Conversely, by removing PMs and forcing Wanikanians to make all their conversations and contact more-or-less public, the mods are pushing people to be more careful about what they share, by default, and definitely making it harder for abusive situations to arise because all of us can walk into any thread at any time and read what’s going on.
Call it the ‘broad daylight’ deterrent method.
I think some people were using PM’s to arrange study groups or to ask members they’re more comfortable with for help with learning-related things they might be a bit embarrassed to ask to the whole forum. I get why people liked when PM’s were turned on and why some people still would want access or to devise another system. I used them myself. In the end, though, WK needs to protect it’s members and their own company in the best way they can. They are just a few people handling all of us. So if this is what they need to do, this is what they need to do. I’m sure many of us have and will continue to find ways to contact people we want to outside of the forum. I can’t say if that’s good or bad. Depends on the situation. Hopefully after today everyone will be a little more thoughtful about their own safety, though.
This comment was completely uncalled for in this situation. And even tho your post has some good points you might have invalidated them all by that sentence alone.
It is not in itself a bad tactic. But I do think it could create unsafer situations as a result. I hope I am wrong :).
ok, I caught up on the thread and, without weighing in on whether or not PMs should or should not be disabled, I wanna take back what I said earlier about moving to facebook or some other medium being standard procedure with private discussions.
thinking about that more, it’s clearly just even more dangerous than forum PMs which the mods can see. I would even go so far as to say I think as long as PMs are disabled, it should be explicitly against forum rules to solicit someone to a conversation on another platform. it doesn’t seem consistent to allow such a thing while forbidding PMs in the first place.
You don’t need to do anything, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to do some things. Easiest example would be college. You don’t have to talk privately to anyone else in your major - it’s not necessary for completing the course/major you’re taking - but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to interact with people who have similar interests and are taking a very similar course for the next two years.
Like college and its majors, Wanikani is a difficult and lengthy path that presents the opportunity to surround yourself with trustworthy people of similarly obscure interests. Like everything else in the world, it can be taken advantage of, but that doesn’t mean you should just nuke the whole thing.
(As a side note, if anyone was thinking ‘you can tell what kind of person someone is in college, unlike in WK’ I mean, not really. Taking advantage of people in college is incredibly common (unfortunately). It’s currently a big issues at colleges in the US.)
Apparently you have great parents who are on the ball. I applaud them.
You may have softened my heart with your cheez-it dropping habits, but I still remember a lot from my days as an assassin. I’ll make sure you’re safe.
…Well, I’d love to, but that isn’t realistically possible. It sounds like you already have, but make sure you are taking steps to ensure your own peace of mind. Feeling safe will make getting past this all the easier, so make sure to voice all of your concerns to your parents and other people who have actual power. I PMed you with a way for us to talk, but PMs got removed so this is the best i’ve got.
It might be a good idea to implement something to inform users (especially younger users) how to safely conduct themselves on the internet. Younger people don’t always think about the dangers of giving out personal information, but that could possibly be combated by telling them!
Allow me to clarify. I am saying that when looking at such a situation, the first thought that comes to mind is “how do we prevent such things?”. The answers is there is already a system in place to prevent it and because it wasn’t used in this particular situations we cannot dismiss it’s usefulness. Do we need a more drastic approach than what is already in place? Or do we need to make sure that current prevention systems are actually being used, and people know what to do and how to react to such a situation?
Only if people are so dumb as to share personal contact info on a public forum. IMO the place will be safer.
I was guessing you ment that but in this case the way you put it was harsh. The thing is to know when to use the security system. And that is the important knowledge that needs to be shared in my opinion.
So yes your point is totally valid. I also think… that with the internet being such a big part of people’s life’s there should be a class on it in high school. (just like taxes and other adult stuff imo 
)
You weren’t on chatrooms / forums alot in the early 00’s where you? Because… that literally happened all the time.
I’m pretty sure those people were called morons immediately after. And that there was a big societal push not to do that in the following years.
The problem though is that caution is learned from experience. Most people didn’t start out on the internet thinking “everyone here is a horrible person I cannot trust and they will kill me given the opportunity!!!” Especially when we’re younger, we tend to be pretty trusting. It’s not a matter of idiocy. It’s something you’ve gotta learn, and you’ve gotta be aware when hosting a public space with minors that they might not be aware of that.
I was on one particular one…The Bronze, and then the Bronze Beta. I know people shared their info but they also met up in person etc and it was a very actively self-policing community; if something went down, the perpetrator was outed and drummed out of the society, as is natural.
But that was also in the days before phishing, data-harvesting, ID theft, and ALLLLLL the other fun ways the scary monsters take our privacy from us now. I doubt many people who’ve been active on the internet in the last five years would feel comfortable sharing like that now.
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You can access existing PMs if you have a direct link to them, but you shouldn‘t be able to reply as we have restricted this option to a trust level that isn’t obtainable to regular users. This is an option in the platform available to us.
We also disabled the ability to make new PMs.
If you are able to do replys, then that is a problem. Can you confirm you can actually make a reply? If so it is something we will need to bring up with our forum host so they can address the bug.
Hmm. That’s a lot of good questions. I know they were rhetorical, so, sorry for my slightly picky response - in the interest of clear debate.
If more than 90% of members are using said system
Are they?
and one person does something awful at some point, is it reasonable shutting down the entire thing?
That depends on whether the WaniKani team would be prepared to go out on a limb for this feature. Knowing that they have underage users and provide a private messaging service… and that it’s quite easy to sue people for negligence.
Could further such situations truly be prevented by doing this?
No. But I’d rather reduce the risk of WaniKani being implicated, rather than shrug and say ‘well, it can’t be prevented.’
Could it do more harm than good
If you consider losing a PM function an equivalent harm to say, child grooming, I guess.
I agree with you on principle that no online environment is completely safe. We can’t lock it down so tight that nobody can make any choice that puts them at theoretical risk. But for me it comes back to the question: what is the core function of this website, and what extra risk and responsibility can we expect the developers to take on? The (mainstream) private communication apps have reams of paperwork around child protection and responsibility to their users. We’re not in the Wild West of the internet anymore - you and I know better, I think.
You’re right, I can’t. I thought I could because the writing window would appear… and the button to reply is there. My bad.
EDIT: Wait, let me see which error I got
EDIT 2: @viet Yes, I still can. I tried the first time and got an error (was in Japanese, didn’t bother reading). Now I tried it again and worked.