Write our new anti harassment-policy!

[Doggle]

Could there be a policy to notify members by PM, whether they're active or not, if someone turns up and is asking questions about them? Years ago, one of my exes joined a forum I had been on (but wasn't currently active on) and started asking everyone for information about me, and one of the mods reached out to me to let me know. The mod checked in whether I knew who it was and whether I felt okay with it, and when I said "yes, that's my ex and no, that's really creepy," my ex was banned. I think, both in terms of making sure I was aware that someone was being really creepy about me and asking for my input on the situation, it was handled really well.

This raises an interesting question - if someone who has harassed a board member elsewhere joins the board, can they be banned here if they haven't done anything wrong here? Where is the line on that? Would evidence be needed, or just assertion?

Or how about if someone takes info from here and uses it elsewhere (including in face to face conversation, with no record of it) - how do we prove it and where is the line?

[gracesonnet]

Sorry, KellisAmberlee! I personally am fine with the policy that RoseFox linked to. I don't know what to do regarding the meet-ups or when someone's harassed in non-Awkward spaces but hasn't broken any forum/meetup rules, etc. I'm also okay with the admin team doubling as the anti-harrassment team but I totally understand if that's not fun for you.

Sorry!

[Hrovitnir]

I definitely think a team, and probably just mods unless it's an unusual situation. I pretty much agree with all of kathlynn's comments.

A guideline as to what "counts" would be ideal, really, but it does make me wince imagining trying to get that really clear. Still, it's nice to have something to point to apart from anything else.

Thank you so much for your hard work!

[Doggle]

[*] What do the team do if they hear about a user who has harassed people in non-Awkward spaces but not broken any rules in our forums/meetups?

Nothing, unless another user feels that this person may harass or stalk them, then take appropriate action.

[*] How strict/lenient will we be when it comes to looking for proof?

It depends on the case. If it's a case, like the one posted earlier, then the evidince seems obvious. Otherwise, confirmation of the events, and successful stating of the reason the user thinks the behaviour will continue here. for a minimum.

This is really difficult to draw the line.

E.g., suppose the person from this thread turned up: http://friendsofcaptainawkward.com/foru ... ker#p39200

There would be no evidence, and no way to confirm the events, but the OP would still be legitimately uncomfortable and have good reason to feel unhappy with having him posting here.

Are we saying nothing can be done about a situation like that? The OP would have to choose between having their creep here and leaving?

Of course the failure mode the other way is to ban people without evidence, which isn't great either.

[Vicki]

1) Explicit permission to photograph: Yes - I think that this is a very good idea. I've worked with several people who have religious / cultural objections to being photographed. I personally loathe being photographed and have successfully avoided photos save for gov't ID for decades.

I agree--even if someone took the pictures and photoshopped platypuses over everyone who didn't want their image captured, the photos would still exist. It isn't that hard to ask permission before pointing a camera. That being said, enforcing such a policy seems beyond our forum's capabilities.

It might be worth putting something about photography permissions into meetup guidelines, even if that's less enforceable than rules about behavior on this forum.

I see your point about enforcement--what if person A says B took their photo without permission, and B denies it or claims that they did have permission?--but something like "photographing other meetup attendees without their permission counts as harassment, and we will investigate any reports of unwanted photography" might be useful. Some investigations would wind up with "insufficient data," but if C and D say that A didn't have permission to photograph them either, and just grabbed a quick photo of everyone on that side of the table, that's evidence in one direction. And "A asked if anyone minded if they took a picture, and a couple of people said 'sure, go ahead' and B didn't say anything either way" is evidence in the other. (I'd rather have explicit permission, but I think there's a difference between B not hearing the question until too late, and A not asking.)

[Doggle]

There are a whole variety of ways we could all choose who ends up on the team! We could approach users, you could nominate users/moderators you'd like on the team, we could take volunteers, I could ask my ponies to put their noses on your names to choose you...What would you prefer?

Ponies!

I think the most important thing is to try to get a team with a good demographic spread (race, gender, identity, orientation, disability, etc.) to have experience with different types of power dynamics and types of harassment.

[E.g., I recently read that one type of harassment which happens to PoC cosplayers is that they get unsolicited comments on whether or not racebending a character is appropriate, or how they should only play a character from their own race, etc. I have no experience with this and would never have guessed that that was a thing. Insert equivalents for all the other privilege axes - getting a team as wide as possible minimises the chance of failing to see why something is important.]

With that in mind, either asking for volunteers or tapping people to volunteer are fine. Or random selection of everyone with more than e.g. 50 posts here, or something.

[M.J.]

Hey folks,

In response to the suggestion by tbac I understand why it sounds appealing. It seems like the combination of the best of two systems, right?

Speaking as someone who would be part of implementing this system it looks a tad more complicated from the inside. First of all the technology of the forum isn't as malleable as we'd like it to be and there are still other technological requests that we have been unable to provide (such as hiding threads and getting the thank-you system to work). I'm not the foremost expert on tech on board but creating a toggle option like tbac mentioned that is useable by the admod team is going to be difficult and time-consuming, if we can figure out how to do it. If we can't that would mean that we would have to create a manual list and update it manually and that is a dauntingly large amount of work to put in relative to what you get out of it.

Given that we also don't know which demographics people on the forum represent (and I doubt we are going to try and collect this information due to privacy reasons) I'm open to suggestions on how to encourage as wide a demographic spread as possible.

[M.J.]

Not at all! We love to hear your thoughts and suggestions! And it's really difficult to know what is easy to make happen from a tech pov if you're not familiar with the backend of it, so don't be worried about throwing out suggestions. :)