally the intent to get the thread closed. deliberate Trolling. I don't mind so much that political threads are banned. I get it is to much work to maintain.
I personally don't have trouble just stopping communication with someone that is just trying to get me upset. I've seen plenty that do however. It does seem like a lot of work. To police this so I get it.
I do feel it was giving a troll exactly what they wanted however.
That part bothers me.
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About the topic of racial slurs, I want to mention that avoiding them is not always so easy. As a non native English speaker, I sometimes read words that I get what they mean, but I don't realize that they can have a negative connotation. Then I use that words, unknowing that they might be offensive to other people.
The subtleties of language can lead to making mistakes and unwillingly offend people. I would expect to get any post where I said something offensive to be removed, but I wouldn't like to be banned for something like that.
To me, they key difference between a mistake and pure bigotry is that, when someone feels offended, the first person will probably apologize and the second will engage.
Flagging and moving on can be an option when facing trolls or people who are willing to start a flame war. Engaging those people is giving them too much credit and just what they want.
But I don't see anything wrong in stating you are offended by other people's word as soon as you do it politely. I'd like to be told if I was offending anyone.
I am against banning racists for a reason: when there is a racist user who posts offensive content it's not uncommon that offended people would engage. Then the flame war starts and both users end insulting each other. Even if the racist user was the one to start the war, it's highly possible that both users would be banned, even if one of them just answered to a provocation. Nothing keeps an often polite user to have a bad day, engage the wrong person and say the wrong things. So banning such a person would not be fair.
Locking threads might not be the optimal solution, but from my point of view it's the best option that we have.
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Rysky, the guy in my example did not know anything about the word beyond the fact that it is used extensively today to refer to that nomadic lifestyle. It's not common parlance even in the usage he used it in. Not everyone is aware of every trigger word for every individual group. That's why, instead of jumping into a full-on flame war over stuff like that, it is best to just simply mention that certain groups may find it offensive and offer evidence as to why.
To offer an example of how far that can go if we consider word misuse or other, unintentionally offsensitive things to be actually racism, consider this hypothetical scenario. Someone from Europe calls me a cracker as some sort of strange cultural joke. Being from Europe, they don't understand the fact that it is a slur when spoken to a white person here in America because, in Europe, it actually means something else. Would it be right or fair for me to then say that they are actually an evil racist and that they need to be banned? If not, why is it different? Intent is everything in these sorts of scenarios.
To the reply about my friend, saying that he was just trying to have an excuse to be racist, that is quite disingenuous. He was simply responding that he did not know that the word itself had any racial connotations and that he was not using it in that context. He ended up getting banned simply because he was trying to relate why he used the word after the thread blew up with the typical internet insults of 'you must literally be Hitler to say that' and accusations that he was secretly some dumb, uneducated redneck that spent his days wearing a pillow case on his head.
Regarding my personal anecdote about Romani not knowing or caring about the word, I have never heard anything about it before that incident. I have crawled internet forums for years and have even had the displeasure of being on 4chan for quite some time and I never heard of it being used as a racial slur before my friend was the subject of that witch hunt. In my experience, if you cannot find it some way on a website like 4chan used as an insult, then it must not be widely known.
Indeed, that incident is one of the reasons why I left GiantitP years ago. A hyperaggressive community willing to grill someone for something that was completely unintentional and mods willing to ban the person for simply stating that's not how they meant it is not a community that I can honestly get behind. That, thankfully, doesn't seem to be the case here, but if it ever becomes as such, I will excuse myself from it.
Such behavior is almost as toxic to a community as actual trolling, because it pares down communities into cliques where everyone needs to know every single thing and never make any sort of social faux pax. It creates a gated community of sorts. It kills off constructive dialogue rather than helping facilitate it.
There are plenty of people who mean nothing racist at all when they use words like the example that I stated earlier. Taking a standoffish attitude with them as a kneejerk reaction does nothing to help them realize their words may have been offensive. As a matter of fact, it just cements the idea in their head that it must not be a big deal if the only people that it could possibly offend fly into histrionics over it.
All that said, I will leave this thread with this one piece of advice: try to understand people's motivations behind saying certain things instead of automatically assuming that they racist ***holes. Try to internalize that, at some point, you have made some sort of mistake of your own, a mistake that no one had any right denigrating you as a person over. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
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Rysky, the guy in my example did not know anything about the word beyond the fact that it is used extensively today to refer to that nomadic lifestyle. It's not common parlance even in the usage he used it in. Not everyone is aware of every trigger word for every individual group. That's why, instead of jumping into a full-on flame war over stuff like that, it is best to just simply mention that certain groups may find it offensive and offer evidence as to why.
Saying that he was just trying to have an excuse to be racist is quite disingenuous. He was simply responding that he did not know that the word itself had any racial connotations and that he was not using it in that context. He ended up getting banned simply because he was trying to relate why he used the word after the thread blew up with the typical internet insults of 'you must literally be Hitler to say that' and accusations that he was secretly some dumb, uneducated redneck that spent his days wearing a pillow case on his head.
Regarding my personal anecdote about Romani not knowing or caring about the word, I have never heard anything about it before that incident. I have crawled internet forums for years and have even had the displeasure of being on 4chan for quite some time and I never heard of it being used as a racial slur before my friend was the subject of that witch hunt.
Indeed, that incident is one of the reasons why I left GiantitP years ago. A hyperaggressive community willing to grill someone for something that was completely unintentional and mods willing to ban the person for simply stating that's not how they meant it is not a community that I can honestly get behind. That, thankfully, doesn't seem to be the case here, but if it ever becomes as such, I will excuse myself from it.
Such behavior is almost as toxic to a community as actual trolling, because it pares down communities into cliques where everyone needs to know every single thing and never make any sort of social faux pax. It creates a gated community of...
if someone shouts racial slurs at me, I am not going to assume them a confused innocent, despite my considerably sinful lifestyle.
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Nope, but starting a flame war doesn't help either. Tell them to stop it and apologize. They don't? Flag and don't engage. Trolls feed on people who engage.
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...Rysky, the guy in my example did not know anything about the word beyond the fact that it is used extensively today to refer to that nomadic lifestyle. It's not common parlance even in the usage he used it in. Not everyone is aware of every trigger word for every individual group. That's why, instead of jumping into a full-on flame war over stuff like that, it is best to just simply mention that certain groups may find it offensive and offer evidence as to why.
Saying that he was just trying to have an excuse to be racist is quite disingenuous. He was simply responding that he did not know that the word itself had any racial connotations and that he was not using it in that context. He ended up getting banned simply because he was trying to relate why he used the word after the thread blew up with the typical internet insults of 'you must literally be Hitler to say that' and accusations that he was secretly some dumb, uneducated redneck that spent his days wearing a pillow case on his head.
Regarding my personal anecdote about Romani not knowing or caring about the word, I have never heard anything about it before that incident. I have crawled internet forums for years and have even had the displeasure of being on 4chan for quite some time and I never heard of it being used as a racial slur before my friend was the subject of that witch hunt.
Indeed, that incident is one of the reasons why I left GiantitP years ago. A hyperaggressive community willing to grill someone for something that was completely unintentional and mods willing to ban the person for simply stating that's not how they meant it is not a community that I can honestly get behind. That, thankfully, doesn't seem to be the case here, but if it ever becomes as such, I will excuse myself from it.
Such behavior is almost as toxic to a community as actual trolling, because it pares down communities into cliques where everyone needs to know every single thing and never make any sort of social faux pax. It
There is a point in there for ignorance however. I apparently missed the posts or thread about the racial slur parts. However if the person doesn't know the word is offensive then they should be educated and then if they still maintain then maybe a harsher reaction.
There has been times even in my adult life where some words catch me for the first time and I wasn't aware that they were used in a negative context. Now if you know and do so anyways that is a different story. (heck if it wasn't for south park I would not know about a lot of racial slurs.)Immediately (colorful descriptor) destroying anyone that doesn't already see the world like you is akin to racist behavior. You should at least attempt to properly inform someone. Now this is different then willful ignorance however.
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Someone shouting racial slurs at you is an entirely different thing than someone obviously misusing a word in a potentially-offensive context. If someone shouts racial slurs at you, they probably mean it offensively. As I stated above, context it key.
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Immediately (colorful descriptor) destroying anyone that doesn't already see the world like you is akin to racist behavior. You should at least attempt to properly inform someone. Now this is different then willful ignorance however.
we simply disagree here.