Kicking out bullies

Room owners can now use a new moderating feature to keep the peace in their rooms: There now is a kick button with which you can remove offending users from your room.

In your own room, you will find that all listed players now not only have the usual +/- buttons for the Karma system, but next to it is a kick button, symbolised by a door and a red arrow.

As you may know, the karma system allows users to rate each other’s behaviour. This is especially useful in public rooms, where unregistered users hang out. Unregistered users don’t have the ability to chat (and sometimes don’t understand the language). When they are rated negatively, and get a full red bar, they’re being exiled, ie. sent to the “bully room“, where all the naughty kids hang out (and where we’ve placed a convenient link to our Terms of Service). An exiled user cannot join any other room for 10 minutes.

Room owners that often just want to get rid of bullies sometimes hesitate to dish out that punishment, sometimes because the offender is so engrossed with what they’re doing, they don’t pay attention to their Karma bar or what is being said to them in the chat.

When you kick out another user from your room, an alertbox will first ask you to confirm that that’s really what you want to do. If you kick out that user, he will be kicked out from your room and can’t come back for 10 minutes. However, this user still can visit all other rooms.

Kicking out a user is a milder form of punishment than exiling, but please only make use of this feature when there really is no other way to get the offending user to play nicely. Remember, be nice, and have fun! :-)