I would, for one, ask you to not term this as "harassment". Asking a writer a question about their novel doesn't always equate to annoying them. Some authors love replying to questions, even (see page 800-1400 of the link I gave).
Just becuase I asked an author once about which character among two in-verse characters is stronger, is not "harassment". There's a big line between harassment and curiosity.
You cannot take someone else's right to ask someone a question just becuase they are a user here.
I would say "
battleboarding questions" is a very broad term and that should be changed in the rules. You can ask an author "is Naruto stronger than Sasuke" and that would be considered a battleboarding question too, but is it something that shouldn't be asked? No, that's just BS.
By definition in terms of our rules, that is what that equates to. It is harassment. We have codified it as such, for very good reason.
We have no proof that he was trying to circumvent our rules in specific. We both know most authors like to not answer questions filled with jargon they don't understand. A question like "is X multiversal" is bad, but a question like "can Goku destroy the hyperbolic time chamber" isn't becuase 1 is purely powerscaling and the latter can also just be a genuine question at the author.
Also, powerscalers tend to will whatever they say with jargon unconsciously. I mean, I have known people who use powerscaling terms in daily-life conversations and I have to remind them to try and use a more understanding-friendly language. So if someone is offering someone else to proofread their question before posting becuase it might be filled with things the author doesn't understand, isn't so "rule breaking" as trying to circumvent our leading question rule.
And even then, is he using those questions and answers on vsbw? NO.
We do. To ask the questions at all is a rule violation. Extending any powerscaling question to a creator is against our policies, one of the few offsite rules we enforce sternly. I don't care about "genuine questions", because these were not genuine questions. That is the crux of the matter. The offer was to rephrase powerscaling questions.
He isn't using them, but he was also caught before such an eventuality could come about. I cannot see the future any better than you, we may only infer from evidence. What evidence I see, was a server of VSBW users talking at some length about breaking a fairly central rule, and one of them offering to do so in a way that could circumvent that rule and help it go unnoticed. This would do a great deal in making it so he
could use it on VSBW.
The screenshots, at least the ones I'm saying, mention questions like:
- Is Hinata's MWI false or true (this is an in-verse topic strictly speaking, even outside battleboarding)
- Every worod ahs diff laws of physics (this is also literally a statement from a volume in the light novel)
- What is the promised land (this is literally an in-verse term)
- Mass of infons (this is once again an in-verse topic)
Just becuase a verse is filled with hax and a tier 2 or above cosmology doesn't make all questions related to it illegal. I mean otherwise it's like saying "we won't let you ask the author any question because your verse already has many OP things!"
The only "actual" power scaling BS filled question I can see are
these, but you know what? This is
literally from 2023, before I even started doing anything on vsbw.
So you're basically doing something like "punishing an adult for something they did as a teenager 3 years later".
You're pretending as though the explicit issue wasn't that these were powerscaling questions. Alex's offer literally dispels this entirely, man.
Not once has any of us used a WoG filled with powerscaling BS to make an upgrade here (I'm speaking on behalf of tensura, not Ninjago since I don't know whatever they do here nor keep track of it). The only WoG we have ever uses is either from official interviews we have no control over or from QnAs back from 2013, more than a decade ago.
So assuming something we're doing in our free time is explicitly for vsbw when in the time of 2 months between this report and those questions, is unfair.
In cases like this where the actual punishment worthy thing is "he WOULD HAVE done it" instead of "he actually already did it" (use that wog here), past records actually matter.
This part I'm actually aware of. To the best of my knowledge, Tensura does not currently rely on WoG. But the possibility exists (strongly, given the current circumstance) that it may have used WoG in the near future. But that is beside the point. The allegation is not, "you guys made a CRT with prohibited WoG statements". The allegation is, "you guys were attempting to gather prohibited WoG statements". In legal terms, I believe this would be something like "conspiracy to commit" (in addition to the act of sending the questions to begin with, since this is, of course, the central offense). Past record doesn't mean anything for serious infractions, and I consider these extremely serious infractions.
How do you interpret this?
As him removing powerscaling BS from the question or rephrasing the question but still keeping the powerscaling BS?
Becuase his offer is to specifically rephrase the question SO that it doesn't look like powerscaling BS.
But if you think otherwise, I feel like this is more a matter of different opinions than dishonesty
Alex offered to camouflage comments such that they did not appear to be powerscaling stuff. We've seen the same obfuscation for other verses, ranging from your aforementioned Ninjago, to SCP. It is a common tactic to hide the rule violations by trying to make the questions sound "non-brainrotted". I honestly don't know how else you would interpret that-- he very clearly didn't offer to just make them non-powerscaling questions, that would defeat the purpose of asking them in the first place, it changes the very nature of the question.
So now asking something like "can Goku destroy the time chamber" as bannable as "is X Multiversal"?
As with all rules, we must approach them on a case by case basis. I don't know shit about Dragon Ball and intend to keep it that way, however: my stance is that, in general, you would be best off not pestering the creators, as per our rules on the subject, listed on our rules page. If you cannot survive in this manner, should your oxygen be expelled from your lungs forever if you even consider
not asking them, then I would suggest not asking them a question that might be construed as being powerscaling related. Are they exactly as bannable? No, probably not, the latter is certainly more explicit. But in terms of the binary of "against the rules" and "not against the rules", both are certainly against the rules, the question would simply be how severely we react, based on contextual information.
That only is under your jurisdiction if the users actually use those questions on vsbw, which they don't. Like, it's been 2 months in between and we haven't used anything like that here. Are we really gonna assume in the absense of actual past cases that we magically would use them now?
You've already had it explained to you in reasonable detail that it is not outside of our jurisdiction. You are blatantly lying. You're also acting as though you have this grand idea of precedence and how we handle things on VSBW, that we are bastardizing enshrined policies by reaching this conclusion-- that you guys broke the rules and that Alex ought to be banned-- when
the exact opposite is true. This is, to the best of my recollection, the lightest sentence ever handed out for anything as fishy as this. We're not "magically" using one offense to ban someone-- we've done it many, many, many times in the past. That
entirely depends on the severity of the offense.
I think you're misunderstanding something here. We already have
answers to the questions. We could use this for pushing some hax for other dimensions if we wanted to, but we didn't. Why? Becuase these questions were to fill personal questions, bit whatever everyone here is theorizing.
chatgpt...
I don't know the context there, but I do know that a screenshot saying "this isn't definitive

" reads like the author negging you, anyways. More than any moral conscience, that seems like it would stop any attempt to use it as evidence. Furthermore: you previously defended the notion that Fuse would never reply, anyways. I'm not sure how to take this, which I implicitly understand as a response from Fuse to some question or another you guys asked (which, again, highly against the rules!)
To my memory I wasn't a user (or well, that was the date I made my first msg on vsbw) in context to the question I myself asked.
Is that also breaking the rules and punishment worthy 3 year later now? Punishing a 3rd year for not entering the office in the correct way in his first day of his first year?
Those two dates coinciding is not exactly a pleasant coincidence, you understand.
You keep mischaracterizing this to your own benefit, and I find it extremely dishonest. It is the dishonest way by which this behavior is defended, and the lack of any sort of acceptance of responsibility, that continues to solidify my opinion that these were malevolent acts, intended for manipulation. Nobody has said "that is indeed against the rules, my bad", instead we get "YOU'RE GONNA KILL ME? FOR STEPPING INTO THE OFFICE WRONG? BECAUSE I MOVED MY FOOT AN INCH OUT OF PLACE?" No man. This stuff has led to massive scandals, major headaches in the history of this site. I've been there for a good amount of them. And you know at least part of that history, because you've referred to Ninjago a couple times. Even if you didn't, I think it would be reasonably ascertained why this is such a serious issue, whether you feel you are in the wrong or not. And yet you keep exaggerating how insignificant this is, as if it will convince me to agree that our rules are just wrong and there is no problem with this sort of behavior. It's crazy.
If it was about fear of getting caught, we would not have made it
so obvious that we were asking him questions.
Asking questions is an entirely different thing than using them on vsbw.
This defense hinges on me assuming that you would be sly enough to hide your activities when we got here by you guys being discovered. People have admitted to worse things in more public places because they assumed they were safe and among friends.
Asking questions remains. Against. The. Rules.
I would like to ask, will I get an official warning to the log for something I did 3 years around the time when I was as new as a baby to vsbw, now 3 years later?
While the designation of which users would receive a warning had not occurred yet, given your unrepentant attitude, the dishonest means by which you have defended yourself, your clear and repeated ignoring of the rules, I would currently advise yes, you should receive a warning. You do not care about the rule and have repeatedly pretended it does not exist, or was not broken, or is invasive, or is invalid off the wiki-- in order to excuse yourself and others.
This is not even nearly the same lvl of analogy we are talking about. It's not about "I committed a crime now but my past records are clear", it's about "I didn't commit a crime, you guys are assuming I did becuase you think I have bad intentions and WOULD HAVE used the WoG on vsbw when I never did so in the past, even the 2 months between that WoG and the report right now".
For example. Alex did break the rules. He did "commit the crime". You disagree on the extent to which that would have continued, but the fact is that he did break the rules.