Namepros has made a change with regards to moderator identifiers, amidst threats spelled out in the post below, Namepros smartly has moved to mod team id’s. In March of 2018 Eric Lyon was receiving threats and had his role changed at Namepros.
In February of 2017 Namepros reached 1million discussions and it sucks to see things get to this level. I was a mod there for 12 years but I cannot say outside of the normal trolling that I experienced anything one would consider threatening.
This was posted on Wednesday:
NamePros is an open community that welcomes members from all over the world to share, network, and do business with each other. An important part of online communities is their moderators (mods, for short). Moderators do their best to assist members with questions, help mediate disputes, find solutions to problems, enforce the rules to avoid small issues from escalating into larger ones, protect the integrity of the community, keep members safe, and so much more.
Over the years, we’ve explored different ways for moderators to perform these tasks without them being personally attacked, abused, harassed, or threatened. Although the vast majority of members on NamePros are respectful toward moderators, it unfortunately only takes one person to find a moderator’s home address and threaten their family for us to realize that we need to try to do more to protect them. Imagine volunteering your time to help the community and then being met with this type of hostility and danger. Unfortunately, these kinds of incidents happen more often than a reasonable person would expect.
During a recent incident, a self-proclaimed psychopath threatened the personal and physical safety of the NamePros team and their families. It’s unfortunate that moderators are sometimes mistreated and even threatened with violence toward their innocent family members, but some people in the world are unstable and have mental illnesses that we cannot disregard. Being a moderator can feel like a scary and thankless endeavor at times, so we are giving all moderators at NamePros the option to use private accounts or their personal accounts if they choose.
Our top priority is the safety of everyone on NamePros, including our moderators. Working toward that goal, we have created team accounts for the safety (and peace of mind) of the hardworking moderators of NamePros. There are now multiple team accounts for moderators based on their access level: some moderators have more access and permissions than others, so each team account will represent a different access level. All of the moderators using a specific team account will have the same access and permissions as each other.
Please help protect and respect the safety of our team and their families by keeping their names confidential. While we may not always get everything right, our intentions are always good, and the domain community benefits from these efforts. We need your cooperation to stay safe and keep NamePros running smoothly.
As always, our team is here to help you if you need anything.
