At what point does comments here on the EN World boards become cyberbullying or harassment? And don't the moderators already account for that?
"At what point" is going to be nebulous and ill-defined, but I'll go ahead and say that while there are certain actions that people should be called out as immoral for engaging in, Dungeons & Dragons isn't one of them, regardless of how someone plays the game. For that matter, saying "don't the moderators already account for that?" comes very close to suggesting that anything you do is fine so long as the mods don't sanction you for it, essentially outsourcing any sense of restraint or responsibility to them.
If someone makes a post that other respond to in kind and state they disagree with it... if that response is not flagged and locked by moderators, then I don't think we can call that response cyberbullying or harassment.
No, I think we can. I think that just because this site's administrators let something go doesn't mean that it's necessarily okay. The mods are just people, and are prone to making mistakes. You should not surrender your judgment for theirs.
If the original poster did not respond BACK to the person, and that responder just kept quoting the original post and asked/demanded a return response multiple times... or if the poster responded back to actually say "I don't wish to discuss this with you" and the responder didn't take no for an answer... then yes, we could say then it was cyberbullying and harassment, and the moderators would probably boot that person out of the thread if not give them a ban for a period of time.
That's an example of cyberbullying, but it's not the
only example. If you make it clear that you're (in the general sense of "you") going to attack the morality of someone for playing a fantasy elf game in a manner that you don't personally approve of, you're a harasser, and you're making it more difficult for people to post about their game out of anxiety that they may then have to deal with your harassment.
But if you are the original poster and you comment back at someone who responded to you, and you argue your point trying to convince them why their response was wrong... you can't then say you're being harassed. You engaged with them. You made that choice to engage and discuss/argue. And when you do that... you don't get to declare that your side of the argument can't be criticized. That's not how forums work.
Just because someone engages with a harasser doesn't mean that the person they're engaging with isn't a harasser. Telling someone else "the way you play your game makes you a racist" is condemning them as a person, and that remains true even if they turn around and say "no it doesn't."
As a general rule it's better to talking about the game, rather than talking about the people who play it (which includes dropping not-so-subtle implications about what sort of person they are), and things will be more pleasant all around.
