How to handle member attacks ?

[Cedric]

Let's say a user became upset because you ended your friendship to avoid further issues. Rather than accepting your decision, this person chose to harass you through private messages and threatened to share personal information about you on the forum if you told anyone about the harassment.

As a normal poster, this situation made me think about how forum staff would handle similar situations. If you were in a staff position, how would you deal with members who attack and threaten other members?

 

[Arantor]

Seems to me like this is one of those cases where restriction of user rights is a thing - removal of PMs, post moderation, or perhaps even a full ban if warranted.

Personal attacks aren't cool - personal *harassment* is very much 'do not do this', because it's basically the nuclear option.

 

[PGen98]

If you have someone constantly harassing another member, the best thing you can do is either ban that member and remove any subsequent "rage quit" attempts in the aftermath, of use the Discourage feature, to make your forum hard to work with for them. They'll see all sorts of glitches, page load issues, errors, etc that will make it near impossible to use, give up and leave. Staff always have options

 

[Cory]

Harassment that is serious in a harsh way generally deserves extreme restrictions or an outright ban. I wouldn't know what to do with a user making threats about spreading my personal information and me not being able to do anything about it due to more threats. Though most threats are empty threats that no one really commits to, there are extremists out there that don't mind ruining other people's life.

 

[Kale]

I feel I have seen both users and staff do this to each other before and it always ended up being a bunch of BS. They had zero personal info on the staff member or the staff having any personal info of the user. I feel the best way to handle it is to ban that user and even use discouraged if need be.

 

[Reverie]

I would highly recommend in cases where you are worried about your own personal information you must be careful of who you add on social media first and foremost, and make sure your last name is not easily accessible on the forum.

But back to fully responding, if it was happening to me as a member I would report and screen shot these and show the admins/staff members. The more people know the better. If there was no threat of private information being shared, I would highly just suggest ignoring the user. Using the ignore feature helps! If it became worse though they should end up banned, but in the meantime while you await the ban I would ignore them.

As a staff member I would basically do the same thing though, I wouldn't ignore the user though, but monitor the activity closely until a ban is agreed upon.