This is so loaded with emotion I don't even know where to begin with my response to this. I'm ashamed to say how ignorant I was of how this kind of culture was happening on the server. You can say I was living under a rock, or just that I've been so focused on the surface of the server that I am quite literally blind to everything else. This genuinely makes me so happy that I'm not part of any staff teams to deal with this fuckery.
That being said, I'm so happy and honestly, pretty emotional, that this is being talked about and being advocated for in such a direct way now knowing how much it hasn't been. I started playing on this server since before I graduated high school, and I cannot imagine being in the position of some young boy or girl coming on here and being accosted by people who are supposed to help build up and sustain a community. I know what it's like to be in a position of little power, and it's scary and it LIVES with you long into your life.
There were traumas in my life, predatory in nature, that I experienced as a child, and I was lucky enough to have adults to go to to help me get through it. It's still hard, it's still a scar, but it's manageable. It hurts so much to tears to know that there are people children who are going or went through the exact same thing, and very literally have few to no people to turn to. No adults to step in and give them a hug and say that everything is going to be okay, no one to just enter in a simple command to remove this person from the platform and take just one ounce of worry away.
At the end of the day, this is a simple website, run by simple civilians who can gate-keep the community (in the good way, not the dickish way) to keep kids safe. I'm an adult playing on a minecraft role playing server, and as an adult I'd like to say that this really is that simple. The people who run this are not the FBI, they're not law enforcement. Taking action to protect your community isn't acting in accordance to the law. They don't have to be the law to ban someone from playing on this server or visiting this website! If anything warrants sending information to proper authorities, then maybe there should be some kind of task team to get information from the person making the complaint, and giving them proper contact information to local authorities to help. It's all just a click away and a short google search to find phone numbers and tip-lines. They just have to be the adults protecting the children who come on here from predators who would take advantage of them! Take the law out of the equation for just a moment, and just ban.
JUST. BAN.