Hello everyone,
MeatShield here. It has been brought to my attention that the comments section on loadouts has been suffering from the toxicity and negativity of one or more users. I've been able to find at least three of their aliases ("No", "Anon", and "GenericUsernameHere"), and contacted them via email instructing them to change their behavior if they want to continue using this site. Their reply indicated that they had no intention of changing their ways, so I just went through and manually purged all 100+ of the comments I could find of their aliases. Additionally, I looked through the loadouts and was able to identify four of them that were submitted by the user in question -- those have been deleted too.
You might be asking yourself: "How does this affect me? Why write this blog post for a simple moderator action?" Simply put: I expect that the comments will keep coming and I want to equip you all with the knowledge of how to handle "No" and other potential trolls in the comments section. If (when) "No" comes back and keeps leaving toxic comments on a loadout, don't waste your time debating them. Instead, REPORT the comment. There's a threshold where if enough users report the same comment, it will automatically be hidden and flagged for moderators' approval. Please don't abuse this system by reporting comments you disagree with -- use it solely for reporting toxic comments from trolls such as "No" and the like.
In addition to manually deleting their existing comments I could find and equipping you all with the tools to fight back against that negativity, I have changed the Comments settings on Karl.gg. As of the writing of this blog post, Guests are no longer be able to leave comments on loadouts. Instead, only people who have signed into a Karl.gg account will be able to comment. It's unfortunate that it has come to that, but by raising the barrier of entry it should make it more of a commitment to leave negative comments, and make it harder to do it with impunity. I apologize to the guests of this website who have been leaving comments in good faith, but for right now the good of the community necessitates disabling Guest comments. Maybe at some point in the future this change will be undone, but for now you'll have to be signed into a Karl.gg account to leave comments.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this situation, or how it was handled, please feel free to reach out to me on the DRG Community Tools Discord server.
Rock & Stone; -MS