Are users the ones who need protection from us? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Hi everyone.
I've been here for over 7 years and usually I only tend to post in the forums when it comes down to important things. As such, by writing these lines I hope to spark a significant debate over something that I consider to be an important, ongoing and still-current issue of supporting users.
Essentially, users can block us for just any reason, and that makes it impossible for us to either interact with them, or report their behaviour. At the same time, if we - as supporters - block them, even for what we consider to be completely fair reasons, we ocasionally receive messages from your website stating that we're misuing the feature (and could get in trouble over it).
Let me give you two examples of how this is usually misused. Imagine you spot a user with a name such as 'hotdaddy69'. You connect with them, they visit your profile, somehow notice you're a male, and quickly block you... meaning, there's one more pervert in the website, and we cannot do absolutely nothing about it - we can't even report them, which is an issue!
Another example - a few hours ago, a user made me a bad request. He, or she, wanted me to pretend I was performing an illegal sexual act with them and tell them how it would go. Naturally, I told them I was uncomfortable with the request, and I was about to report them when the conversation "mysteriously" disappeared. He - or she - had blocked me. Again, this meant one more pervert in the website, and we cannot do anything about it.
Now, this is a significant issue. We should be here to present support to those who need it, and instead the website is offering ways for misdeeders to protect themselves from us, while even preventing us from reporting them. This has to be corrected. As Listeners, if someone preemptively blocks us - usually, to prevent us from reporting them - we should still, at the very least, have some way to flag their profile too!
@AFollowerofPlato
I am not surprised you might see the worse of a site
yes, i think you should have a strong system of being able to report or otherwise stop the perverts.
Not only for yourself but to protect others from similar experiences
Listeners do similar, including verified listeners. Today I was talking to a listener who far into a chat who wanted to know my age and if I was single. Then I was asked about my sex life, completely irrelevant to the chat. And no surprise - when I didn't give them details about my sex life - blocked.
I think this is actually more harmful than when members do this type of thing because they have personal details regarding my life from the actual chat topic. I agree though, it's a problem when members are being inappropriate too.
Even though I was blocked the listener is reported - at one point the trick was to take screenshots before trying to type more. Now, I think even if you type to see you are blocked you still have access to the chat as long as you stay on that chat - don't go elsewhere without taking screenshots first.
Reporting is now done via Support - click the submit a request button at the top and then options include report a member or report a listener (along with other things).
As for the inappropriate usernames, the safety patrol team does flag those, and the accounts do get banned, but it takes a bit of time for the flags to be processed (usually within a day). Non-safety patrol members can reach out to anyone on safety patrol, or a community mod.
Anyone interested in joining Safety Patrol can check out this information - https://www.7cups.com/forum/safe7cups/SafetyPatrolTeam_1685/ApplyfortheSafetyPatrolTeamNowOpentoListenersandMembers_273682/
@AffyAvo , hello there! The two of us did talk a few hours ago, I remember you, and I hope you're feeling better by now! 😊
Anyway, what you mentioned is certainly possible, but it derives from a problem that I also already presented in the past, one that is even repeatedly pointed out in literature, and that yet nobody ever seems to truly care about or fix - to become 'verified' one has to go through a test under test conditions, and this makes it absurdly easy for people to become unfairly verified.
At the same time, you mention that people can report these problems via Support. Maybe they can, sure, but it deserves to be pointed out that support appears to be completely sleeping on the job. Based on personal experience, I've contacted them multiple times across the years, including with very serious problems I had to report, and ZERO of those contacts were ever answered. In fact, it's been over four years since i reported a significant issue with the system, the problem is still ongoing, and they never answered me about it... which shows that, well, probably they won't do anything about reported users, either!
@AFollowerofPlato I've been here a long time too, and I agree the support has been lacking at times and things got missed.
Since they moved over the majority of reporting via the Support desk, I do see things being responded to in a reasonable timeframe - within a week for most reports.
I really do like the current system, you automatically get a case number when a request is submitted, so it provides something that can be referred back to.
