Re: 2016 Championship Harassment Survey
 

Man, poking hornet's nests is always fun. Sorry for the inattention today, I was busy getting de-cyborged and recovering from that. (Long medical story.)

First off, added clothespinning and unwanted physical attention to the harassment types, which is now checkboxes to avoid "Other: this, and this, and this" responses. Only 38 responses so far, but that plus this thread is still pretty informative. So far ~40% of issues are seating related.

Second, to marshall and others annoyed by having to deal with these things themselves: This is obviously entirely the purpose of having a real and enforced harassment policy. The interaction with the harasser or their team gets put into official hands, where there's better odds of the message sticking anyways. Yes, this is even more volunteers that we're going to need, and specialized ones at that. I'm still thinking about that side of the problem.

To those that think clothespinning is harmless fun, it's really not. Secretly invading someone's personal space is not cool. Imagine if you will that the clothespins have fun messages like "I'm watching you." or "See you tonight." There is a non-zero percentage of the population that will interpret a sleath clothespin in this manner. It is sending the message "I can get close to you and touch you without you ever noticing." For some people, this is going to be a spine-chilling moment, especially if they've previously been traumatized. And you do NOT know that they haven't.

Clothespinning TL;DR: You're literally terrifying an unknown number of people for your own amusement. Stop it because that's an awful thing to do.

Final note: I'm mostly expecting this thread to be consolidating reports of incidents, etc. For instance, I'd forgotten clothespinning was a thing. Discussion of why things are problems is also understandable. I'm planning on starting up a new thread for working on policy and ideas for dealing with these issues in a few days, after I pull some links and ideas together I've run across in the blogosphere.