In 2023, the Requiem Café in Anaheim hosted a Homestuck collaboration event. The Serverstuck mod team chose to take advantage of this opportunity to do some in person advertising at the event. They pasted physical posters nearby the Café.
The poster included no information about the fact that Serverstuck is unfriendly to proshippers. There was also no information in the server's rules at the time that prohibited proshippers from participating in the community, just a Blacklist channel that contained a list of topics that weren't allowed to be roleplayed or talked about in the server. The only way anyone could have known that Serverstuck wasn't friendly to proshippers was if they visited their Tumblr, where this banner was present under some posts:
Conveniently, the Tumblr isn't mentioned in the poster, or anywhere in the Serverstuck rules at the time of writing. You have to go out of your way to look for it.
Several members joined the server as a result of seeing this poster, including the subjects of this post. One of the subjects posted a commission ad that briefly mentioned they were willing to draw Dead Dove content. (This ad has since been deleted, so no receipts here.) This prompted the Serverstuck mod team to go through the social media of both subjects, and upon discovering "disturbing content" (that is, proship content), they banned both users.
Here is the ban message they posted:
Owner of Serverstuck confirming that the subject's ad is what caused them to look into their social media history:
The Serverstuck mod team then reported the subjects to the Homestuck Anniversary discord server, as well as a handful of local cosplay group discords. This resulted in the subjects being banned from all of the mentioned servers, labeled dangerous predators, and excluded from their real life friend groups.
Here is one of the subject's thoughts on the matter: (Thanks @sals-geno for the screenshots)
"I posted my commission sheet (with permission from the mods) because I needed money, and on my commission sheet it briefly mentions I am OK doing Dead Dove and NSFW commissions. it was only mentioned, didn't show anything explicit. I only accept commissions from adults regardless of rating. They pulled me aside and said it was "unacceptable" that I am ok taking dead dove commissions and that they were banning me (and by extension my partner) from the server. They then went around and to all the cosplay groups we were also in since there was a lot of overlap due to an IRL event, and we got banned from all of those servers as well. I will note at this time I accepted a single commission from a minor, but it was due to an IRL circumstance. We were at an event and I was short on cash, and he was the only person around who had any. He offered to help me pay for something if I drew him something in return, and I agreed."
TL;DR: Serverstuck's false advertising and subsequent cyberstalking and defaming of a "dangerous" pair of users led to real life consequences for the users. All this, because the mod team did not like that they were posting Dead Dove content on social media accounts unassociated with their activity in Serverstuck.
Additional: Less than a month later, they formally added "proship content" to the blacklist. Yes, that's really what it says, and yes, this is really how they chose to announce it.
A bit odd that they would insult the reading comprehension of proshippers, given the fact that putting "proship content not allowed" on the Blacklist still isn't an actual statement explicitly barring proshippers from participating in the community.
