On Wednesday, Discord Subreddit lit up with a post from u/Eanae informing the public that the FFVIX subreddit Discord had lost its partnership due to TOS violation.
Eanae explains that they had received an email referencing the NSFW channel that partnered servers are not permitted to have with 48 hours to deal with the situation, prompting them to delete the channel completely from the server. What is in question is that even after removing the offending channel Discord then decided that partnership is removed permanently.
Eanae links the correspondence they had with the Discord team in their reddit post, which ended in the following manner:
Searching up the word “r—–” (edited to not trigger automod) brings up a staggering 4,869 results at the time of sending in this ticket, and there are also a large amount of strong racial slurs which we won’t be mentioning here.
By being a Partnered server, we hold your community to a higher standard and trust that your server is one that anyone can enjoy without worry. Unfortunately, you and your server’s behaviors and actions have not fostered a welcoming home. If anything, it’s become a server that has gotten bad enough for users to write into our team directly about.
This is a final decision and the perks will not be restored.
After reading the entire post and looking at all links it is very clear that the Discord Trust & Safety team did a thorough investigation and although the initial punishing act was for porn posted in the NSFW channel, what made the decision stick was conduct from Eanae and other users in the channel. This recourse is encouraging the Discord community to now look a the rules themselves and other partnered servers.
As an ex Discord partner and avid Discord user myself I went to look for NSFW rules discovering:
That is correct, if partners have NSFW channels they can lose partnership.
— Discord (@discord) October 30, 2016
But then I also found:
That was lifted when we added the NSFW feature! Please keep in mind that Partners are required to follow the ToS/Guidelines still!
— Discord (@discord) November 5, 2017
You can see why there is confusion just regarding NSFW channels themselves but there is no confusion that Discord will not tolerate continual poor behavior by partners and their users who are given extra perks as partners that violate their TOS. The channel still exists, it just exists differently.
Looking further into Discord partner rules and information the Discord Partnerships Requirement page was updated two hours prior to me writing this:
Do keep in mind that being a Discord partner means exhibiting the best behavior, as well as always upholding our community guidelines. Because of this, Partnered servers should never contain pornographic content, but you are welcome to use the NSFW age gate for something such as a channel discussing spoilers.
Does that clear things up more?
Time will tell as I am sure many servers across the platform are in clean up mode after this news. I for one 100% applaud all efforts platforms take to be responsible for it’s users in a bid to support healthier, higher communication standards but gaming communities – all communities – thrive for the better if communication (as well as the vision of a company) is clear so folks all over the world converging on it to chat to each other understand.
