Hi Everyone! ♡

As most of you know, I have been on a break from Everskies. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t done my duties as an Admin; I just haven’t been socializing as much as I’d like to on-site. I have a lot of social anxiety when it comes to interacting with others, and oftentimes need breaks. Being a public figure that a lot of users rely on has taken a toll on my mental health, but I am forever thankful for being in the position that I am and I love being a part of making Everskies a greater place to be.I truly enjoy seeing Everskies slowly evolve into the site we all wish it to be.

There are a few things that I would like to talk about in this statement, a lot of them being things that I am excited about and a few of them not so much. I know this statement is long, but I hope that you will still take your time to read it through.

The job of an Everskies admin

I often get asked about what working as an Admin is like and what it entitles; Back when we had a user-based Mod-team, the Admin position was about being a guide and a resource for the Mods alongside being a Moderator too - an Admin was basically a head-mod with extra powers if you will. However, times have changed.

Moderating Everskies was never something I was a big fan of; I love listening to the users and I love helping out, and that’s exactly what I can do now as an Admin.

Recently the job for us Admins has included very little moderating and much more helping our new and growing Trust & Safety team understand our community and understand the rules within it. Moderating Everskies is unlike any other social platform, and we have made a big deal out of educating them in the eyes of our users; not in the eyes of the standard “social media” moderation type.

I am very proud of our current Admin team, we have bettered Everskies and we have grown together and I could not wish for better individuals to lift this huge and stressful task and responsibility with, therefore it makes me incredibly sad to see the amount of hate the two other Admins receive sometimes where I am seen as the better one, when that could not be further from the truth. We are all representing our own minority and we learn from each other everyday and seeing stuff like what went down yesterday really blew my mind.

Kurat sent me a message over discord this morning explaining to me that she was receiving endless comments on her guestbook, as well as her dms after she fell asleep after working for 10 hours onsite doing various tasks. Of course this statement is in no way to address this situation in particular but to be quite honest, it pushed me even further to do so. Every Admin is different in their own way, and to see my fellow Admins harassed over not only things they didn’t do, but being told to get fired and leave the site, and even being sent death threats in DMs? We can do better than this. Just the thought of opening my direct messages only to read someone telling me to disappear breaks my heart. And honestly reading the DM this morning made my heart sink.

Why not just hire new admins?

If only it was that easy. Us as Admins have quite some anxiety when it comes to hiring new Admins after the majority of our ex-Moderators, who we thought we could trust and some of them we even considered as future Admins, only ended up showing their true colors in the end. We still struggle to this day with finding quality members that we know we can rely on. We have spent a lot of time looking for new Admin candidates, even among the Trust & Safety applications we received - but after a couple of good candidates either declined or decided not to take up the offer, we have decided to invest our resources into looking for more Trust & Safety members instead. However, I can confirm that we are constantly seeking newly effective ways to ensure that users’ receive help quicker, one of these being a new and improved support system.

Then what about new In-Game Mods? We have simply chosen to separate the community from our Trust & Safety Team to avoid the bias that will always persist if members of our community are the ones with power and final say. Sure, mistakes and misunderstandings happen, but this is the better solution and we are trying our best to prepare our Trust & Safety members for our community.

Enforcement of rules

Before we start talking about our Trust & Safety team, I’d like to explain down to detail how our report system currently works for those who aren’t familiar with it:

There are eight ways you can report a post/comment in a forum, no matter if it’s contained within a club or not:

All reports go to our Trust & Safety team (the red bubbles) and the blue ones are going to the Club-mods. It was never intended for our users to deal with anything that can harm them in the process. Our Trust & Safety team are the ones to make sure that our ROC is followed, the Club Moderators’ job is to ensure the club rules are being followed. The plan in the future is to let Club Mods expand the club report reasons, so if they want to punish users for spamming or for stuff that doesn’t belong in the club, they are free to do so.

Trust & Safety team

I get there’s a lot of confusion about our Trust & Safety team, and I’m here to provide some transparency that hopefully will make everything make a little more sense. For those wondering, no, our reports are not handled by AI. It is correct that we played around with some AI stats in the background at some point to determine trust levels of users to see how well it worked based on an AI analysis of messages sent by the specific user, but as mentioned before, it is currently too unstable and would never provide the moderation we need standing alone.

What is the point of a Trust & Safety team? To make sure our users aren’t exposed to harmful/triggering content. They are essentially the Moderation team, but in the background. As our Trust & Safety members are not an active part of our community, it can sometimes be hard for them to judge a situation; hence why some bans take longer than others. This doesn’t mean that they are not gonna be handled, it just means that sometimes an Admin has to make the final decision to make sure that everything is investigated fully. We are also currently trying to become more transparent when it comes to our ban-reasons. This is a fine line, as we want them to be as transparent as we can have them without triggering our users. On the contrary, we are relieved to see that you appreciate longer and more specific ban-reasons instead of everything being a little cryptic.

Our Trust & Safety team issues bans based on what is written in the given situation, hence why it’s so important that messages/posts are reported directly. It is also important to remember that the Everskies community has a lot of “unwritten” rules and it takes a while for users (in particular new users) as well as Trust and Safety members to understand these.

As said above, the Trust and Safety team issues punishments as fit to the ROC. This goes for anything, including harassment towards users and Admins alike. Regardless of the situation at hand, harassment is not allowed on Everskies, as it creates a toxic environment for the user base, and we want Everskies to be safe and enjoyable for everyone. In saying this, muting has nothing to do with race. The Trust and Safety team is simply muting off of what was said and following the ROC as it is. Harassment, regardless of the situation, will not be tolerated. If a situation is at hand, please report the users or reach out to an Admin in DMs. Harassment will lead to punishments we do not want to give out, but will have to as the ROC would be gone against. Pinging Admins is not harassment, but if it is not done in a helpful respectful way, and you are simply pinging the Admin team to a hate forum about them and telling them to “delete their account” or “hope they get fired”, that is considered harassment. Please understand the Admin team and I have feelings, and it is very discouraging to us to want to reply to users if it is simply us being bombarded with hate, especially in situations where we have done nothing.

In case you are wondering, of course we are covered by our Trust & Safety members all day around and we are currently getting new individuals onboard.

Do Admins & Trust & Safety Members lock forums?

Only when it has been requested by the users, but normally Club-mods are the ones locking threads! If the forum contains any form of triggering/NSFW text/imagery that can be harmful to our users, we will instead archive them.

I would also like to state that just because an Admin is online, it does not mean they are handling reports, because most of the time we aren’t; as our priorities are replying to as many messages as we can alongside doing other duties such as drafting event ideas, preparing articles, communicating with the team, reviewing magazines, and reviewing club-submissions.

I’ve seen recent situations where an Admin or even Parrot has gotten blamed for not banning a particular user or not giving out punishments properly. A lot of the time we have a habit of leaving our Everskies open even while we’re away or just simply doing other things online. Please please please do not assume that because an Admin is online that they are the one muting/banning and handling reports. The Admin team gets many DMs and notifications a day, and we are always trying our best to hear out the user base. If a user feels like they have been muted/banned unfairly we encourage them to send in a support ticket; having other users making forums about the matter won’t help.

This also leads me to another point. It’s no secret that I have been very vocal in forums about one particular issue; the “making an alt for attention” issue. Here is something I posted in ES general recently that I feel belongs here too:

https://everskies.com//club/es-general/forums/general/psa-making-alternate-accounts-to-send-hate-2753369

I cannot stress this enough, please PLEASE stop doing this. I’m heartbroken to see the amount of racist trolls being absolutely awful to black users only to find out it was a black user behind the troll account. It is HARMFUL and you are making jokes at the expense of others’ mental health, including my own. PLEASE stop this. We have a lot of tools in our grasp to find main accounts of those who create troll accounts. I will show no mercy to users who do this as they will receive a ban WITHOUT appeal.

Sets containing items made for Black users

I’ve been informed that there has been a recent issue of users buying sets not meant for them. As I’ve stated before, we cannot tell one’s real life race simply through their avatar. This is not a bannable offense; if we were to issue a ban to every user who had a set not meant for them culturally, religiously, etc. We would have to issue bans to nearly the entire website.

This especially has been an issue for non-black users buying sets containing items meant for black users. Everskies is in many ways different from other dress-up games, and as someone who has grown up with the internet and therefore dress-up games all my life, I can with certainty say that this is the first time I have seen this happen. Am I against it? Absolutely not, but we need to keep in mind that most users onsite do not know that it is discouraged to buy certain sets if they don’t identify with that particular group. Not to mention the incidents where I’ve seen user’s lie about their race is countless, and it’s not something we or any other platform can adequately moderate.

For black hairstyles: We struggle with our hair and our rights to wear our hair-styles every single day and feeling represented on Everskies wearing hairs with important significance to us. And let me make this abundantly clear, OUR HAIR AND SKIN IS NOT AN AESTHETIC.

I want to discourage users from messaging those who have black sets and asking for the sets in return. This does not do anything to help the situation at all. If anything, it makes it harder because then harassment mutes have to be issued. I understand that users are upset, in which their feelings and thoughts are completely valid. However, I will entertain no witch-hunting whatsoever.

We’re currently looking into some options to remedy this situation and we would love your input. The two options down below are the ones we’ve talked about within the team;

1. Make it so sets won’t contain face + hairs
2. Make all cultural / items intended for POC usage (hairs, faces and other items) available in CC - which would mean these would not be rare.

Upcoming updates

Parrot is currently busy rewriting our code to be able to support more users and actions than up until now, and this is unfortunately taking up a lot of his time. However, I’m here to tell you that progress is being made in the background and what the next update is gonna contain, alongside some other future updates!

Upcoming update, follow after the server update mentioned HERE.

Club rework

It’s no secret that the clubs need a rework, and this is the first update toward better clubs. We have a lot of other exciting updates for the clubs planned but this is definitely the first step in the right direction.

• Club mods will be able to claim reports
• Club owners will be able to transfer ownership
• Ban Appeals within the club
• Message showcasing why you have been banned from a club
• Permission settings within a club (to decide who can post where for example an announcement category only for mods etc)
• Club report notifications
• Removal of inactive clubs after the owner has been offline for 2 months
• A “report club” feature

Other stuff

• Selling outfits
• Mobile game optimization (instead of the mirrored laggy versions we have right now)
• Changes to Tictactoe; you won’t lose ranking when your opponent leaves

Plans for the near future

• More customization options for clubs (emotes, roles and more)
• The request of inactive usernames
• The displaying of mute reasons (similar to ban reasons)
• An item thrasher (spacejunk)

I think that was all I could come up with today. I will be here all night to answer questions, concerns and suggestions within this forum as may other Admins. Thank you for reading this far and may you have a wonderful rest of the day!

- Lapine and the rest of the Everskies team ♡