GM Failure

[Alistaire]

If the way you joke around with your friends would sound like real insults to other people, then it shouldn't be done in public chat, where you're likely to offend those other people. Use /tells or a private channel for such things. (Of course, this assumes the offence is blatant enough that the speaker could predict strangers taking offense at it. I don't know if that was the case with whatever the OP saw without knowing what was said.)

According to ToS it shouldn't be done in public period.

[Niwashi]

The report button works, just not when you're reporting on someone else's behalf when they're perfectly capable of reporting themselves.

But the OP wasn't reporting on someone else's behalf. She was reporting on her own behalf. Whatever is said in a public channel is being said to everyone in that channel. You can't specify that only a specific person is allowed to react to it unless they're the only one it's sent to.

This was just a case of a GM taking the easy way out to avoid enforcing their own rules.

[EveK]

To clarify, since this has garnered more interest than I expected...

1) The actual message transmitted in a public channel was gross and obscene. I will not repeat it here. It was because it was gross and obscene that it was reported. I don't care who the perpetrator supposedly intended it to be seen by, whether they thought it would be welcome, or whether the ostensibly-addressed person actually did like it or not.

2) The policy of being unable to petition on others' behalf totally makes sense. If the harassment was via /tell, for instance, only the person that actually saw it would be appropriate to report it. If they mentioned it to someone else, that other person ought only encourage the actual recipient to report it if so desired. It also doesn't apply here; the issue isn't that the policy exists but that it was erroneously applied to this particular ticket.

[Enkrateia]

Greetings, EveK!

Thank you for bringing this concern with the customer service provided by the GM team to my attention. I will be personally looking into the report and how it was handled to make sure that our policies were followed and that any investigation that was appropriate was conducted. Since I will not be able to provide further information about this investigation, I will be locking the thread at this time.

LGM Enkrateia