[Resolved] Ban appeal: Polech

[Polech]

Hey, so I was just playing TF2C and i got banned for a week for racism, which is disagree with. I didn't insult nor support any racial discrimination or anything of the sort. Here's what happened: a player in chat wrote "jebic zydiw" which is grammatically incorrect translation for "fuck the judes" in polish, so I typed the correct translation but also said this is wrong and i dont support it and that he shouldn't have said that. A moment later, i got banned for a week. I understand its a sensitive type of topic/ban reason but I disagree that im the one deserving the ban.

As a polish person, we've been taught a lot about the Holocaust etc since its big part of our national history and we were taught to be sensitive and respect victims of such crimes and xenophobia as a whole. I'm not that stupid to disrespect the Judes nor anyone else for that matter.

 

[VintagePC]

Hi there,

Apologies for the delay. Your appeal has been received and I'll get back to you shortly.

 

[Polech]

I'll get back to you shortly

I love You guys but not gonna lie, this is the longest shortly in my life so far.

 

[VintagePC]

Side-track:

As much as I'd wish for the community to be so successful it could be a full-time focus... I do have a day job that keeps the lights on and a roof over my head that takes priority. It takes a non-trivial amount of time for me to review what's available to me and construct a reply. I'd meant to get that out yesterday evening but got sidetracked with other responsibilities, so I can only say sorry for the delay.

Anyway, to the issue at hand:

In a purely technical review of the issue, it's a violation of our rules (#3) on hate speech, and the punishment issued appears to be in line with our policies for repeated infractions. You do have a prior 2 day comms ban on record with us in early July, and second infractions generally start at a duration of 1 week. (The other player was on their first infraction, which explains the disparity between ban lengths).

The thing I'm struggling with here is why you felt the need to correct someone that was already saying something racist, and as much as I appreciate good grammar and spelling... that doesn't urge me to go correct someone that says something hateful, because at the end of the day whether I mean it or not, I'm still perpetuating the problem by giving it the attention the person is trying to get.

In our book it's not much different from someone quoting a racist phrase or joke from someone else as an excuse to say the thing and hopefully get away with it because "I was only quoting".

Given this, I can't really justify overturning the ban on any technical merits and I don't think the circumstantial one holds much validity either.

I realize this isn't the response you were hoping for but we've had to adopt a fairly hard-line policy on these issues due to serial violators just continuing to act out under our previous approaches.