Oh, from a forum mod note, people do get banned (mostly spammers) pretty regularly because suspicious accounts get flagged by the system, but I would love to have clearer guidelines of how to deal with people you think need to be banned or timed-out (silenced).
But when people are banned or silenced, you can see it on their forum profile with a reason why
Evidenced here:
The reason for ban is highlighted in forum terms, and that is how we will keep it. If more issues occur related to a banned user where additional accounts have been created, we can create a thread that highlights their known aliases but there is no reason to bring other people into it.
Oh that’s totally what I had in mind when I said summary. Sorry, I could have been clearer.
Thank you lily. I think the note on brute’s account is a great example. I know that running a community like this is a ton of work on top of all your other life stuff. It’s really reassuring to know for example that you checked in with the affected other poster and talked about safety.
I’m gonna step away from this for a bit.
To be clear about how I order hierarchy of moderation currently on the forums:
Physical safety of members is first priority. This includes deleting and hiding anything they are concerned about revealing their identity or location. This is why I lock journals and hide journals without questions asked. This has included alerting community members with abusive exes about new user accounts made on certain IP addresses, etc, or moving things into the more locked parts of the forums.
Attacks on users, including personal attacks made in threads, these get next mod priority and I will not adjucate if someone is right or wrong, personal attacks are not okay. Educating someone they did or said something wrong is different than saying someone is an ugly asshole and that difference should be clear.
Racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and other -ism are next moderation priority after physical safety and attacks on members.
the next is respecting contributions. It is not fair to delete the work of other people unless there is a compelling reason regarding physical safety, or things that violate 2. or 3.
Thank you (again) for all of the work you put into the forum and this community when you already have way too much stuff going on in your life 
Thanks. I wish I had more answers. If I was better at forum moderation, I would ask for more support in modding years ago. But because I don’t have great strong ideas about how to Mod Well, I feel uncomfortable bringing in people to the work for no pay without clear guidelines. Also the more we expand the mod team, the more risks people feel in reaching out to moderation team if they have conflict with different mods. It’s a nut I’ve struggled to crack as we’ve grown
Thank you for posting this, because this is genuinely the most information I have gotten at this point. It sounds horrific, and also sounds far worse than what I was able to piece together at ALL.
I actually had no idea so many people talked off of the forums, honestly, and was very surprised anything from the forums had turned into an IRL relationship. And that stuff is scary, because based on limited info I also would’ve vouched for that person - and I didn’t even follow their journal. So even scarier. Sounds like the tactics to ingratiate into groups, get vouched for, and find victims were effective.
There is a record of deleted threads and posts, for people’s information. I can turn back on deleted posts for a set number of days. We also have backups of the server.
Thanks for bringing this point to attention. I can’t defend the lack of care I showed for the other people in the situation, so I won’t. I think I have to be aware of the mob mentality of “someone else will do it,” from a checking in perspective and a reporting perspective. It’s not something I thought of while wallowing in self-pity and for that I’m sorry.
I thought bringing up banning on the discord was an appropriate measure but it was not, so I’m also sorry for that and to both those affected and the mod team for forgetting proper channels. It’s easy to forget when you have an almost actual but kinda parasocial relationship with someone to think “well we’re kinda friends so if I bring this up wherever it will totally be acted on.” As someone who helps moderate a 1000 member Facebook community I should know better.
And DAMN from a preying on the vulnerable perspective it is fucking hard to tell the difference between “wow this person is being really caring in all my hard times” and “wow this person is really making an effort to set me up so I cling to them and defend them.” Like I don’t know if any of the above details are about me but they could have been about me and I don’t think Meow and I have even discussed this. Like, fuuuuck.
Point being clearly a pattern of behavior.
Please don’t apologize. Especially for folks that are here all the time, it’s probably been years since you’ve read the guidelines. Honestly discord was still better but I don’t have mod tools there for the forums. I have had some asks for modding in some way weirder places. I try to be accommodating, but if they are not on the forum, and are like on instagram DMs, I can’t guarantee I will be able to deal with them - same is true when people DM or just comment (without a tag) to ask me to lock their journal without linking to the journal. I have to try to go and find your journal.
ETA: I think people think I’m an omnipotent being who knows what’s going on across all forum journals and private threads all the time. I am not. I genuinely don’t read most threads - not because I’m uncaring, I just don’t have time.
maybe a good way forward is for one of the mods to reach out to the person involved and get details. I know everyone is so busy but this has happened once in the years we’ve had the forum right?
I honestly felt unable to respond because of fear of hurting the victims more. And because he knows where I live. But, fortunately, i now know how to interact with law enforcement if I’m concerned, which is just great.
At this level, yes, thank gosh. But we have incidents regularly that could be something like this but it isn’t clear because so little information circulates. I don’t like being put in the position of Deciding What Happened when there is little information. I also am not going to pry into people’s personal life in DMs, especially in a position of “power”, unless there is an ask for me to do so. And I certainly won’t ask victims for “proof” of anything. That is not my job. So I only have views into what I can control and see. And this is what I am worried about. How to prevent this kind of stuff without prying too deep in.
In this case, as a mod, I did talk to the person named by Brute in a DM and asked about safety and steps she wanted taken. I’m happy to reach out again especially if wishes have changed, but I do not know the other victims involved. So I’m left without next steps.
I’m wanting everyone to feel safe in this space, but recognize that privacy is a huge part of that. I’m not expecting people to process stuff publicly because that is exactly what many people expressed they don’t want.
Hey Meow,
I want to apologize to you for not being more direct in asking if everyone was okay. I know 4-6 people posted in the discord offering more support than on the forums and from my not-involved perspective I thought that meant you felt supported. You did respond and ask us to seek help if we need it and I left it at that. I figured more input from my naval gazing self would only look self serving and harm those who were in the process of healing.
I have not stopped thinking about you or rodeo or anyone else involved in this since it happened silently hoping everyone was doing okay but feeling too awkward and far away from the situation to say anything. If you had been one of the folks I have interacted with on a one-on-one level before this I would have felt more comfortable reaching out but I didn’t want you to think I was trying to be nosy or get information for personal gain. Or even worse, contribute to the situation further.
This situation sounds so painful for you and everyone involved and I know myself and many others here want to support but we don’t know how. I am also another internet stranger, who you will likely have a lower level of trust for in general after everything (not because of anything I personally have done).
I cannot imagine what you and others directly involved are going through in the aftermath but I know one thing for sure- I am so thankful that while the forums were the place this started, we still have so many people here that you can trust and who will step up when you ask (I would assume the folks who were just in NYC are some of many on the list).
I have no answers, I wanted to share my apology for staying quiet.
General thought on PM policies - can people choose what their preferences are? Maybe in their journal intros or their profiles? Like “PMs without asking are acceptable” or “PMs unwelcome”. This would help me. I personally am open to PMs and have been thankful for every one as they have offered me support or further discussion on a topic I wanted more private. Some people have expressed they are uncomfortable with PMs and do not want people to PM then without explicit invitations? We put rules in our journals for spoilers maybe this could be the right spot to do that?
I really like this idea. I might be able to make it a function preference in user profiles.
It feels like there are two separate issues being discussed here.
1 - is the moderation on OMD still at the level of involvement the community wants?
2 - in situations where members of the community really need support, how best can those close to the affected person/s let the community know support is needed?
I had no clue about any of this; I muted brute a long time ago and stopped reading most of the forum last year. I’ve been catching up in pieces on my work breaks.
I consider people directly affected by brute’s actions to be my friends and would 100% want to meet up if we were in the same city. I had NO idea that support was desired; I haven’t seen anything on the forum or via text that indicated anything besides the people involved wanted to move on from the hellish bits.
In the past we’ve had other instances as a community where highly emotional discussions end up spread over multiple threads and off forum platforms, and as a community we’ve lost valuable members that feel the community as a whole doesn’t support their input or struggle.
IMO the details and backstory here are not relevant to the question of How as a Community do we ask for help From The Community.
I’ve been part of forums for 25 years and have seen many different ways of filling this need.
On OMD if I’m remembering correctly, the community as a whole has preferred to work things out as a community. To me this also means that we then need to ask for what we need in the moment. Perhaps a thread in a subforum people will see (not an individual journal) stating “this is a support thread”?
Regarding the perceptions around mod actions here - my opinion:
I’ve been a moderator on a few different platforms, some with a massive membership (page views in millions) and some more intimate. I’m currently a moderator on a forum that puts member safety as Priority #1 because a sizeable percentage of our active members are minors. I am expected to read every post on the entire main forum and the mod team splits the few subforums we don’t care to read.
Flagging and reporting posts or users has been critical on every forum on which I’ve been a mod.
I also have always been required to make decisions based on forum guidelines - which has meant in several cases that we link a series of posts and a user’s IP address/es to the Admin, but as moderators we are unable to take action because the point of contention is about something happening outside the forum. The most recent case was a member posting Tik Tok videos slandering a business, and the business posting on their Facebook page how the business owner had received threats of violence from the member. As representatives of the forum, we can do nothing on the forum about this member until they violate the forum rules. But we are watching very closely and also check all outside forum social media related to this member just to make sure we have as much of the picture as we can.
We are an entire team of mods, internationally, covering all time zones, with financial support. So obviously things can be done very very differently than OMD. And yet the outcome of a situation like brute would be exactly the same from a moderation toolbox standpoint.
…ok y’all are typing way faster than me so I’m gonna go catch up
Sorry I didn’t check in about how everyone was doing or if they were safe. I am not even on the discord, and didn’t interact much with Brute or Rodeo, but that’s no excuse.
I am learning a lot from this thread. (People are hanging out on Discord?! I had no idea.) I knew that there had been drama, but I had no idea what happened or who was involved.
I’m very sad to learn that a particular forum member had abused people’s trust. But I really appreciate how respectful and thoughtful everyone in this thread has been in trying to make sure forum members feel safe going forward. Thanks for being such a great community. I know it isn’t perfect, but I do really appreciate the vast amount of effort that is being put into making this online space worthwhile.
It was set up kinda one-off as an experimental thing when Covid started, because it has voice chat. Eventually, it became a perk just for Purrsonal Finance Society Members. It is unmodded and not super useful, but it’s a bit more locked down then the forums so sometimes people rant in there, and some people use it to play games over the voice channels. If it becomes really popular I will have to either learn how to properly use discord or I will delete it because I am still confused by discord.
I have heard it mentioned but I don’t know what discord is? I figured it was just another thing I didn’t know about because I’m not very internet or forum-savy. My first forum was MMM and my second was this one 
I’m also sorry that I didn’t reach out. I am another person who didn’t know anything about anything until I saw the apology. I didn’t follow the other main person’s journal either until she started a new one after this all took place. I didn’t feel like I was “in the know” enough to poke my nose in, if that makes sense? Another forum member and I briefly chatted about it via text but I felt like it would be out of place to mention anything online since I literally knew nothing about what was happening.
I felt like I was doing the respectful thing by not “rubbernecking” essentially. Idk if that’s the right or wrong response, but it felt like “not my business”? I wasn’t close to any primary party AFAIK
