anonrerising | Damnit, Arcanist

Discord's technology currently doesn't help much when it comes to content filtering, so the gene/eye spoilering is basically a cultural bandaid for it. I don't blame people for trying to make it a thing for their own sanity. This sense of responsibility does indeed lock me out of the bigger servers too. I also forget what to spoiler and fear social shaming.

I have ideas for what Discord's development team needs to implement to lighten the individual responsibility for spoilering content. I will list them if it's relevant to the conversation here.

I disagree with your 'moral weight' comment btw; individual people shouldn't have to weigh whether something is unpleasant enough for them to not have to interact with it. Maybe what you mean is that censoring niche/SFW triggers and phobias for everyone encumbers people who don't need those warnings.

thank god they lowered it because 5000 levels for the final badge was ridiculous. what were they thinking?

I am pretty baffled that you, as someone who has actual memory issues, are so eager to dismiss other people with memory issues, who perhaps don't have the same experience as you, as lazy.

yeah lol i saw that and was like "okay so youre getting a dragon a day from me so i can get the daily badges" because i for sure am not sending in 700+ dragons for an average fest raffle

absolutely no idea what they were thinking. maybe if the badges were amazing id consider it but they're just kinda average. nothing against the artist who made them but its very hard to justify such a steep price set by the leads

+1, as someone who also has memory issues.

Another thing to consider is the confusion of going between servers that do and do not have a list. I mix them up sometimes, not remembering exactly which one had what, and will accidentally post in a server that does have a list thinking it was a server that didn't.

I don't have such a strong reaction as you most of the time, but eye gore/horror makes me physically ill -- including literal physical reactions I won't get into for the sake of not grossing people out, but that are a genuine problem. Shadow and Plague primal are the only things on the entire site that do this for me, and it's not a small fraction of the userbase that has these issues.

As long as a server has a clear, concise list easily referred to (ideally just make a bulleted list in a rules channel, or hell if you wanna really please 'both sides,' an entire "spoilered content" list channel just for that), I don't see how it's so unreasonable to take 30 seconds to give it a quick scroll when you want to post a dragon -- even if you're physically incapable of remembering a single item on the list for more than 30 seconds at a time, you can still just double check whether the eyes/genes line up.

SA

Actually, technically there's some UMAs that do this as well, but fortunately those are spread thin enough and with few enough printings that of the millions upon millions of dragons on the site, there's maybe a hundred at most that will be an issue. It's basically a non-factor.

nayrt

I mean, I do feel like I am "losing" when I'm told that my needs can't be met because someone else's take precedence, or when they're dismissed entirely because "it's not that hard to spoiler, suck it up and get over it." One idea I saw was that there could be two channels, or a non-spoiler thread in a dragon share channel. Even if a solution that meets both needs can't be found, some acknowledgement that my issues are, for one thing, not completely made up or trivial would be nice!

I have A Lot Of Thoughts, but the general tl;dr

It sucks to be on both sides of this issue, but having easily-accessible, clear and concise lists is just the best solution/compromise for both. Having nothing spoilered sucks on one end, and having long-ass lists with way more information than necessary that are cumbersome to browse sucks for people with memory issues. I encourage discords to have a list of what needs to be spoilered, and to keep it as minimal in format as possible.

I think my personal best way to do it would be to have a channel right below the rules channel called like "spoilered fr content" and have it have a clear, concise list. Something like, for example:

"Please spoiler the following content on dragons when posted in this discord:
- Shadow/Plague Primal
- Multigaze
- Jaguar/Rosette
- Gembond"

(Idk what other new genes/other stuff may be triggering to people, I was just listing the three things I've seen mentioned most as well as something vaguely similar to make the list slightly longer in size.)

Something clear and concise like that is a fair compromise where it's very accessible to check if you have memory problems (no one is saying anyone has to remember anything, and as long as the list is clear and concise, it shouldn't be an issue to check your dragon you want to post), but also accommodates for the most common triggers.

Ultimately, it comes down to communicating one's needs. If a person has memory problems and the list format of the discords they're in is written weirdly, hard to find, or has way more information than needed which makes it a longer read and they've forgotten the beginning by the time they get to the end (trust me, been there, done that...), then they should poke at a member of the mod team and ask them if it can be formatted differently to make it easier on them. Chances are, as long as they're polite and considerate about it and express what they need, the mods will be willing to work with them on finding a middle ground that also works for the memory issues.

If they're not willing to consult a list *at all* ever even when formatted clearly and cleanly, yeah, no, that's just being insensitive and selfish. (I do genuinely try to take most users who claim a disability at face value and work with them to try and find solutions, but sometimes you do run into someone who's very clearly just trying to not bother with common courtesy and play their way and only their way with getting exceptions baked into rules for their royal ass.)

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As a side note to you on your personal theory -- I'm assuming you have no problems with content on the site, but for me personally, shadow/plague primal make me physically ill to see. Like literally physically ill. I'm not going into the details on this post directly to avoid making other people uncomfortable, but if you really need to know, you can check https://pastebin.com/HUAkggsn which explains the symptoms I personally experience. Something doesn't have to be related to RL traumatic events to still provoke a visceral, physical reaction in someone, and I wouldn't considered it "unearned moral weight" to want to not be made ill just because I'm in a community discord.

Also, as a note to your point 3 -- I haven't gone to Dragon Share since the release of primal eyes. I don't really actively play much anymore in general, but when I did, it was easy enough to avoid the primal eyes because the main things I did were economy related. I'd see dragons in the coli when buying fodder or when raffle attending, but if I knew I was going to be doing an activity like that where I would see random dragons that may have Primal, I'd just set the site to 70% zoom and between that and the smaller previews in the AH and PAs, it was extremely easy to just miss the primal eyes and not see them if they ever existed. (I did also have a note on my attendant cell to "pls don't send me shadow/plague primal," but I took my own steps to mitigate it on my end as well.) I don't know whether that would help with the trypophobia genes that are on much larger sections of dragons, but at least for something like primal eyes, it was very doable. I did unfortunately have to leave a few community discord servers that weren't willing to accommodate on the primal eyes, but ultimately, most of them ended up understanding and being willing to work with people who communicated their needs.

Also, generally, it does make sense to request spoilering in a discord server because generally, a user cannot prevent discord from loading images themselves (adblock) or change the size at which the image is displayed (zoom level on a browser). The most common workarounds that work on the site itself on the user's end just don't work in community discords, so the only option left really as a bandaid fix is to just have the "spoiler it if you're gonna post it" option.

Nayrt

I feel you anon, theres a special kind of pain when you're just trying to honestly communicate your needs / limits and people who should obstensibly be on your side just meet you with dismissal at best

AYRT Thanks very much for your detailed comments! I think I didn't explain my unearned moral weight comment properly. I'm not passing judgement on anyone specific and their triggers or squicks or whatever. I was just trying to find an explanation for why it's always assumed that things must be tagged in a situation in which we're attempting to balance memory issue needs and tagging needs, even if they cause a lower level of harm than a trauma trigger. Someone just finding something icky and not being triggered or otherwise having their day ruined seems to carry the same weight as someone who IS actually getting their day ruined. I think there is unearned moral weight in that case because we generally agree on the need to tag triggers, so any other requests for tagging, even if they don't cause harm, are treated with more gravity than they would be otherwise. I hope that makes sense.

Plus there are bots that can repost images into a second channel. It wouldn’t be a problem to have one that applies spoilers in a special “read-only” channel to something like an art share or dragon share channel

I guess it's because I value the experience and comfort of those around around me more than I value taking time to look at a list and spoiler appropriately. I'm sorry you don't see things the same way and see it as an attack when they already are accommodating our memories with lists on any decent server. I leave the ones that don't.

blogpost typed up and deleted lol but it is absolutely a power trip for some people if you let it be, and my good will for those who might genuinely need tags has been completely drained by bad faith actors. my internet viewing experience is my own responsibility, and i now believe that to be true for everyone else too

not to say those discords with long trigger lists can't exist, but i feel very bad for anyone in there being guilted into the mindset that they did something horribly wrong for posting a dragon someone else just didn't like... especially those cases where players mini-mod and say "yeah it's not on the triggers list but it might bother someone, you should spoiler it"

exhausting bullshit

There's a difference between making a mistake and refusing to follow the rules for the comfort of others. Mistakes happen. You apologize, make up for it as well as you can and move on.

AYRT
YES! That's what it was. Dude argues on Tumblr 24/7 and loves to misconstrue what people say. That, and drama blog personalities don't sit well with me at all.

ayrt

I think its because the last one was animated, but even that's too much for an animated badge

There have been a lot of good and thoughtful comments in this thread already, but I'd like to take a moment to also emphasize:

I think people (not unjustifiably) frustrated by unwieldy long lists of dragon share spoiler requirements sometimes fall into a bit of a Dragon Triggers Georg fallacy, with the whole "well if you need all this censored, how are you even playing the game!?" thing. The reality is that most people with these visual triggers have Just One Thing that messes with them, and which they probably have solutions to manage on their own in the game itself. It's simply a matter of what happens when a server has a large population and you get a list that accounts for many different individual "Just One Thing" needs. And there's not a moral component to it working out like that; it's just how it goes.

(Personally, I am fond of the solution that I know at minimum Fire and Nature use, which is two different Dragon Share channels, with and without spoiler rules.)

Whoever set the previous level requirement must've been horribly out of touch or thought they're supposed to be cumulative badges. The badges from an Arcane user's PB last week aren't even that high and they even carry over to the next one.

this, pretty much!

to me, a gem gene offers something that is desirable for making a dragon seem "fancy," for some value of the concept.
(in the case of stained and pha/sarc, i have a sneaking suspicion that these are gem genes specifically because of their value as a kind of "tech choice" for g1 collectors, with soap being a gem gene simply to keep it on even footing with stained.)

i am willing to acknowledge that my own initial "why are these gem genes??" reaction totally came from feeling like the harlequin theme didn't meet the arbitrary standard for ~elegance~ that exists in my head. and that's a two-way street: i was super surprised that flaunt/flair were treasure genes due to their detailed art and elegant, sparkly aesthetic. but, you know, obviously that's nothing to complain about, haha.

all that said, it is also interesting to me to think back to when butterfly (and eventually petals) came out: those were game-changers at the time, being only the second gene type to introduce accent colors and doing so in a more "elegant" way than poitox. but would we react the same way to butterfly + petals genes if they were released today? i'm not so sure! truly, we've been spoiled with so many cool options.

Multiple channels with and without spoilers was also the thing I was thinking about, that is a great option

Yeah, I think this is what a lot of people just forget.

They see a huge list of things that need to be tagged and start getting into the mindset of every person who wants something tagged wants ALL those things tagged.

I don't use discord, but I do have things I don't want to see on FR.

The top of the list is spiders. Period. I have to deal with spiders in real life occasionally, so when I am doing my 'relaxing' by playing games, I do not want to have to deal with them there. But, I can use adblock to block spider images on FR, but since I don't use discord, I don't know whether I would be able to do it there, and even then it could come down to having to basically adblock every single spider image, since it works off of url, and if the url is unique, it doesn't matter whether it is the same exact image.

Next is keel. I do not like plague primal or shadow primal or multigaze, but I don't have any physical reactions to them, just a bit of disgust and desire to look away. Keel on the other hand makes my skin crawl. Like there are things on me. I eventually realized that Keel reminds me of ticks. Fortunately for me, keel is not a well liked gene and even with the reaction to keel, I can actually take it in some cases (like chocolate chip cookie, or 'baking' dragons)

Last for my personal issues are plague/shadow primal and multigaze, but again those are generally fairly easy to avoid and/or scroll/click away from when encountered.

I definitely feel that FR needs the ability to censor images for people who have that 'just one thing' they dislike and want to avoid. I know it would be a ton of work, but I do feel the pay off would be worth it.

This has been confirmed that it won't happen, unfortunately. Due to them being mindless and also being made up of a modern breed.

Also, them being made of the exclusive kickstarter breed makes it problematic as well.

Because people could claim it's FR breaking their word.

weighing in as someone who both needs trigger warnings (both common and uncommon for warning tags, including but not exclusively dragon stuff), AND greatly struggles with providing trigger warnings:

it's frustrating, and there's no easy solution that works for everyone.

i've been in discords that have long lists of things to spoiler, including genes/eyes. i've moderated some of those discords.

while i will be using general terms, dragons are a big part of that.

so to discuss these particular points from my own experience:

1. yeah, i have memory issues, and browsing the long lists can be taxing. it sucks. i also have overwhelming anxiety related to my inability to retain information. before posting an image that i feel is "borderline" or might need tagging i will repeatedly re-read the list and look at the image and upload the image but not hit enter and re-read the tag list again. sometimes for wayyy too long. sometimes i just give up and don't post the image because i realise that i don't care THAT MUCH about sharing it that it's worth all that anxiety. this is definitely worse in discords i moderate because i feel breaking a rule (or a generally-agreed upon social convention that isn't technically officially a rule) while being a moderator is a much worse infraction than doing so otherwise.

2a. "Are most people who want spoilering actually triggered by images, or do they just think it's icky and they don't want to see it?"

that's a question i ask myself sometimes, about both other's triggers and my own. when i find myself thinking about this, i realise that i've internalised a sentiment that is at best dismissive of others and lacking in empathy, and at worst actively ableist and harmful to myself and others.

there are certain things in images that make me feel physically dirty, and i need to shower to make it go away. how strong and distressing this dirty feeling is and whether i can resist the urge to shower varies for a lot of reasons that no-one, not even i, can fully account for at any given time.

this overwhelming feeling of dirtyness often starts out with a pretty vague "icky" feeling. if i manage things right, sometimes, i can keep it to that level and not let it get so bad that i need to shower.

i'm going to repeat something i said to my therapist recently: for me, triggers are like radiation. a small exposure now and then probably isn't going to cause any noticable harm. but repeated small exposures add up to enormous problems, even though no individual exposure is a big deal on its own.

so, yeah, seeing triggering content probably isn't going to cause a full-on meltdown every time, and might in fact only bring about an icky feeling in the triggered person. but that doesn't necessarily mean exposure to the content didn't harm them.

2b. "Alternately, are people with "memory issues" actually burdened by spoiler lists, or could some of them put in more effort?"

i mean......yes to both? at least for me. sometimes i definitely just don't bother posting an image because i don't want to have to check the spoiler list. it's one relatively minor inconvenience that i just don't want to deal with at that moment, so i don't deal with the inconvenience by not sharing the content which might warrant a warning, especially if i'm in a server with a particularly lengthy trigger list.

but i've also posted unwarned content that should have been warned for out of sheer forgetfulness. an important part of fighting my anxiety is not constantly checking things. having to check a list of things to warn for is a really big problem for mee (see 1), so sometimes i don't check. i just post things with the (entirely fake) confidence that it'll be fine. and 99% of the time it is but there have been a couple of incidents of me Fucking Up™ and not spoilering something that should definitely have been spoiled. this significantly worsened my anxiety about this!

3. see 2a above for "triggers are like radiation". in-game, it's usually easier to avoid triggering images than it is on a discord. unless you're browsing the dragon share forums (which i don't recommend if specifics about dragon art can cause you harm), pretty much the only time you're going to see full-size dragon art is after clicking on a much smaller icon of that dragon. the AH and lair avatars are small enough to conceal details that could be distressing, but not so small that you don't have at least a vague idea of what that dragon looks like. and, more to the point, the tooltips explicitly tell you about their genes and eye type. if you have any doubt about whether a dragon is safe to look at, that tooltip will let you know!

also it's possible to block scry images that contain genes/eyes you want to avoid because of how scry urls work. just add the string that corresponds to the thing you're avoiding to the following filter for your adblocker:

img[src*="/dgen/preview/dragon"][src*="bodygene=19"]

the above blocks jaguar on modern breeds. this only works for scries, but if like me you buy a lot of first gens, blocking scries in bios is very helpful.

4. nevermind the big flight discords, i'm in small friend discords that maintain trigger lists. it's really difficult to find a discord that doesn't. they're definitely getting more common, not just for flight rising but in general.

the presence of trigger lists changes the whole atmosphere and social functioning of a discord in more ways than just "social pressure to warn/fear of shaming" and "avoidance of spaces that have trigger lists".

just going by what i've observed both myself and others doing, if a discord usually requires warnings/spoilers for the "main" channels, but has one or more channels where those rules don't apply...the no-spoiler channels start getting milder and milder, with more and more content being posted to them and discussion of that content, and then the no-spoiler channel becomes a main channel and at some point the mods are likely to decide to add it to the list of channels requiring spoilers.

and even if it doesn't reach that inevitable conclusion of becoming a spoiled channel, the other issues persist and only get worse.

it's my experience that not only are most people willing (if not happy) to respect requests for trigger warnings and spoilers, they are WAY TOO EAGER about it, to the point that their eagerness and lack of nuance just causes problems.

they mean well. most of these people themselves have triggers (or did in the past) and thus want to make sure they're not exposing someone to something they don't want to be exposed to. but this overzealous use of warnings for the mildest of content renders the warning less useful for the people who need it.

if a discord has a no-spoil channel, people anxious about falling afoul of rules they don't fully understand, or failing to warn for triggers they don't fully understand, will use it for anything they're not 100% confident is safe to post. which, given that the list of possible triggers is almost infinite, can be anything, especially if the discord's trigger list is particularly long or vague.

in one discord, i used to avoid the no-spoil channel because it frequently contained the kind of stuff i definitely didn't want to see. but over time, people lost confidence in their ability to judge whether something was okay, or due to participation in other discords actively felt it might not be safe. so they started posting stuff that really didn't need to be there in the no-spoil channel because it's the only channel where you can't get in trouble for not spoiling.

unfortunately, some things i really enjoy seeing and talking about are pretty common triggers. so, even though there was not and never has been a need to warn for/spoil those things in that discord, they started appearing in the no-spoil channel. soon enough, they were gone from other channels and existed exclusively in no-spoil. that server's no-spoil channel is now effectively #thing-i-like-discussion.

occasionally, it also sees use as an actual no-spoil channel and stuff i REALLY cannot handle seeing gets posted in there. it's infrequently enough that it catches me by surprise every time. i can't complain about seeing it because it is being posted in the channel where it absolutely belongs. i feel it's not my place to complain about the channel becoming #thing-i-like-discussion because that's become the norm there, even though i've been there long enough to remember when it wasn't, and i'd be questioning an established social norm that everyone else seems comfortable with. i'd likely also bring the very existence of the no-spoil channel into question, since it was originally created just to accommodate my triggers.

i experience similar issues (thing i like being posted in no-spoil channels alongside my actual triggers) in other discords, but it's definitely a bigger deal to me that it happens in this one because of the slow evolution over time and because i feel i'm the only one with a problem with it.

so i really don't think no-spoil channels are the solution people want it to be - and believe me, i wanted it to be the solution too.

personally, i think a technical solution would help.

if you've ever submitted anything to a tumblr blog, you've probably had to click - or at least seen - the tag checkboxes blogs can provide for submissions. those are excellent for this kind of problem, and i think they are PARTLY - definitely not entirely - a solution to this problem.

at the very least, a checkbox system would remove the anxiety of "did i forget something" and lessen the burden on those of us with memory issues. when uploading an image, all you have to do is read each checkbox in turn and decide whether or not the image you're uploading might qualify for it.

there would still be issues with over-warning and warning for unnecessary things, perhaps moreso than there is now, but i think it would help.

of course, the only way to get these checkboxes on discord is if discord as a company decides to add them, and i don't see that happening any time soon so i'm aware this isn't a real solution. but it is all i can think of right now.

5. i can actually answer this! perhaps because i'm unlucky enough to suffer from both.

violating a boundary is an act, and having a poor memory is an experience.

let's assume pomegranites are on the discord's spoil-and-warn list

i post a picture of my pomegranite breakfast. i don't spoil the image, i don't mention that there are pomegranites.

i've made an act here: posting the picture. this act has a consequence: someone who is triggered by pomegranites saw one.

i have committed a boundary violation.

the boundary - tag your pomegranites - was clearly expressed. the list of items to tag is publicly and freely visible at all times, and i can easily check it at my convenience as often as i need to.

in a straightforward, logical way, i had good reason to know about this boundary, and the person who expressed it had good reason to expect their boundary be respected.

but my memory is bad. i forgot the boundary existed. i thought the boundary existed in some other space, with some other person. i checked the list of boundaries, 5 minutes ago, and i don't remember seeing anything that would stop me discussing what i had for breakfast today.

my failure to remember the boundary doesn't change the fact that i violated it. i still commited an act, and that act caused harm. i can't un-do the harm by remembering the boundary too late.

my bad memory is a constant thing. it's a thing i know about. it's in my discord bio, so everyone who reads that knows about it too. it's very clearly a fact of my existence.

as such, it's a fact of my existence i'm expected to be aware of and account for. if i know i have a bad memory, why didn't i check the list of triggers before posting? i did, but BECAUSE i have a bad memory, i fucking forgot pomegranites were on that list in the 2 minutes it took me to upload the picture.

how many times am i expected to check? how often?

what of the fact that constantly checking the list of triggers actively harms me, because it triggers my anxiety? did i check it? recently? what if i'm remembering checking it yesterday, or the day before? even if i did check it a few minutes ago, what if it's changed since then? what if something new was added? what if i just didn't notice the pomegranites? my reading comprehension isn't great. i should check again.

it's a very, very frustrating experience i think for everyone on either side of it.

if your clearly-expressed boundaries are violated, that harms you and it's reasonable to express your frustrations with that.

if you struggle to remember people's boundaries, that can cause a lot of anxiety over respecting them correctly in the moment. this is much harder to talk about, because it's difficult to say "you asking me to respect your boundaries makes you difficult to talk to".

personally, i almost never post images to any discord now, i NEVER share dragons or look at dragon share, and i'm guilty of contributing to the atmosphere that the no-spoiler channels are the place to be because they feel like the only place i'm free of the anxiety of failing to spoil.

further thoughts:

i think it's fair to say that, in general, people don't fully understand triggers. even if they understand the consequences of triggering something in a particular person, they probably don't understand the mechanisms behind those consequences, or the exact nature of the content they need to warn for/avoid. often the people with these triggers don't fully understand this stuff.

this incomplete understand can at once cause anxiety over failing to comply with other's triggers, and either an unwillingness to fully enforce your own, or an overzealous attitude to enforcing your own triggers.

some examples of my own thoughts processes on these points:

failure to comply: "should i spoiler this? it technically counts. it's not that bad. is it? it's not my place to judge. they said spoiler butterflies. this is a photo of a person with a cartoon butterfly on their shirt. that's a butterfly. i'll spoiler it."

in reality, the trigger only relates to butterflies in motion (so a still image will rarely cause issues anyway) and is rarely ever affected by simplified, cartoonish butterflies. the cartoon butterfly shirt was a complete non-issue, and spoiling the photo only with the warning of "cw butterfly" only muddied the waters for the person with the butterfly phobia.

in fact, they clicked the spoiler because they had experience with people excessively warning for anything relating to butterflies, even though they explicitly specified it's only videos and gifs, and only real or realistic butterflies when requesting an addition to the list. but only "butterflies" got added to the discord's trigger list. someone in that server used to have the butterfly emoji in their discord username (not nick, their account username) and removed it because of this supposed butterfly trigger even though the emoji had zero chance of triggering this person at all.

and at the same time, it can be difficult to properly enforce your own need for spoilers or warnings, especially if the thing you need spoiled/warned for is "silly" (pretty much anything that isn't directly related to gore, sex, or death). that person i mentioned with the butterfly phobia was terrified to ask they be added to the list, and suffered in silence for months because, in more mainstream spaces, basically no-one respected thier basic request to not be tagged in or deliberately shown videos containing butterflies. in fact, when they brought it up, they got flooded with mentions/dms of butterfly vids and had to basically quit social media. and that is apparently nothing compared to what they've had to deal with irl on the subject.

Damnit, Arcanist

Re: Censoring genes/eye types on Discord

water's OOF badge level requirements

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(frozen comment) AYRT

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(frozen comment) The previous anon

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