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Hey Gaians,

This is Zero Omega here with you today and on behalf of the customer support team (which entails admins, moderators, and forum assistants) I want to personally address a policy that was put into place and work together with moderators and the Gaia community to find a resolution to the concerns about this policy and any bans that were placed as a result of it.

In 2013 we enacted a policy where we would delete posts that mentioned the personal information of our prior CEO and COO. This policy was enacted by request of prior management due to the increased amounts of threats of violence and abusive messages against the prior management at the time. This was a policy that was met with a lot of concern from the community regarding censorship and the effect of it. The team also dealt with a number of other issues as a result of management changes, a large part of it being community health and their reactions to the changes that were going on. A result of this policy and the other issues going on were the concerns of bans that came from it and Gaians feeling that they had been unfairly banned due to an overly strict policy.

Placing a ban is something that we take very seriously and it's ultimately something that we don't like doing. We understand that it ruins your experience on Gaia Online whether you're a new Gaian or old. As a user of Gaia Online, you’ve come to make many friends, create an amazing inventory, and established a home within Gaia whether that be on the forums, in our games, or Flash Worlds. As a Gaian myself since 2003, I know that such a ban would devastate me, and I know that our moderator team feels the same. In these cases, it hurts doubly so as the feeling is that you were banned due to an act of passion, trying to fight for a community that you felt was being ripped away and drastically changed for the worst. I know that there are those of you out there who feel this way, and do not believe that you are trying to be malicious and intentionally break the rules because it’s fun. When you get banned, you should absolutely feel free to appeal your ban and we owe you that due diligence to further explain that ban if you ask. To that end, this was something we did not properly do when it came to this policy and for that, the belief that unfair bans were being handed out became more prevalent.

Hearing Gaians talk about unfair bans pains both the Gaians and our team. Our team works hard to try and ensure that Gaians have a fair and positive experience, and when someone feels that that was taken away from them, we want to do nothing more but help investigate the situation and ensure that proper steps were taken. If we fail at doing that, then we can't ensure that Gaians also learn so that it isn't a problem in the future. So with regards to this policy, we want to take the time to correct our fault in this process.


I first want to give some history to this policy in an effort to be transparent over what has transpired in the last three years. As previously mentioned, previous management made a request to the customer support team (for reference, the “customer support team” consists of the administrators and, by extension, the moderator and Forum Assistant team) that posts containing their personal information, and the personal information of other Gaia Online staff, be deleted for security and safety reasons. This was in light of comments that were being posted that were abusive in nature or contained threats of violence. While not every post containing this information were of this nature, enough had been posted where it was felt this was the necessary solution.

The initial request was to ban anyone for posting this information, regardless of context. This was something that myself and the customer support team did not feel was fair to the Gaia community and did not necessarily support, and as a result, we decided that the policy should be enforced as follows:

• Posting personal information of Gaia Online staff: Post deletion with no formal warning, but a request that the information no longer be posted.
  
• Posting abusive or threatening message along with the personal information of Gaia Online staff: Ban of varying length depending on the nature of the post (e.g., a more threatening or severely abusive post would results in a permanent ban)

We still did not fully support it, however, this was a policy that we felt was most fair in the face of a request that the team did not feel was necessary to enforce in the first place. However, given that the request was made from up high, it was our place to enforce it. It was a policy that many on the moderator team did not want to enforce, so to that point, I offered to any moderator who did not want to enforce the policy to contact an administrator with an offending post and the administrator would remove it. I personally took on the majority of these cases in order to being as lenient as possible in the fact of these issues.

Regardless of how fairly we tried to enforce it, the community felt unfair and overly strict bans were being placed. As mentioned earlier, this is something that we wish to address.


It is the belief of the customer support team, as well as my own, that the vast majority of bans placed because of this policy were only in severe cases of abuse and not improperly placed. However we recognize that due to a lack of transparency, it could be believed that it was the result of overly strict moderating. I, along with the rest of the support team, want to offer a chance to the community and Gaians affected by these bans to appeal them publicly in a good faith effort to be as transparent as possible to the community regarding this policy, and allow Gaians to get further information on their bans. This is certainly not something we are doing as punishment to our moderator and customer support team, but rather a way to address the concerns brought forth by the community in light of our decision to relax this policy. We do this publicly in an effort to be transparent about our process, especially for a policy that was so controversial to the team and the community. This will allow any Gaian to get insight into our decision making process and help more widely address concerns about these bans. Here’s how this will work.

• If you have an account that you feel was banned by this policy, post the name of the banned account in this thread.
  
  
• From there, the customer support team will take some time to review the ban and come to a conclusion regarding the ban.
  
  
• Once we have come to a conclusion about the ban, a member of the customer support team will quote you and post the outcome of your investigation.
  
  
• There will be one of three outcomes per account:
  
  
  1. We find that the account was properly banned as the account had posted a severely threatening or abusive message and due to the nature of the message(s), the account cannot be unbanned.
     
     
  2. We find that the account was properly banned at the time given the policy that was in placed, however, in a good faith effort to be more lenient given the changes to Gaia, we are unbanning the account.
     
     
  3. We find that the account was improperly banned and should not have been banned, the account will be unbanned.
  
  
• In all cases, we will post the content that led to the ban and thoroughly explain the ban and our decision.
  
  
• Cases posted in this thread that do not relate to this policy will be redirected to our Help Center as that is the proper channel to appeal all other bans.

We will host this thread for one month, ending on March 6, 2017. After all cases have been reviewed, we will then post a secondary thread with our findings and results, again, in an effort to be more transparent about our process.


We understand that this policy was frustrating and confusing for the community and we hope that this process allows the community to fully understand what transpired. We do want to mention that even though we have relaxed this policy, effectively reversing it, that the intentional and/or malicious posting of personal information of any Gaian, staff, user, mod, or otherwise, is still not allowed. Gaians should feel safe to express themselves on Gaia without worry about real identity being present if they do not want it on Gaia. We want to foster a friendly, safe community for everyone and in order to encourage that and achieve that goal; we still will not allow others to harass other Gaians by posting their personal information.

We do want to thank all Gaians for their patience and understanding as we transition into a new age of Gaia that we think everyone will enjoy.

If your account was hacked, you should file a hack report. The ban will be handled as part of the investigation on the hack report form.

Because this was a ban placed for your own protection on your request, it would not fall under the category of bans that Zero Omega and team are reviewing in this thread.

There will always be people who let power go to their heads. I would second this. Check moderators. Banning people for legitimate reasons is okay, banning people because you don't like them? Eh, not so much

This is an unacceptable solution to the serious issue here. Publicly dealing with it instead of in private as it should be dealt with is not transparency, it's bullying. You're trying to intimidate users into not posting or getting justice for their bans.

You need to have this handled privately and it needs to NOT be Zero Omega who is in charge of this. He's the one who issues bans in the first place and approves them. If he approved it to begin with why would he take it back now? You're guaranteeing that no one will have a fair chance since the person reviewing their ban is biased in the first place. If his pride gets in the way of him admitting he was wrong people are going to remain banned.

I for one will continue to get my ban resolved PRIVATELY through the ticket system and dealing directly with staff members other than Zero for the ban I never should have received.

I urge others who realize how inappropriate this is to speak out and request that Gaia handle these matters privately and professionally rather than in this open format that can and WILL lead to nothing but bullying and exclusion.