Asked to Hush About Religion in the Spiritual Room

Actually, you are free to talk about whatever you want in any of the rooms on Pogo, so long as you don’t break the Terms of Service.

The Spiritual Rooms are designed to attract people who do enjoy discussing their spirituality, regardless of particular religion. Most people who visit those rooms regularly, from my understanding, are welcoming and respectful of other people’s differences.

But, on occasion, these rooms also attract “griefers”– those who enjoy creating chaos in the chat room. Sometimes the behavior is incredibly obvious, and sometimes, as in this case, the behavior is more subtle. These people are obviously in a Spiritual room, and no doubt have been reminded of this fact several times. Yet, they make this request anyway. They could very easily find a room where the chat centers around other topics.

What do you do? Hmmm…. Oops, one too many ‘m’s in that Hmm. That extra ‘m’ must stand for “mute!” And indeed it does.

So, if you are asked to refrain from discussing your spiritual beliefs in a room clearly designated for the topic, then you may politely inform the inquiring player that this room is set up for this sort of chat and that there are plenty of rooms available where he or she won’t see these discussions. That way, if the player isn’t aware that the room is designated for the topic at hand, you’ve done your bit to let him or her know.

Then, if the player doesn’t leave and insists that you halt the conversation, simply mute him or her.

Even though the player is being a bit obnoxious by making these requests, technically he or she is not violating the Terms of Service, so filing an Abuse Report will do no good.

The ‘mute’ function, however, will allow you the ability to continue your conversation without being interrupted with such requests.

I’m sorry that you fell for this line of flimflammery. Your assumption that a Pogo Employee would come into a room and offer free gems on a non-Pogo site is wrong. If Pogo wants you to have free gems, Pogo will give them to you. Or you might win them in a jackpot.

Unfortunately, there really isn’t anyway to stop these folks from creating new accounts without making it unreasonably difficult for honest players. It takes these folks around 90 seconds to make a new account and then they use some program to make their way through the chat rooms with their fictitious promises of great gem wealth.

We do strongly urge our community to avoid such scams and warn players from time to time about the dangers of visiting these sites.

When you see these messages, I encourage everyone to report the spammer (choose ‘not listed’ for the screen name if the account has left the room), and if you’re feeling particularly helpful, to remind everyone those in the room who may not know that this is, indeed, a scam. A simple: “don’t believe the spammer scammers!” should be sufficient.

Thanks so much for the good wishes! This is not typical tournament behavior, and leagues have no business asking players to vacate a room. They may, VERY politely, ask if others might consider switching rooms, as a tournament is about to take place, but they should never pressure anyone or tell anyone that they need to leave.

However, it’s not easy running a tournament on Pogo. And there may be occasions in rooms that don’t hold too many players that the Tournament Director may need as much space as possible to properly run the tournament. Nevertheless, the onus is on the league to find that space. So, even if you are asked, you really don’t have to leave the room.

Of course, if you are politely asked to leave a room to make room for others in the league, then the super-polite thing to do is to grant the wish. Yes, it’s an inconvenience, but your politeness will help a good number of people.

In this case, it sounds like you and your friends were asked to leave in a less-than-friendly manner. My advice, should this unfortunate situation ever rear it’s head again, would be to simply mute the requesting party and continue to play in peace.