A few years back I created a Google Group for the local community because the Yahoo group we had at the time was kinda... well, not working out so well. Over time, the Google group became the de-facto official list and now has more than two dozen members, nearly half of whom are actually active. Given that it's just a local, community list, we didn't really have any explicit rules in effect; it was just generally understood that it was a clean list and that people should conduct themselves like adults.
Of course, given that the furry fandom is exactly 49.41% drama (and 102% of statistics are invented), it was only a matter of time before shit happened. Specifically, one person posted an old 4chan meme, prefaced with two or three sentences of written child pornography. While I realize that written stuff like that is in a legal grey area (as opposed to outright illegal) I also recognized that it's the kind of thing that could easily get someone in trouble because, though it might not be explicitly illegal, it could attract the unwanted attention of an employer's e-mail filter or - even worse - an overzealous parent.
I just posted by saying it was tasteless, inappropriate, and completely irrelevant to the list. Then several other people chimed in saying they thought it was funny (only one person posted with a "WTF" instead of registering approval). The first guy then said it was my problem since nobody else took issue with it, clearly failing to understand the potential ramifications of what he posted. I posted again, this time explaining why, exactly, it was inappropriate.
Then he and one other person both told me to chill out, continued to insist it wasn't a problem, and so on. Given that I'd already given him previous warnings off-list for spam and being rude, I'd had quite enough with his attitude. I posted telling him to knock it off immediately, laid down rules explicitly detailing the things that are common sense even to most furries, and told him that if he did something again I was going to moderate his posting until further notice. This led to him e-mailing me and mocking me off list, quite literally daring me to ban him; rather than giving him what he wanted, I simply set his posts to be automatically rejected and told him to never, ever e-mail me again.
I would have hoped that would have been the end of it, but no sooner do I forward the off-list stuff to one of the only other sane furs in town do I get a phone call where he attempts to verbally take my head off over the way I handled the situation. He insisted that, just because we hadn't explicitly stated that posting porn to the list was unacceptable, there was no excuse for me even threatening to take an administrative action against the guy who posted the content in question. After repeating my opinion several times and him becoming increasingly agitated due to my unwillingness to immediately apologize for "not doing things like an admin" and simply do things exactly as he wanted, I asked one simple question: "Did you expect anything positive to come from this phone call or did you simply want to vent in my ear until I hang up?" That seemed to get him to cool down considerably and, even though I didn't change what I was saying in any significant way, he went from insisting that I was the only person even remotely in the wrong to acknowledging that, while the situation could have been handled more tastefully, I at least was acting in a logically consistent fashion and not out of any sort of off-handed malice or similarly unfounded insanity.
End result? Aside from having a slightly longer block list for my Gmail and AIM accounts, we now have drafted a full-blown set of rules to try prevent this kind of bullshit from happening again. I'm willing to bet that it's only a matter of time before the guy who started this mess does something stupid and that his "apology" was simply because the person I spoke with on the phone told him to make one, but I'll deal with that when it happens. End result of all this is that I spent almost three extra hours awake than I originally wanted and lost any sex drive I had for the night. So now instead of getting eight good hours of sleep after pawing off, I'll get barely five hours and will be even more frustratingly pent up in the morning.
Someone, please, remind me why I'm in the fandom again?
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