The Realms Question
As first wave of global bans rolled over Minecraft community, many people initially assumed that Mojang finally started actioning chat reports (until that point there was no evidence of it happening). There were, however, some commonalities in all known ban cases: subjects of the ban were almost exclusively playing on Realms in the days preceeding the ban, and from their own testimonies - it was highly unlikely that anyone would have reported them. Some examples include:
- (Reddit) Suspended from playing Minecraft for swearing in my own realms
- (Reddit) Minecraft censoring
Moreover, Mojang released an article titled "Our Commitment to Player Safety", wherein Proactive Moderation section states the following:
For Bedrock and Java Realms as well as partnered Bedrock servers, we leverage an automated proactive chat filtering system.
We use it to classify, filter, and escalate online harms for human review and moderation to promote safe and welcoming interactions on Minecraft games. That includes behaviors such as harassment, abuse, and hate speech.
As such, it became known to us that all Realms chats are actively monitored in an automated manner, and being reported is not necessarily required to end up banned.
It's important to understand that our means to combat chat monitoring and reporting within Realms are incredibly limited. Even if realm owner could somehow disable enforce-secure-profile on their realm to allow exchanging unsigned messages - it would matter not, as all messages are processed and logged by server which Mojang own and can therefore trust.
To add insult to the injury - it is already evident that "Community Guidelines" are enforced with no respect to context of the conversation or consensus between participants. This is the exact kind of enforcement that many feared when chat reporting was announced, and seeing it confirmed further justifies putting as tall of a fence between yourself and Mojang moderation as possible.
If you absolutely must play on Realms for whatever reason, you can leverage No Chat Report's chat encryption as means of protecting yourself against monitoring and reporting. See To Encrypt or Not To Encrypt - Realms.
However, the best possible solution is to abandon Realms altogether, in favor of using more conventional hosting services that give you full control over your server.
...speaking of conventional hosting services. In case you don't know which one to use - I can personally suggest BisectHosting:
