Have you ever had to deal with online harassment?

I have had a few cases myself and suffer to this day from one person who continues to hunt me down and harass me with e-mails. It's complicated because it links in with this other community I am a part of, making it impossible to completely separate myself from the person without also leaving the community, which I don't want to do. But I did make inroads to make huge distance about six months ago, because the daily abuse, the user sending me threatening messages, stalking me, trying to look up my personal information, it really left a mark on me, that to this day being reminded of it opens up closed wounds once again.

Was wondering if anyone else has experienced this. I hope not, but sometimes the internet can be a dark place.

I get harassed in Dota2 daily.

Uh, block the user?

I close my computer and come to the realization that they have zero effect on me or my life.

The closest I've had happen, is someone threatening to hack my facebook and post gay porn on it (lol) because I beat him in Starcraft. Granted I didnt take it very seriously, cause it would be next to impossible to do that knowing absolutely nothing personal about me.

Hearing stuff about my mother in Dota 2 every day.

@nsmb2_mario: Easy solution ... go legal in his ass

Hide your wife, hide your kids, the Russians are coming to your house.

I once got an angry message on YouTube. Oh, and HitmanAgent47 called me a bottom-feeder.

I wrote a book. Not a good book mind, it was fairly shitty and something I did because I wanted to see if I could. Well I chucked it up on Amazon, thinking it might be fun to see what other people think of it. The amount of abuse I got for this was pretty shocking. Now the book itself was as I said nothing to write home about (see what I did there), and the content of it was arguably offensive (it was a piss take of the book of revelations), but the hate I got was all in relation to the fact my grammar was not perfect. In the end I took the book down and forgot about the whole thing.

one time i beat a guy at street fighter and he messaged me that he knew someone in my state who he would send to kick my ass, and that he was gonna make it so xbox live didnt work online anymore for me (whatever that means)

another time i was called a homophobic slur in a message based on my choice of loadout in call of duty modern warfare 2.

Fortunately no.

Some "girl" on this Pokemon mmo thing that me and my friends tried out a while ago said she lived in the same city as us, then she got our IP's or something (idk how the internet works) and learned our real names/addresses and said she was going to tell her cop dad that we raped her. wtff????? We all logged off and never played again lol. I mean, I talk a lot of shit online and insults don't bother me, but looking up addresses....that's too far, man :(

You probably deserved it.

Not in any concentrated amounts, but I had to deal with a lot of bullying in my school days, if that counts for anything.

@toowalrus said:

It was because I had less than 1000 posts, so I absolutely deserved it.

I once had a stalker here on Giant Bomb. It was just weird. Even after he was banned, he made a suicide account to spam the forum with a poorly photoshopped image with my face. To this day, I have no idea what his issue with me was.

None that I can recall.

Yeah, I have. Some of it here on Giantbomb. Not gonna be the last time.

Plenty times, but it's a matter of forgiving and forgetting. Sometimes I deserved it, and sometimes I didn't.

No offense dude I didn't read your book but a book having grammatical errors is like releasing a game full of bugs, no matter what the intent was if the way your delivering the medium is broken from the very start how could you not expect black lash?

Don't really play many games online except with people I actually know, so not really in video games.

Once some guy I don't even know started talking a bunch of crap about me in a Facebook photo of me, which made me a bit sad. I just deleted the comment and blocked the guy and that's that.

@artelinarose: :( ... we may disagree in topics and the like but the dudes harrasing you jus case are dirtbags.

Yeah. I got the second highest score in 1 vs 100 on a Saturday during a "show" or whatever it was called. Anyway, they showed the 3 highest score totals, and they showed your avatar and Xbox live ID next to it, so as soon as I see myself on the screen, I get over 60 messages. Most were just friend requests, but a few were pretty crappy. I got called a skank, one dude asked me if I wanted to have smart babies with him, and another asked me if I was a lesbian. Keep in mind this is an E for everyone game and I could have been in a room playing with kids, or I could have been a kid for all these people knew. Just creeper behavior. It's really too bad, and especially bad considering the game and supposed audience for the game.

Yeah a fair bit, particularly when I was an admin for various game servers and forums over the years.

One that stands out (though my part in it was not really the issue) was my stepping in when a female player was being harassed in a server. Later on I started getting these really abusive, horrible messages in the server, on steam, via the associated forum, even in the IRC channel for "making moves on his woman"

It turned out this guy had decided he was in a relationship with this girl (she didn't know this, mind you, and he actually hadn't worked up to talking to her) took offence at me banning the dudes that were being dicks when it was "his job to protect her"

Luckily, I happened to know his older brother and I am reliably informed that he smacked some sense into him and them told his parents what the little psycho was doing online.

Lots of times. Between games, Youtube and various forums, I've had a decent amount of trouble in the past.

I don't let it get to me. It's just the internet. Unless they are making credible threats (meaning they can actually do something, not just talk), but other than that I just sum it up to assholes on the internet and forget about it.

Once or twice a year someone will say something that really puts me on edge and I get that Jay and Silent Bob mentality of "I'm gonna find that montherfucker and..." but I usually cool off a little after that and forget about it.

Nope. Anyone bring that negativity round me gets an ignore/block.

Not really. The only "bad" comments that come my way are on my youtube channel, but it's never been personal. Besides that, nothing. I'm just lucky and/or smart not to randomly talk to anyone online, I guess.

I'm also not a lady. I'm sure if I was, my internet harassment levels would increase a thousandfold. Sad truth.

I've had my share of internet pests, but I usually don't care if they have issues with me.

Nope. I get the occasional private message full of disparagement, but no one seems to care to attempt to ruin my life.

In college, there was a girl (or guy pretending to be a girl) who kept on sending me e-mails to my university address. This went on for a handful of months, maybe once a week. Also at this time, she sent two hand-written letters to my university PO box, which I hadn't checked in months since I was off campus and had a mailbox at my house.

Everything she sent was crude in a very sexual and disturbing way; even called me the n-word a bunch of times (I'm white).

Never knew who she (he?) was. After a while of not responding (mostly due to not checking my university e-mail regularly past sophomore year), I finally told her to stop. Surprisingly, she did.

There was nothing for me to go by as far as clues went. The e-mails were always vague and never descriptive, except for, y'know, the "sex" parts.

I gathered someone was fucking with me, but none of my friends knew anything about it.

I was hanging around LambdaMOO when the incident that "A Rape in Cyberspace" was written about happened back in 92, 93? Believe it or not, things are actually much more civilized on the Internet these days. There was some absolutely foul trolling going on back then.

Edit: In retrospect, I may simply be completely jaded and what seemed incredibly vile at 15 years of age is now "meh" at 36.

Yeah, a decent bit over the years. If you have any kind of public face or regularly get into heated discussions, it happens. It varies from just crappy messages to someone hacking my computer to print out threats. People can be really nuts.

For a while, I was a major contributor to a news website, and that got me some harassment. As bad as some interactions are on gaming forums, I'd have to say that my interactions with people on strictly news forums have been worse. We see glimpses of that in some of our Off Topic and gender issue threads, but it's still usually better than the terrible things people will say and do when mainly just discussing recent events and issues. It's rather unsettling at times, to say the least.

Off and on for a long time, I've been rather vague online about whether I'm male or female, and that has always been kind of an interesting dynamic. I'd say I've gotten noticeably worse and more harassing comments when perceived as a woman, and that's even amongst other women. Just some really nasty, hateful stuff. Well, and the creepy, of course.

I've even had some harassment and threats here on Giant Bomb, too, but in most instances, people eventually get bored and move on to harassing someone else.

Back when I was into Youtube (Like over five years ago) I used to get some hate. Like when I bullshitted a review for Animal Crossing on the Wii and people wanted to murder me because of it.

Otherwise I get pissed off kids messaging me all the time on Xbox Live. Particularly when I'd blow their ass up on GTA IV. (They shot first, mind you.)

a couple years ago on some other website i apparently super pissed off some random dude (i just proved him wrong in his thread is all) and he went all internet detective and looked up all my various social nonsense. Then spread lies and rumors about me to almost everyone i knew, sadly alot of them fell for it. Caused a ridiculous amount of drama. I've become very wary of sharing anything personal online since then.

An example of what the dude did (he was a total stranger), he found out who i was dating at the time and sent her an email saying he saw me with another girl the night before. (luckily i had an alibi for that night, being with her). He also emailed my sister saying i looked at child porn.

Totally fucked up. I've basically sworn off social media because of this event. I mean it mostly blew over but it caused alot of unnecessary drama.

Almost never online aside from the typical "noob" nonsense.

I do, though, pretty regularly get called, "Faggot!", riding my bike around. Got to kick one of those cars, once. Felt pretty good.

Woah woah, stalking? Looking up your personal information? You should probably call the cops, duder. Notify Valve while you're at it.

I don'tdisagree.

Funnily enough I actually go out of my way to piss people off on the internet fairly regularly, but I don't think I've ever received hate mail. Honestly I'd take death threats and the like as a sign that I was doing my job right, and I'm kinda disappointed I don't get more of them.

Yeah actually I have to the point I had to sever all connections to the community where it happened. It gets scary when it spills over to the real world.

Let's just say it pays to be careful about how much personal identifying stuff you put out there. I'm very glad I didn't have a whole lot at the place it happened.

Only freshman year of high school, a friend of mine had won the heart of a girl I was in love with and been good friends with for a long time and I sort of lost my shit over it and was a little insane for a moment, admittedly. We all had Xangas and him and his friends would get on my page talking about how long they make out or whatever. But myself and my friends would fire shots right back so it never felt...abusive so much as just a feud.

Otherwise, no. I'm always amazed at how close to online communities some people can become even though I've been on one forum or another since I was 11 or 12 years old. I can count the number of public relationships on the internet that formed private ones (through PMs, emails, bleeding onto other boards and what have you) on a couple of fingers.

@evilsbane: Because I put it out for free, Because you can hate the book which is fine but emailing me and calling me names is not called for, Umm Because they didn't have to read it maybe.

It happens to me. My wife keeps emailing me, doing some Facebook nonsense and generally harassing me. I'll get her when she sleeps though. Ha ha