I suppose I mostly just want to make a post in defense of my server, in defense of myself, but most importantly in defense of the people who are apart of my server. Because there are events that have never happened now being used to slanderize some of these people, and I appreciate the truth.
For first off, yes my server has grown into a wild frenzie before I could ever truly grasp it. Of course, I have moderators but some are more there to help me manage in decisions, and while I thankfully have a lovely technical moderator now, I had struggled a lot myself in trying to organize, create, and manage the server without them for many many months.
I have arranged my server to try and be safe for the few minors that are present, because I wanted it to be a fun fandom space for all. I deemed 16 year olds capable of being in a server, if they were capable of handling the show. That was my mistake that I am constantly trying to rectify, currently. But my priority for a very long time now has been the safety of minors in the space I, myself, have created. It’s my JOB as the adult on scene, as the creator.
It comes unfortunate to have already dealt with groomers in the server, of whom I have banned and blocked and warned others about, and that I had to deep dive and personally investigate the entire matter to get ahold of the answers. Despite the person being a member in my server, none of it had happened on the platform that is my server but rather A DIFFERENT HBOWar server that I am not affiliated with in anyway, so it was harder than one can imagine to gain the full story. I have already dealt with minors who have lied about their ages to access the server, against my will and against the will and consent of the adults in the server. Those minors are not there anymore.
I try to make it an extreme point in my server that I care about the safety of minors, and I try my absolute best to manage that without impeding over the adults —who manage quite fine without constant intervention (usually). NOBODY is actively or presently grooming anyone within my server, or even outside of my server as far as I know. I don’t know everybody as well as I should, but I try to make it as clear as possible that any problems that are happening need to be address through me or my moderators.
Unfortunately, people don’t always do that. They allow resentment to fester, or they try to take it upon themselves to redeem something they’ve said or done, or many people wait until everything spills over for one person just to dogpile on and explode onto everybody else and make the situation 10x harder to deal with. It has created a toxic environment, which is why I’ve tried to slow down the server, have Lockdown Days for people to be more productive OFF the server, provide slowmode for the general chat so it’s not so rushed. All the best I can do to try and ease the tension that comes in the aftermath.
This latest time was personal though. Someone who I used to admire, someone who I used to trust (well… for a short amount a time I had trusted them, but disgareeing with them even slightly leads to consequences of great proportions, as we see now), wanted to attack others in my server for grooming, wanted to attack me and my homelife and the trauma I’ve faced from it, wanted to attack a minor no less who has done nothing wrong except express their own trauma in a space I built SPECIFICALLY for them to do that safely. I simply cannot abide.
These people were not happy in my server because things did not go their way all the time. If I stopped an argument from continuing, that was somehow me “defending” someone. If I DID defend someone’s opinion, those people would then bring up old, irrelevant, unrelated, previously-thought-to-have-been-LONG-over beef, to reiterate personal matters that happened outside of the server. Instead of leaving my server when they were unhappy, or even talking about the matter to me, they wanted to complain publicly about how the server was being managed to try and rile and dogpile ontop of ANY issue, creating even more toxicity. Instead of leaving when I told them they were welcome to leave if they were unhappy there, they decided to attack me, attack my server, and attack a minor.
These people are not welcome in my DISCORD server anymore, in case that hadn’t been made clear by my banning them. Apparently though, me using a PRIVATE space to vent about all the problems they had caused me for a YEAR, was wrong of me. Apparently, me expecting these people to be the grown adults they are and not bring these issues to Tumblr, where I had blocked them specifically because I figured I didn’t want to interact with them and they didn’t want to interact with me, was too much to expect.
This was one of the exact reasons I had held off for so long on removing them from my server. I knew for months, if they hadn’t created a major offence outside of attacking me for my homelife (which IS bannable, but I knew it would be misconstrued just as well because it happened to ME rather than another member) then they would go on the very smear campaign they are going on. now. So I held off. I try to give these people their chances. They fail time and time again until it eventually comes to the point where it cannot be dealt with any longer except with a kick or a ban.
Safe to say, I’m disappointed they took this route, disappointed in myself for allowing it to take this long, and disappointed in those who supported and excused how that person treated others, treated me, and treated the space that is my server.