Hello there, Sai here. I am a regular in the VRChat discord and together with a group of other regulars we wrote an email to vrchat a while back about the moderation in the discord.

Aev told us to write an email to them, Tupper told us to post it on the canny so here it is. This is a 1:1 copy paste from the email we sent.

A thing to add before you read the email. The situation since we sent our email has gotten way worse, there is literally 0 moderation happening now at the times we are usually on, people are constantly breaking rules and mods don't react to pings at all anymore.

So without further ado, here is the mail.

Dear VRChat Moderation Team,

This email was written as a group effort to improve the, in our opinion, lacking moderation situation in the VRChat Discord. More than 20 users have put their opinions and experiences together in an effort, to create a more user friendly, active and consistent environment for the users. To prevent any potential problems or bias, names of said users will not be included. If the names are needed, we are willing to provide each users name with a screenshot of them agreeing to the contents of this mail.

Most of the users supporting this email are regulars in the discord server and are bringing in their personal experiences. Every single one of us, wants to see this game thrive and wants the discord to be a fun place for everyone to come together to communicate and feel welcomed. The discord is one of the first places for users to request support, ask for opinions and to talk to other users as it is the only form of instant communication outside of the game. Users will generally ask for help regarding worlds, their setup and avatars in the discord first, so it fills a relatively important role within the game and the community itself.

But this is where we are now trying to step in.

The moderation within the discord has been becoming worse and worse.

The first complaint is about the inactivity and unresponsiveness of the current moderation team.

We have seen the same scene for months now: The moderation team is online, but does not actively moderate or step in when users are breaking the rules or moderation is needed. The only time this situation was not present was right after an update or a ping in the announcement channel.

Because of this, the moderation is not handled consistently and reliably, but in chunks. The moderation is severely lacking most of the time, with mods reacting after situations have long passed. This results in most users thinking that their behaviour is perfectly fine, even though it goes against the rules. Situations stay unhandled and users stay unpunished and other users mimic their behaviour.

Our proposed solution to the first problem is adding new chat mods and senior chat mods while also clearing out inactive moderators. The best solution would be choosing users that are active in the discord already, to also provide a sense of safety to other users. New users will also be less tempted to push boundaries with chat mods actively talking in chat. This would also include giving normal chat mods their own color, so they are distinguishable from the normal users.

This leads to our second complaint, the clarity within the rank structure. Most users are not able to distinguish between moderators that actively moderate the discord and mods that moderate other platforms like Reddit or Steam. These moderators are still displayed within discord as senior moderators. While it makes sense to give these users a role in the discord, it should be split up into clearer roles.

This also applies to the earlier mentioned chatmods. Their presence is non existent, be it because of inactivity or them not being distinguishable from normal users.

Our solution to this problem would be renaming current roles, splitting them up, and recoloring normal chat mods to make them distinguishable.

The third and last complaint is about the ongoing inconsistency of the moderation. Most regular users will agree that the moderators are not acting unbiased, which means that the moderation will end up inconsistent. Some users might get a warning, another one a ban for the same exact thing. This happens to users that have been warned as well as unwarned users.

This results in regulars and new users not knowing where to draw the line, leaving new users completely confused in most cases. While we can obviously not provide one single solution for this problem, as everyone has their own boundaries that they moderate with, it should be an at least somewhat consistent way of dealing with people.

The proposal here would be warning a user via dm or a ping and make sure they got the warning and then kicking. In a lot of cases, users do not get a warning for breaking a rule, which is not the way it should be handled.

We are fully aware, that the moderation is being provided on a completely voluntary basis, but it may be time, to remove inactive moderators of their positions, and add new moderators and look at these concerns.

We truly hope these concerns are being handled on a serious basis. We love the game and the community within it, and we are out to help it improve to deliver the best experience to both sides, moderators and users.

Thanks for taking the time to read through our mail.

Sincerely,

A group of regulars