Hey ZAM.Follow

I agree with you that the admin should of handled the harassment, but seriously, you're wasting the time of the FBI all because you couldn't get justice from some retarded admin? We all know the threat is impossible to carry out because you're anonymous so it's just trash talking. I'm not defending this guy, but seriously you really need to chill out. Ignore this guy and move on instead of abusing the FBI all because the admin wouldn't cater to your demands.

Edit: I'm sorry if my reply came off a bit harsh, but you have to admit you're really making far too much out of this. I've had to deal with trolls in the past too. It's really best to ignore them and they'll give up eventually. Take it easy man, life's too damn short.



Edited, Aug 10th 2013 9:37pm by ShadowedgeFFXI

Viertel is new to the internets? People saying things like this really shouldn't come as a surprise at this point. I'm not saying that it's ok or that I endorse it, but it's going to happen and it happens quite frequently. Forums are no place for the soft of skin.

Forwarding this kinda crap to the FBI though... that's rich

Why is it so unusual to expect admins to do things about death threats? Look at what is going on with Twitter right now for example.

Edited, Aug 10th 2013 9:43pm by Wint

I'm talking about the death threats some people are getting.

Yeah, like I said there is no excuse for that behavior. At the same time, Viertel is anonymous too. How exactly can you take a threat seriously when the person making the threat really has no way of finding out who and where he is? C'mon now...

Facebook and Twitter are dangerous as most accounts aren't anonymous. You have real life pictures and contact info so the threat rating goes sky high. It's important to point out the severity of a Twitter threat is usually more serious because of those risk conditions. You'd think Twitter would be sued if someone actually cared out a threat.

To be fair I doubt they've had to deal with a stalker situation before. I have (World of Warcraft) except rape was more on his mind than killing me (though both could have occured).

I don't **** around with this anymore.

It should of never got to this point. The person should of been banned long ago. Honestly the person trolling the OP was probably some 12 year old kid with a potty mouth. I agree with you though and that's all that matters, right?

As for the OP, I really feel for him/her. I know I would of handled it differently, but everyone is different.

I wonder what penalty 1st degree murder of a forum avatar carries...

It also crosses national borders, too. Just examples of GIFT in action.

Death threats are certanly no laughing matter, and any site admin that doesn't do something about one when reported is an idiot. If nothing else because they themselves would be liable for not reporting it to the authorities if you got killed by the guy. You don't get to threaten to end another human beings life. We take that very seriously around here. There are some absolutly ******* insane people on the internet, so you have to assume that the danger is real unless it's truely one of those rare cases of a joke or a comment between friends and treated by both parties as such. We've had a few death threats over the 13 years that I've been here, some of them ending more amusingly than others. We've had people literally stalked by people they had taken restraining orders out against, more than a few obsessed trolls, the occasional godraiden death threats, etc. None of those are ok. When we encounter something like that here, standard operating proceedure for all our admins is to if possible first contact the person who was threatened and ask them how they would like to proceed. If they want law enforcement involved, we provide any and all relevant ip, contact, and posting information to verified law enforcement officials. if they cannot be contacted in a timely manner, or if we feel it's a sufficient level of threat to justify calling the police (and thats only happened once) then we go that route. So far we've never had a poster killed by a crazy person at any rate! (ironically, hiding the karma numbers seems to have cut down on them for some reason.)

Anyways, Thank you! We definitly appriciate it when people notice what goes on (or in this case, things we prevent from going on?) behind the scenes. We try to keep things fairly invisible to minimize the admin interference into normal forum operations whenever we can. If any of you ever feel you are in danger from another poster here, think something illegal is happening, or even just have a bad feeling about something and want someone to take a look, please don't ever hesitate to contact any of us. That's what we're here for. Obviously our response will vary depending on circumstances, but I can and will garuntee that someone will look into the situation and see what is going on and act accordingly. If you ever get a response of "**** off, i'm busy" when you report a death threat to an admin here, let me know and I'll ban them myself.

As the Senior forum Admin, it sometimes falls to me to play "bad cop" in situations where a heavy "slap" might salvage a poster we would otherwise lose to a silent and permanent ban. Thats one of the reasons we'll occasionally seem too forceful in a given situation. Other times there are behind the scenes PM's and manouverings that go on leading up to a more public thread.



You would be suprised what people can find if they dig enough. For example, in one case I know of, a certain individual managed to scam a younger child of a forum user out of an in game account. The only thing known was the name of the individual's in game character, the contents of the character that was stolen (a few of which were distinctive and rare) and an approximate geographic location and a few persistant spelling errors due to some chat screen captures (for eample, I always spell definitly wrong, etc.), Using that, certain people were able to locate another gaming forum where the scammer used the same tag, and then backtrace enough publically available information to eventually identify the person in question difinitivly, to the point where return of the stolen account was arranged. While that's an extreme example, it's not a huge task to get more details about someone if you are crazy enough or determined enough to go through the effort. It's why you have to basically interact online with the expectation that anything you write will eventually be seen by anyone on the planet, and proceed accordingly. It's the primary reason why we don't allow people to post phone numbers, etc here whenever possible just because of all the personal info you can glean from that.


What is up with you and calling admins retarded anyways? More than a few people find that term fairly offensive by the way. Most people who aren't 12 year olds find something better to do than call people names. You should probably think about maybe kinda stopping doing that before you annoy some admin somewhere and they ban you as a waste of bandidth. Just a suggestion and all. Oh, and please stop sassing Wint. It makes me cranky when people talk back to my admins. Thanks!

Happy posting everyone!
Senior Forum Administrator
Kaolian "Tim" Drachensborn

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