WARNING: This question will mention cases such as self-harm.
I am building the setup of the community I have been planning to put together for a year now: It's called "Hear Me Rant". The basic idea of the setting is so it is a place where members can "rant" as free as possible as long as it follows the rules I have put up. It is more or less a therapy place on Discord without it being called therapy. As of now I only have a few developers helping me build a bot and a few friends in the guild.
For the bot we are developing, we want to have it include some sort of emergency action available to the members for cases such as when a member sends messages suspicious of them being quite close to self-harm or suicide, which is unfortunately something I imagine possibly happening due to this community being built is towards helping those feeling uncomfortable, lonely, etc. or wanting to help others.
Now, Discord's ToS states the users must at least be the age of 13 (but it depends on the nation, too) as well as them having their guardian(s) being the one agreeing to the ToS and letting the minor have an account. However, there are cases when:
- The minors do not mention this to their guardian when they create their account on their own
- The minors are under the age of 13
I bring this up because I am planning on allowing the users that claim they have successfully agreed to the ToS, meaning people as young as 13 may join. And when people as young as 13 are on the internet, they definitely troll (though there are adults that do as well).
As my team of developers are building the bot, we are trying to figure out a solution on how to either be
- Safe for the person the members suspect as being on the border or
- In case the report turns out to be a prank, how to still check up on the person that is being reported (before finding out it was a prank) without them feeling uncomfortable or questioning what's happening
Would it be fine to have the person reporting the emergency to acknowledge them having their name noted so in case it turns out to be a prank they can be banned? When finding out it's a prank, would it be bad to mention to the suspect who had reported them?
Just another important detail: None of the members so far are professional psychiatrists or therapists, so we shouldn't be holding much responsibility on results.
