On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof

[Polk]

While reading another thread (and I please ask people to keep that SPECIFIC conversation there), I got to thinking about the purpose of logs, receipts, proof, what have you.

I think it’s really easy to conflate the two things, and in fact sometimes people may be doing so in bad faith.

If I, as someone running a game, ask Alice for logs after Alice complaints to me about Bob, it’s not because I need “proof.” Logs aren’t proof. Logs are testimony, carrying no more weight than the accuser typing “p polk=Bob harassed me.”

The reason to ask for logs, is to know what actually happened. “Do you have logs?” from someone like me isn’t “Do you have proof?” It’s “Can you show me exactly what happened so I know what to do about this?”

I want to see what happened, what was said, and the context before I do things. Misreadings happen. Misunderstandings happen. Friendships are lost over such things.

But in the case of “Bob is pressuring me for sex RP,” that’s never going to be what you’re trying to do. Not at all. That’s an entirely different situation. Even if Alice is mis-reading Bob, you’re not going to try to get them to be friendly again. No.

Some folks are so used to the “due process” of “Do you have logs?” that they believe it’s proper to ask for them before dealing with ANY complaint. But that’s not the point!

Asking for logs isn’t about proof, evidence, due process, and all that. It’s about being a cool-headed third party to mediate a dispute.

In the case of an accusation of sexual harassment, that’s not the time or the place to be the cool-headed third party to mediate a dispute. That’s the time to separate the two at once, and to keep an eye on the accused.

Watch the accused. Does the accused’s behavior fit the pattern? Are there other complaints? Are you ready to take action to protect players from this player if there is a problem?

Getting the logs might help with that, but it’s certainly not required or even necessary to start the process.

In practice, sexual harassers in games do so serially. It won’t take long to get a few red flags and boot 'em.

I think logs are a red herring in most of these discussions.

[Pax]

I don’t think the issue of sexual harassment in MU* treads any new ground, and I think you’re absolutely right that cool-headed third party brain needs to chill out when that’s the issue on the docket.

Demanding receipts is problematic for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s hard for me to think of a woman, any woman that I know, who hasn’t been in a conversation they were fine with that suddenly took a turn. YOU KNOW. A TURN. And I’m sure this happens to men, to non-binary individuals, and to folks of all identities, but I can only speak from my perspective.

If I’m in that situation (I have been), then now in order to prove to Random Cool-Headed Third Party that I’ve been harassed, or that this person is a danger, I have to show the four pages of kinda steamy texts that were fine with me before the Alleged Creepazoid got weird as hell.

Yay, that’s so fun for me, people will definitely NOT call me a slut or act like I deserved it, or shame me in any way. This never happens. Thanks so much, RC-HTP! You really helped. Wew. Not it.

I’m staring at the Discord server for a game where something Sort Of Gross happened. It happened once, and then there was a weird reference weeks later in an OOC conversation that made me think of it again, and I think to myself, “I should really mention this. That was weird. Weird as fuck.”

I know I’ll get asked for logs. I know I’ll get grilled over the conversation before and after, which I just don’t really remember that well. I’m sure my machine logged it, it logs everything, but do I really want to dig it up, and hand it over, so some strangers I don’t know can pick apart everything that I might have done? This person is more well-established in the game than I am, more interconnected into the community.

Knowing all of that, the whole situation screams Why Bother, and I feel kind of disappointed knowing that this dude will probably make someone else feel kind of weird. Explosively harassed or violated? No, nothing like that. But explosively harassed or violated isn’t what it takes to turn someone off from a game. Sometimes all it takes is someone making you feel kind of weird, and people who are not tightly ingrained in the community and who might not have someone to turn to and say word about it, they might just leave instead of hanging around and dealing with it.

[GF]

I propose an informal poll.

How many people here have reported sexual harassment to a mod? Were you asked for receipts? If so, once receipts were given, was any action taken, or was the behavior excused as lacking sufficient evidence to moderate/you being too sensitive?

I’ll start. Yes, yes, and nothing happened.

[Pavel]

@GF Yes, yes, I was blamed for not telling them sooner.

[Sammich]

@GF No. (as in, was subject to sexual harassment, but never reported it)

[Pavel]

@Pavel said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

@GF Yes, yes, I was blamed for not telling them sooner.

I should add to this that I was playing a male character, it was the early 2000s, and the harassment came from another person playing a male character. So I don’t know how much a part homophobia played in the admin’s thinking.

[Polk]

@GF I’ve once been hit on aggressively, including SUDDEN NUDE PHOTOS, but I didn’t Feel harassed so I didn’t act on anything. People who get it a lot probably would have felt harassed, though.

[sao]

@GF Yes, no, and yes. But it was on Arx and the person I was reporting told on himself rather quickly when they contacted him about it. He was banned the same night I reported.

[Jennkryst]

I have gotten extremely lucky, in that I just ghost people when they start to get creepish in a way I am not comfortable with. I should maybe re-evaluate that going forward.

But in a weird twist, I reported myself on one occasion, because I done fucked up and accidently stepped over a line*. Which could be why nothing really happened to me beyond some stuff getting retconned and me feeling so bad about it that I didn’t RP for a couple months after the fact.

(* proof that affirmative consent in advance is important, because this was literally the first time that I didn’t ask about something that I didn’t even consider weird… between characters who had done much weirder things together. But also regularly asking for affirmative consent was evidence that this was me being a dumb thot, and not predatory.)

[Pax]

@GF Y. Combination Y/N, sometimes I’ve reported it, sometimes I haven’t. In every instance, I was asked for logs. The range of reactions I’ve gotten when I have, and I will use specific examples only:

1 - “We’ve made a note for our records, and told the player they’re not allowed to contact you.”
2 - Absolute silence, zero.
3 - “Block them.”
4 - One place did kick that MFer out almost immediately, so good on them, but I had also been on that game longer and he had committed the High Crime of acting weird in public, so I think admin didn’t have to dig really deep for that one.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s representative.

Weirdly, when I reflect on instances of harassment, and maybe this is just the price of being female and on the internet, it takes a second for things to register as harassment. Like, I am so dead to this shit. Annoyed. Fatigued. Put off by it. But also dead to it. I’m not even that fucking friendly. I’m not what you’d call a “soft target”. And yet, this has to be a FRACTION of the times I’ve been harassed on a game.

[junipersky]

I do find a lot less weird shit (not none) when I explicitly put “FTB” in my +nfo/+info/+finger or when I play a dude.

[Artemis]

@GF I’m so desensitized to the odd, awkward, or vaguely insinuating messages I receive from random people on games like these that I forget reporting harassment is a thing I can do. I know this doesn’t answer your question exactly but idk maybe offers some insight.

[GF]

@Artemis The poll is mostly about whether providing logs produces positive results, but I totally get what you and Pax are saying. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to notice and get mad at being harassed.

[Warma Sheen]

@GF I haven’t reported anything of this type. Everyone has their own definition of what applies and rarely does one person know what another person’s definition is. So I’ve encountered it occasionally, but never to the point where I felt I needed staff intervention.

[Hobbie]

Yes. No. “They’re new, they’ll be gone in two weeks.” I’m a male btw.

I noted it down on a lesson on what not to do. Which to be fair I’m doing with a lot of the examples I see here. It’s the weirdest thing, the common sense to actually take something like this seriously doesn’t seem to be very bloody common.

[Pavel]

@Hobbie said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

Yes. No. “They’re new, they’ll be gone in two weeks.” I’m a male btw.

I noted it down on a lesson on what not to do. Which to be fair I’m doing with a lot of the examples I see here. It’s the weirdest thing, the common sense to actually take something like this seriously doesn’t seem to be very bloody common.

There are four main reasons I’ve found why taking action on such things isn’t common:

1. They just don’t believe you or care
2. They believe you’re overreacting, or misreading a situation
3. The person you’re accusing is popular/important/a key contributor,
   or
4. They’ve done the same kind of thing and don’t want to think that they’re a sexual harasser too.

[mietze]

Yes, yes. On most games, nothing happened. Sometimes I was turned into persona non grata if not overtly so. On the rare few it was dealt with immediately. (I genuinely don’t report red flags though, the one exception has been Arx, where I feel comfortable enough with staff either way that I don’t feel like I need to wait until it’s horrible to say anything, I can just ping with a “hey this happened and it felt weird, i don’t expect action or even a report back, just wanted you to know”. For a long time it was the only game I felt okay doing that on. Now I don’t play on any game that I don’t.)

Hell, I’ve had the yes/yes/nothing was done in RL when reporting both domestic violence and stalking to the police in the 90s. So i’m not terribly surprised to see similar behavior in folks who grew up in that era, and am pleased at some of the changes that you do see.

I can’t think of a single game I played in the 90s/00s that was safe to report any kind of issues to staff, especially if it involved “active” or “popular” players. I’ve even been disbelieved by friends (but not necessarily gotten blowback). I believe that was a pretty much universal experience during that era. 10s-current seem to be a much more mixed bag.

[Warma Sheen]

@GF said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

@Artemis The poll is mostly about whether providing logs produces positive results, but I totally get what you and Pax are saying. I have to remind myself that it’s okay to notice and get mad at being harassed.

What do you mean by “positive results”? The range on that is wide, as is what constitutes being harassed. Whether you were satisfied by the resulting action is an altogether different story than whether the staffer took action or whether there were positive results.

The topic is such a delicate clusterfuck.

[Pavel]

I agree with @Polk that most staffers require logs in a weird form of jurisprudence, which ironically makes the apathy towards sexual victimisation all too realistic.

But I’d wager that most (not all, obviously) people posting here who ask for logs aren’t asking for proof so much as they are asking for context. We aren’t on the game in question, we aren’t privy to those conversations, and we don’t know who they’re talking about. So if someone comes asking for solace or advice or whatever it is, we want context.

I’m not saying it’s right to ask for logs, just that it’s understandable and from a different perspective than the one people most attribute.

[Hobbie]

My desired approach when dealing with this problem is that logs are helpful but optional, because as proof it’s unreliable since text on a page is so hilariously easy to alter. But, true or not, having them for reference answers one burning question straight away when running an investigation.

“What am I looking for?”

It’s not impossible, and it’s not even hard to investigate a potential harassment case without them, but context is for kings. Logs of interaction provide a pattern to look for, then when you’re checking behaviour, you cross-reference it against what you have. If it matches, you can rule out #1 and #2 in @Pavel’s list of reasons pretty much immediately.