Tareq’s Discord Server: Toxicity, Hostility, and Lies
Content warning: rape, bullying, harassment, racism, transphobia, homophobia, pedophilia, ableism, slurs
Please stay respectful and empathetic, and do not for any reason harass anyone mentioned in this document.
We would like to preface this announcement by saying that this is unfortunately going to shed light on a negative aspect of our community.
Many of us have come to cherish the Super Mario Sunshine (SMS) speedrunning community and appreciate the overwhelmingly positive and encouraging interactions that exist between people supporting their fellow players in improving at the game. As the moderation team, we strive to uphold these values and to preserve a safe environment, fostering the growth and improvement of players of all skill levels. In particular, we take a strong stance against animosity or contempt for other players. Whenever elitist or exclusionary behaviors crop up in public community spaces, we do our best to deal with them properly.
Unfortunately, this behavior can still exist privately outside of our Discord server. The subject of this document is a Discord server owned by a runner known as
Tareq (also known as
SERGES). Many people in the SMS community have interacted with Tareq or know of him to some degree. He has frequently crossed the line of what is considered acceptable behavior. Most people are probably not surprised that his server has been a concentrated environment of targeted harassment and toxic behavior.
This server has existed since 2019, and it has been a place where bigotry such as racism, transphobia, and homophobia are the norm. It’s an environment where all of the most offensive statements and conducts are encouraged, and seemingly nothing is off limits. Members of our community (as well as the SMO and SM64 communities to a lesser extent) are constantly mocked and belittled.
This might not have been an issue for the SMS mod team if these behaviors were aimed exclusively at the individuals involved within their server. The problem arose from the fact that these offensive remarks were targeted at other members of our community who have not been able to defend themselves and have been made to feel uncomfortable thanks to rumors of this behavior leaking from the server gradually.
We were informed about this behavior by
Ian_LC, a former member of the server. He has been instrumental in this process, and he is the reason we were able to expose the behavior listed below.
We got a log of the worst channel of the server, and we were able to gather screenshots to support this document.
The list of server members includes:
Tareq, Guy2308, Nebuladiv, EquivocalGenius, Oatflaker, UrinalMike, DDoS, Rays04, Knirgesh, and Gainai, as well as three alts:
Kayami85, kitori and Kiyoku45 - used by DDoS, Tareq and Nebuladiv to attempt to pick up girls on other servers.
Tareq, Guy2308, EquivocalGenius, Nebuladiv, DDoS, and UrinalMike are the worst offenders who took part in the behavior detailed below. The other server members participated to a lesser degree, but importantly, they were completely aware of it and did not actively discourage it. Both Rays04 and Gainai showed limited to minimal participation. In Gainai’s case, we were unable to find any offense warranting action on our part.
We have labeled the offenses in detail with screencaps and/or explanations below.
Racism
Constantly, the members of Tareq’s server use the word “nigger” to refer to a multitude of people, whether it be to directly attack black people, or attack quite literally anyone else. It goes without saying that this word is unacceptable in any context, however, this group uses it quite freely. The slurs “nigger” and “nigga” combined come up nearly
800 times in the logs that we were given. Other slurs are used as well, and they frequently make antisemitic remarks and incite hatred and violence on other ethnicities. Members of the community who are not native English speakers are mocked for their accents. At the time Ian left the server, it was named “NANAZI FANCLUB 7.8 MILLION AND COUNTING”, after Japanese SMS speedrunner Nanashi.
Examples -
(content warning: racial slurs)
Transphobia, Homophobia, and Sexism
Trans members of the community are routinely objectified; they’re referred to by their former names. Some members are called “it” and “tranny”, and the group makes a point of consistently misgendering transgender and non-binary runners. The word “faggot” appears over 300 times in the log we were given.
On a YouTube account owned by one of them (named “SunshineCommunity” as a parody of the official community channel),
videos were posted using voice changing software to imitate and mock the voices of transgender members of the community.
Nude photos of women obtained through DMs were also shared within the server, all but certainly without having asked for the consent of the concerned individuals.
Examples -
Transphobia,
Homophobia,
Sexism -
(content warning: slurs)
Rape and Pedophilia Jokes
Rape is another common topic they enjoy deriding - from the traumatic experiences of community members, as seen
in the set of
videos about SniperKing, a rapist who was removed from the community in 2020, to calling others rapists themselves in unlisted videos. They use the term very loosely - it appears close to 700 times in the log.
The group continously decides to make light of pedophilia as well. Without any merit, they’ll accuse community members of pedophilia, sometimes going as far as making unlisted YouTube videos about them. Attacks on sexual predators, such as SniperKing, are
not what we are referring to- the issue is, they often will attack and accuse users in the community who do
not have any record of pedophilia. Some of this is mentioned in the testimonies later in the document in greater detail. On many recorded occasions, they will join discord voice calls with screen-capture on with the sheer intent to frame innocent members of pedophilia,
and upload these to YouTube. This is a blatant, cruel and baseless attack of character and exemplifies the fact that they find this traumatic subject funny and meaningless.
We strongly encourage you to immediately leave any voice call that the offenders join out of the blue in other discord servers as soon as you notice. They have a known, documented history of doing this with the pure intent of harassment and belittlement.
Examples -
(content warning: rape, pedophilia, slurs)
Pedophilic Behavior
In some cases, we found members of this server themselves engaging in pedophilic behaviors. Specifically, we found photo evidence of Nebuladiv sexually abusing an underage girl on his alt account, Kiyoku45, on an E-Dating discord, going so far as to ask for photos of the victim despite
implying that he knows the victim is underage. Despite him saying he doesn’t date underage, his actions simply do not match his words: he specifically asks for “
underage thigh pics”, immediately followed by a request for a photo of the victim’s breasts. This is a form of grooming and child endangerment with an intent to obtain and distribute child pornography, and is very damaging and harmful to the victim. Nebuladiv as well mentions to the minor he’s a Discord moderator in another community, which can be construed as trying to entice a minor from a placement of power, another pattern typical of a textbook predator- again, fully after implying he understands the victim is underage. DDoS, while not directly engaging with the minor, encourages Nebuladiv to ask the victim for
more photos without any regard for her safety.
Screenshots -
(content warning: sexual abuse of a minor)
Whether Nebuladiv intended this to be a joke or not
does not matter- this is a very serious offense and needed to be documented. This type of behavior from those who should know better does everlasting, unerasable trauma and damage to their victims.
If Nebuladiv, DDos, Kiyoku45, or any of the other group members or alts have sexually harassed or abused you, we strongly encourage you to report it to: Discord Support and/or https://report.cybertip.org/
General Hatefulness
Although these screenshots do not fit into the others, they properly demonstrate how frequent and widespread hatred is in this server. A large majority of members of the Sunshine Community, as well as members of other speedrunning communities such as SM64 and SMO, were attacked at some point or another.
These attacks range from insulting runners and other community members for simple questions or comments, to leaking people’s DMs and privated tweets to mock them for reasons such as their mental state, to also wishing death to various people. Oftentimes, these insults also include some manifestation of the bigotry explained above. Not all screenshots we provided are equally offensive but were included to demonstrate that a wide range of people are targeted in one way or another.
Examples -
(content warning: various slurs)
Deception
The group knew very well this behavior was unacceptable and that it would lead to severe backlash if it was ever learned about. In their public voice call channel, dedicated to streaming, use of slurs would be jokingly called out to maintain a positive outwards facade.
Their front was supported by deceptive communication with the moderation team. On multiple occasions, Jpep and 1Ups asked them to refrain from saying offensive things in public spaces, because their behavior was negatively affecting many people in the community. In response, they acknowledged those concerns and lowered the intensity of their public irony and jokes. However, as we’ve now found out, it turned out that they were just doing that to get mods off their back, and in fact they ridiculed these attempts at communication in their private channel.
At one point, Guy2308 sent a
DM to jpep complaining about being treated unfairly and asking for the same treatment as everyone else — again in an attempt to get mods off his back and protect his public image, aided by
EquivocalGenius leaking discussions from the moderation channel to him (see highlighted portion in both screenshots: there is no way Guy would have said that if Genius had not leaked it). Importantly, he made this complaint while participating in the above behavior and hiding it from the public, knowing it would make him look bad.
On July 18,
this DM was sent by Skitch to a community member. We issued a temporary ban for Skitch while we investigated. We initially were wondering if Skitch’s account was hacked by Tareq to send this message (it reads very similar to Tareq’s usual messages). However, we soon suspected that this was a hazing ritual to let Skitch into their server. To assist this,
UrinalMike invited Tareq and Skitch into SB’s Discord server, which allowed Skitch to send the DM, since the user was in SB’s server.
It was later confirmed by Jpep that this was a hazing ritual, after he received DMs from several members of their group. The comment about Tareq’s account (SERGES) being deleted is true; however, Guy and Tareq later invited a member of the mod team to a group DM - likely as a prank - confirming the latter had simply created a new account to keep interacting with the group.
Outside the Discord
While the majority of this group’s awful behavior remains confined to a private Discord server, much of their behavior in the larger SMS community has been colored with elitism, sarcasm, edgy humor, inside jokes mocking community members, and more. Listed below are specific examples of the ways they have harassed our people and negatively affected our community.
- Since 2019, their group has mocked SB relentlessly regarding his mentality, gameplay, etc. SB’s testimony
- Ian informed us that Guy2308 recently made videos imitating SB, making fun of him and slandering him by calling him a pedophile.
- They made fun of him for removing himself from the IL sheet during a point of mental distress. They also frequently made fun of his strats, movement, and choice of routes - notably by randomly highlighting mistakes from his stream and titling the clips “Aut” or “Tism”. SB goes into more detail in his testimony.
- Dith was made fun of in much the same way and also called a rapist and a pedophile. According to Ian_LC, several of the videos mocking SB also slandered Dith: “Guy made a series of videos pretending to be SB, then [a fake] “dith” would go into the chat and say he raped 20 kids in an orphanage”
- After Guy got his first Any% world record, inspired by a suggestion from Tareq, he raided SidedWilliams on Twitch, spamming “cuck” and variations of the word. Afterwards, the group made emotes and gifs using Sid’s face without his permission with the apparent intent of harassment.
- They create GIFs mocking the movement of players on facecam from their streams. When told to avoid doing this because it may be interpreted as ableist, they mocked the term and the people who use it.
- Tareq made a subtweet aimed at lumardy, parodying his tweets about what motivates him to speedrun.
- Statement from lumardy - “In terms of my experience with each individual, Tareq is one of the worst people I have ever interacted with. There's a surprising amount of people in the community who like him and it's why I've fallen for his bait when he decides to be an asshole to me (to protect my image and not want to look bad to people i thought were cool) an example would be a couple months ago where I said I didn't have much motivation to play sunshine because UK players weren't giving much competition at the time, he made a tweet clearly directed at me mocking that sentiment and quite a few people who i felt like i had good interactions with before liked and rt'd what he was saying, guy, neb etc etc, it was really the beginning of me realizing that they were incredibly two faced and toxic if they were willing to be friends or talk to tareq frequently. it's important to note that these people probably feel like they aren't toxic and things like that but how they come across to people like me who just wanna play the game and meet fun people is quite frankly disgraceful, i don’t want to play sms anymore and it's because people like that have become figureheads, and how could i feel any different given my interactions''
- They created a parody “SunshineCommunity” YouTube channel with videos uploaded with the intent to harass various community members, and to make light of serious community issues.
- JJsrl was mocked for calling out the inappropriate jokes and videos made about rape. He was not attempting to defend SniperKing’s actions in any capacity, but when he tried to explain that making jokes relating to these topics of rape and underaged sexual relations was too far, he was mocked for being a “pedophile defender” which is mentioned in his statement. After his call out of these jokes, he was banned from Guy’s twitch channel, discord server and blocked on twitter.
- Statement from JJsrl - “I never really was a part of their private calls, I was in their discord for a little bit but I don’t remember joining one of them except for when I was just practicing once. If I am to be completely honest, something that I’m a bit ashamed of is that there was a time where they were all kinda making fun of [redacted], like getting pics of them from their Twitter and distorting them. And I didn’t really do anything about it to stop it. So that can be put on me if you want. There obviously are the videos making fun of sniperking, which apparently turns me into a “pedophile defender”? Because I said the videos that were being made were too far.”
Moving Forward
We have decided to take the following action regarding the users involved within this server:
- All moderation roles have been removed from EquivocalGenius, Nebuladiv, and Oatflaker.
- The following users have been issued bans from the SMS Discord:
- Tareq (already banned)
- Guy2308
- Nebuladiv
- EquivocalGenius
- Oatflaker
- DDoS
- Rays04
- UrinalMike
- Knirgesh
- We will discuss with the community how we should move forward with these users, regarding submission and visibility of runs on SRC and on our public IL spreadsheet. For now, their submissions to both will be frozen.
With how serious the offenses listed were, why did we not remove mods as soon as we found out?
While all of us wanted to remove those in power and take action immediately, we needed ample time and proof to construct this document, lay out the facts, do our interviews, and confirm various details.
Tareq’s group enjoys far-reaching influence both inside and outside the Sunshine community. Guy in particular is a key public figure as the holder of the current Any% and 120 Shines world records. Private or not, his actions impact not just his targets of abuse, but our entire community and its image. Furthermore, many newer or rising players attempt to get closer to the group due to their exceptional in-game achievements, resulting in incidents like Skitch’s situation earlier this year. Many runners told us of negative experiences they’d had with the group, but asked to remain anonymous to avoid damaging their relationships with members of the community they judge too important to be on bad terms with. A deep climate of discomfort has been allowed to set in in the community for some time now. By releasing this information to the public, we hope to finally allow for open discussion of events that many have stayed quiet about thus far.
Please remember that although the members of the group took part in terrible behavior, they did not all participate in it to the same extent, and
they are still people. The coming weeks will likely be difficult—nobody enjoys having their character picked apart and every mistake they’ve made exposed for all to see. Please stay respectful and empathetic, and
do not for any reason harass any of them.
- The SMS Moderation Team, October 4th, 2021
