The day someone crosses the line

Someone has posted your address, or is sending things to your house, or has turned up somewhere you are, or is messaging you in a way that has stopped being uncomfortable and started being frightening.

You will not be thinking clearly. That is what this chapter is for: a short list you can follow when your judgement is not available.

The first hour

1. Stop streaming. Not permanently. Now. End the stream, do not explain at length, do not read the chat.
2. Do not respond to them. Any response, including an angry one, establishes that contact works. This is the single most important item on this list.
3. Screenshot everything, with context. Full screen, showing the username, the timestamp and the URL. Not cropped. Save it somewhere outside the platform — a folder on your own machine — because accounts get deleted and messages get edited.
4. Do not post about it. Not a callout, not a vague-post, not a "some people are horrible today". Publicly reacting tells them it landed, and it invites your audience to investigate, which produces chaos and sometimes harasses the wrong person.
5. Tell one person. A mod, a friend, someone who is not in it. You should not be handling this alone, and the sequence of events is much clearer to someone whose hands are not shaking.

The lockdown pass

Once the immediate moment is over:

• Report and block, in that order. Blocking first can hide the evidence you need for the report.
• Tighten every chat setting. Followers-only with a delay, subscribers-only if it is bad, slow mode. Say nothing about why.
• Hand your mods explicit authority to ban on sight, without checking with you.
• Check your recent VODs and clips for whatever they used to find what they found. If it was a reflection or a window, delete those VODs.
• Change passwords and turn on two-factor everywhere, if there is any chance of account compromise. Email first — email is the key to everything else.

When it is physical

If someone has your address, has sent something to your home, or has appeared in person, the category has changed and the response changes with it.

• Contact the police. Yes, even though you expect them not to understand. Even a report that goes nowhere creates a record with a date on it, and a documented pattern is what makes later action possible.
• Bring your evidence, printed, in order, with dates. It makes an enormous difference to how the report is handled.
• Tell someone physically near you. A flatmate, a neighbour, family.
• Do not confront them and do not investigate them. It is satisfying and it escalates. Identifying them yourself also contaminates what the police can use.
• Consider not being at home for a few days if you are frightened. That is a reasonable, proportionate thing to do, not an overreaction.

Platform reports that actually work

• Be factual and short. Dates, usernames, links, what happened. No narrative, no anger, no history of how they were always awful.
• Cite the specific rule if you can name it. Reports that map to a rule are processed faster.
• One report per incident, not one per feeling.
• Ask your mods to report too if the platform weighs volume, but do not mobilise your audience to mass-report. It backfires, and it can get you actioned.

Afterwards

• Come back when you want to, not on a schedule. Your channel will survive a week off. Say something brief and neutral: "took a few days, back now, thanks for being patient."
• Do not tell the story on stream. Not the details, not the timeline. The audience that wants to help cannot, and the person involved is often still watching.
• Talk to someone properly. This is genuinely distressing, and treating it as an occupational hazard you should shrug off is how it stays with you for years.
• Change one structural thing, not everything: the VOD policy, the chat settings, the address on a domain.

The part worth holding on to

This happens to a lot of people who stream, and it is not a sign that you did something wrong or were careless. The preparation in this path is not because you are at fault — it is so that if it happens, you spend the evening executing a list instead of improvising while frightened.

Next: the everyday version of the same subject — parasocial closeness, from your side of it.