Everybody has to know their history, so here is the story so far. Note that these are the words and experiences of KingPing, and not myself, iLER. As more history or info comes to my attention during my stay as the admin of GRC I will post them in here. So here is The Story so Far.....

In order to understand what has happened, I will sum up the events that lead to this movement at this point (partially taken from Redwood’s Quake news page):

There is a female Quake player by the name of HellKitten, who maintained a personal web page containing things about Quake and some real pictures of herself. When Dhab, a friend, posted his title page artwork of her (a drawing depicting her), she began receiving emails and messages as a response. Those emails turned into "foul, disgusting, sexually perverted emails and altered images" of HellKitten. At first HellKitten's response was, what anybody’s response would be: She removed her personal pictures from her webpage.

After a few days, and some positive responses from people, HellKitten decided to put her "pictures back up despite the offensive emails, because I am not letting those immature scum hurt my page".

On September 3rd, HellKitten had again removed all photo's from her webpage, since she continued to receive emails of her face pasted on porn pics, included with threats to send the pics to newsgroups.

On September 4th, HellKitten decided to shut down her page after she was traumatized because someone sent her a "picture of a dog with all its guts hanging out with maggots and stuff on it".

But she has decided to fight back and not let herself be brought down by all this. Way to go! Be assured of my support!

I contacted HellKitten about starting this Green Ribbon Campaign and she responded that she is "totally into the idea". I’ve sent her a letter on September 5th, from which I’ll let you read a major excerpt here (modified):

"The day before yesterday, I read about your sexual harassment problem on Redwood's news page, but I didn't pay too much attention to it. I thought, oh well, some little kid played another one of his immature, boring jokes on someone. Frankly, I don't understand why he (or even she? 8-[ ) bothers to waste time copying one picture into another, when one can find explicit pix and the likes en masse on the web (if one needs it). If this had been a single occurrence I would have said, okay, "del MESSAGE" and forget about it. :-/

But then, yesterday, I read on Redwood's, that you have removed your homepage for good because of continued threats and molestations. I surfed on over and found the possibly saddest page I have ever seen on The Web :.( (not only since I like dogs, having had one in the family for many years). This is when I started to think about the whole matter. I read the discussions on QWF and found only well meant responses and sympathy for you. I agree with most of the things people say. Yes, scum needs to be fought. Yes, those people's accounts should be removed, but that certainly is just fighting symptoms.

NO, I am not ashamed of being part of the web community or being a male! It's more of a disgrace that many people just tolerate harassment. What we definitely need is a strong community of reasonable people who do not go around molesting others (not only on the Internet) but support each other and maintain good will. Certain people lack a basic sense of courtesy (netiquette on the WWW) or plain IQ (which they can't be blamed for). I absolutely despise malicious, wicked behavior. Instead of working on themselves and trying to contribute something useful and being creative in a positive sense, they destroy what others have built up. Why? I can only guess. Maybe they go by the motto, "what I can't have, nobody shall have". Improve, then!!

Let me tell you about one of my own experiences (though not as bad): At the beginning of this year, I became untrue to Quake ,-) , buying a neat new game called Diablo by Blizzard Entertainment (perhaps you know it), which can also be played over the Internet. At first it was great fun, meeting people from all over the world, forming teams and battling side by side through dungeons. But shortly thereafter, cheat programs arose from the fingertips of skilled programmers, as well-meant means to back up the character in the game, a function not implemented by the creators. As a side effect (and with some modifications), these progs enabled certain 'subjects' to become invincible and to kill others w/o a threat to themselves, just for fun or to take their equipment. So, what was born were PKs (player killers), who split the Diablo community in half (it's a figure of speech - I hate the thought that PKs could make up 50% of all players!). At least they were enough in number to spoil the fun. But on the other hand, what emerged were clans whose only purpose was to track down PKs and to provide password protected games for non-PKs to play in.

Maybe this story doesn't exactly compare to HellKitten’s experience, but it may provide some clues as how to cope with it:

1. Not all people are bad.
2. You have to live with a certain amount of dirt and scum on your shoes/board while walking/surfing around.
3. You can brush off the dirt when you return home; a strong (web)community/family is the best support for withstanding the dark hours of life.
4. A nice, reasonable community is out there!

Don't fight fire with fire! Break the vicious circle! I am sick and tired of harassment of any kind, be it racist or sexual or whatever. On the Internet it's been going on as long as people could meet online (e.g. chats), hiding behind anonymity. Okay, aliases are cool. They provide means to become someone who you aren't in real life, to role play. I use an alias, too. But why else do we use aliases? You got it: to keep our privacy to ourselves, which is where it belongs. But paparazzi are online, too! They can't keep their fingers still and stop prying. The whole world has seen where it can lead to and all those hypocrites and doubledealers then say that they’ve only done their jobs and know of no guilt whatsoever - yeah right, they haven't driven the car against the concrete wall! I could scream!

I definitely favor freedom of speech, and I know it can sometimes be a narrow line between what has to be said and what shouldn't. But there absolutely has to be something like a basic moral principle for how you behave amongst others (be it real or virtual). If you have something to say, you can do so. You can even say _anything_ you want, but it's the way _how_ you go about doing so that makes it a gourmet's treat or a maggot infested piece of droppings! (sorry - I had to express my thoughts somehow! .-) What I like is the idea of calling out to the world, "Stop harassment! Respect your fellow Netizens! Do as you would just like in real life. The virtual world is hard to control and we all have decided through the blue ribbon campaign not long ago that it should stay this way, but people remember: do unto others as you want others to do unto you! (this seems to me a universal truth - an axiom)."

So, what is essentially intended by the Quake Community Green Ribbon Campaign is to build up some kind of universal understanding and a tolerant Quake-/Internet community with liberty and respect for all.

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