[Accepted] Ryfer's unban appeal

[Riffboi]

BYOND Key: Ryfer
Total Ban Length: Until the heat death of the universe
Banning staff member's Key: rickymadenson
Reason of Ban: Harassing a player over discord channel, no intention to roleplay, and basically saying I violated the don't be a dick rule because I participated in group cyberbullying. I can't copy paste and the window changes to 'your game is starting' almost instantly so I'm not going to get it all down, but I encourage any member of staff to edit in the full thing if they want to.
Reason for Appeal: 

Alright so a bit of backstory on the reason of ban, since this was like over two years ago and there's probably completely new staff by now:
I was a big memester in my time of playing aurora, and honestly I still am but I'm a considerably more mature meme boy. Back when this ban was made I had a friend named Bokaza that I'd been in a seperate skype group for a long time with, where he and a bunch of people had a WC3 roleplay group that I constantly hung out in and joked around in with everyone in there. Sometime later I made a post on the aurora boards that was meant purely as a joke titled 'looking 4 ERP partner', which included the demands for said partner to include 'zoinks scoob' in every single one of their posts. Eventually one of the friends from the group I mentioned earlier gave Bokaza's discord information as an interested partner, which led me to message him asking for some ERP. He responded INCREDIBLY hostilely, and the scale of hostility made me think he was just going along with it and being aggressive as a joke. So I pressed, until he blocked me. Now, I honestly found this funny, no need to lie 'bout it. I was unsure if he was serious or not, but I wanted to press the joke because I thought he would get a laugh out of it eventually when he realized it was me that was asking.

SO! Two other people from that group under the guise of other names and profile pictures messaged him with joking requests for ERP, one of them even sending him tajaran furry porn that was manually censored in ms paint with lots of scribbles over anything nasty; making it much less offensive to the eyes although upholding a lot of the humor that was intended with it - but it ended up being one of the main points in originally banning me although in my opinion entirely harmless and not even being done with any involvement from myself. It was marked cyberbullying, though altogether it was meant as a light joke and in the end was nothing more than that. The reaction to it was strong, and I honestly feel it was unwarranted because calling three people asking 'hey want 2 ERP?' and stopping or being cut off via a simple block is not cyberbullying, especially since no attempts were made after a block and one just stopped after making one joke.  It wasn't serious, it was blown WAY out or proportion because this man is incredibly mature and overall I'm sure we made zero impact on his life. He didn't even make it a big deal, he just complained to the staff that someone in the group was bothering him and he wanted the staff to stop us; which honestly just turned our attention to skull.

I don't know if skull is around still or not, but he has a bone to pick with me and generally just dislikes me due to me occasionally playing meme characters that were only intended as a joke that stops when people get tired of it. I know aurora is heavy roleplay, I know it's serious 99% of the time, which is why these joke rounds were so occasional. I played the server for about three years with one or two characters that were completely serious. Acel Delrico was the chief engineer for a LONG time and recieved high praise from people on the server, with Axton Florent later being my research director and infamous cultist antagonist. I contributed many rounds of completely serious, engaging, and enjoyable roleplay throughout my time and even became a moderator for around a year - which only ended because I stopped playing when I realized my views didn't line up with the majority of the staff's, and I didn't want to push my less serious ideals which gave more leeway to players to crack the occasional immersion-breaking joke or fuck someone up as antag when it furthered their cause without roleplaying out a novel with their target. I'm not sure if staff is still the same, so know this isn't targeted at anyone in current time. Anyhow, I did once in a blue moon use joke characters, and the only thing that encouraged me to keep doing them was the overwhelmingly postive and open response from players I interacted with and the fact that I didn't get any complaints until it dragged on; at which point it'd stop completely. I never even was contacted by an admin to be punished for this, and as far as I know I never recieved notes about it - but it was used by skull as one of my reasons for being banned and it caused Garnascus to close my first unban. To be fair however, my first unban was a joke in and of itself until Garnascus proved to be all too patient with me and I wanted to give him a serious response - I didn't want to give skull one though, as he simply had a vendetta which had origins I'm unfamiliar with. Perhaps he really disliked those joke characters THAT much, but he never expressed his distaste to me prior to that and he absolutely could have. 

I had a pretty much perfectly clean record up until this dumb incident that really had no effect on the person involved, it was silly and immature and I wouldn't do it again if only because it was received by the staff so seriously. I may mess around occasionally, but I've roleplayed for a long time and for the majority of the time I'm serious about what I'm doing and want to create an interesting round and do my job because I find it genuinely enjoyable to do. The reason I'm making this unban appeal is to occasionally come on and play a round when I feel like it, because it can be fun.

[ShameOnTurtles]

Hi, apologies for the long delay on your appeal.

One question before we get into it; have you tried to evade your original ban?

[Riffboi]

Nope, I made a new account for a new name and moved coincidentally, and tried connecting on it, but it wasn't an intentional attempt to evade. I switched back to Ryfer when I was able to connect with my new one and saw I was actually still banned, and decided to make an unban appeal.

 

edit: I believe I was forum banned on Ryfer as well, but there really isn't another way to make an appeal other than making a new account for that.

Edited February 8, 2019 by Riffboi

[ShameOnTurtles]

Okay, thank you.

It's been a long time since your ban. I am willing to unban you but I need you to acknowledge some things first:

• This appeal forum is for recognizing that what you did was wrong, the punishment was fair, and asking for another chance. What you did wasn't acceptable, no 'buts.'
• Any issues with staff members gets properly reported or dropped. I do not want to see claims that X staff member has a prior grudge if you are not willing to report it properly and have it investigated.
• You abide by the rules, which includes not making unbelievable joke characters. It is very possible to make engaging, and fun characters that fall within the rules.

Sound good?

[Riffboi]

Fair enough, sounds good. The grudge was mentioned since I was just portraying the full thing as I remembered it, and definitely could have been left out. I mainly want to play occasionally just to play actual serious characters, so that last bit's easy enough. As for recognizing what I did wrong, I did intentionally try to get a rise out of people and stir up some shit, and I see that isn't acceptable here to any capacity. I'll avoid it going forward and follow the rest of the rules as they're set.

[ShameOnTurtles]

Ban lifted. Let me know if there are any issues.

[Flamingo]

Locking and Archiving on behalf of ShameOnTurtles.