Much earlier in the year I previously discussed what sort of issues constitute what we consider to be cases of serious harassment and this week I would like to once again discuss this subject as well as the proper method of reporting cases of harassment to the staff.

If you believe you are being harassed there are a few steps which you need to take prior to trying to acquire help, these steps will make the process of getting help a faster and hopefully more satisfying process.

The first step before seeking help is to actually, objectively look at the situation and ask yourself if you are truly being harassed or if you are merely being annoyed or bothered..

This step is important because the staff will only intervene in situations which involve what we consider to be actual harassment and you will not receive assistance for situations involving simple rude behavior, arguments, annoyances or other things which could be classified as petty dramas.

We ask that you try to limit your reports to only the most serious of things such as threatening statements, unwanted sexual solicitation or commentary, spamming, page flooding,, clearly racist remarks and other highly aggressive types of comments.

If your situation is better classified as involving lack of manners, rudeness, arguing or other relatively minor situations we ask that you use the Hide Comment and Blocking tools made available to you and cease communicating with the other party.

If you have a serious situation, or your attempts to quell the problem yourself have failed then you should file a ticket with the Help Desk.

Please be certain to file under the Report Harassment category as misfiling your ticket can result in delays in the proper handling of your problem and you will also want to make certain that your ticket contains certain essential pieces of information.

When filing a ticket please be certain to give the staff a short synopsis of the problem. Please make your explanation as simple as possible and avoid writing the type of long rambling explanations which could only serve to confuse and complicate the issue of understanding what you are attempting to report to us. Also avoid vague, useless statements which lack any real information; the more questions we have to ask to figure out what is going on the longer it will take to assist you.

Be certain to name the other party, properly spell the account name and provide a link to their account page in some fashion.

For all harassment cases you will be required to provide evidence of the wrongdoing in the form of links directly to the comments. This means that if someone threatens you during a lengthy conversation you must provide links to the specific comments and not just a general link to the page where they can be found. We need to see exactly which comments you are trying to report and if you force us to search around and guess which ones you are talking about we may not review the correct comment.

Please be aware that screenshots are not acceptable as evidence in a case of harassment and that we can only accept actual URLs and links. Since screenshots are easily falsified we will reject any claim of harassment which can only offer screenshot evidence so be certain to have your links handy.

If you are having an ongoing problem which results in several tickets being filed over time please do not assume that the staff member who speaks to you will automatically be familiar with your situation; there are several different staff members who may handle your ticket and each one of those staff members may handle hundreds of different tickets each week so please give us a short, simple refresher on your situation with each new ticket you file.

Finally, please file only one ticket; filing multiple tickets about the same situation out of panic or impatience will not result in you receiving attention any faster, it will in fact only slow down the process for you and every other person requiring assistance. Please file only one ticket and await a staff response, you can always provide an update on the situation to the staff member who has responded to your ticket

If you are being seriously harassed please do not hesitate to seek assistance so that we can intervene on your behalf and bring the situation to a close.