Re: a small concern about the public record of disciplinary action
Methinks this'll be the last post from me on here and I hope people will read this in its entirety for a little clarification and a little history lesson on how things got to where they are. But first, @Mayana, post 92, wow! That was a roasting scorcher of a post! I'm seriously glad I'm not on the receiving end of it. That would honestly hurt my feelings pretty bad.
As for Dark coming back as a mod? It'll never happen. He doesn't want to moderate this forum anymore. In the event that noone noticed, right before things went downhill in 18, he had started taking these er, vacations of sorts. He always tried to let us know when he was vanishing; I don't know if I can think of a particular time when he didn't. What I do know is that almost every time he came back, he was babysitting some moderation decision that needed to be made. Dark will tell you that this forum has not changed and that this kind of behavior has been seen over and over again throughout the years here and there, but I don't personally believe he fully believes that to be true, because of something else he said, which is that he no longer wanted to put up with the kind of behavior that was being displayed out here and that when he had originally taken up the moderation position he had never invisioned it coming to this. In having said that he is in fact suggesting that things are, at the very least, not as they were when he originally signed up for the job. Dark's love on this site has always been writing and helping instruct with that writing. That is why he put so much heart into the database and the news articles. He thought he could somewhat use that writing to his advantage as a moderator, and it worked for a time.
Then, this happened. I hated that article with a passion, not because it stated a fair amount of truth; truth is something I can accept and live with in order to be stronger. No, what I hated about that article is the way that truth was presented, twisted and manipulated to try and smash a whole moderation panel to bits; even the title was suggestive but most everyone glossed over it and skipped it because *gasp* the moderation panel is being exposed ofhorrible dirty secrets! Lets see what kind of dirt this guy dug up that we don't already know about!
And it worked. Before Aprone started pushing for Dark's resignation Dark had already decided he was going to step down. The thing is that Aprone didn't want him to overlook one thing, and only one thing, and get away with it. Regardless how many other decisions Dark had made that were questionable, how many of them simply looked like petty disagreements, how many of them looked like he was taking things on a more personal level, and regardless of how many good and great decisions he made in the longrun, He never should have embarked upon this moderation decision more or less on his own. One person was unfairly tried and found guilty of something that did not exactly happen on this forum and we had no true evidence to be convinced of the fact. It came down to one person, a female and friend of the chief mod at the time, being believed over another person, male and less capable of writing a proper defense for himself... I'm not really sure on the why since I don't know Walter, but his spelling, or at least what I saw of it, was not all there. For that reason and that reason alone, Wlater became known, for all intents and purposes, as a virtual sex offender
Now, we could have let things be the way they were. We could have done business as usual. We could have gone along with Dark just being the news poster and db writer and everything else he had practically already agreed to doing. Everyone who was a mod, while not exactly always remaining in contact did do their best to analyze situations and stick up for one another based on evidence. That's the problem; there was practically no evidence to support that Dark had not made this decision far too hastily. Why did I write out my investigative piece of sorts? We can argue back and forth about how what's done is done and no going back is going to change it. What we cannot argue against, is that the sad fact is that one thing the article got right, was that there had been a lack of transparency on how that decision, at the very least, had been made.
When I was reading the article, I wondered if it was at all possible that Aprone was condoning the article in an atempt to shake up the mod panel. The fact is that the further I dug in that direction, the less convinced I was that such a thing had happened. Again, while it could be argued that he might have had motive to do so because it seems that for some reason or another he took the heat for a lot of what went down in this particular moderation decision, it can also be argued that trying to undermine a site he chose to help out is, pretty counterproductive. Whatever else you may think of Aprone, that is not a label you can stick on him.
What actually happened is that Aprone came across a ton of information concerning this very subject and there was at least one person who was seriously convinced that he had not shared it with the rest of the moderation panel. The fact is that he did share it. That information was no secret to any of us. The information, however, did not get acted upon. While I cannot speak for everyone in the panel, I know that I, myself, trusted that Dark was handling the situation as best he knew how. You could even go so far as to say that I took it for granted that it was his responsibility to do so. For my part, at the time all of the information came to me I had just been reinstated as a mod and the best I could come up with was that whichever way we swung the club someone was more than likely going to have their feathers ruffled. It was 2016, I was still moving my family into a new house, trying to recover from a flood and thousands of dollars in damages and so on. Aprone writes up one or two emails about it with a ton of information and everyone forgets the situation and moves on.
So that when this article came to existence it did so in an unexpectedly violent fashion, spurring some 20 posts in a short amount of time. The overall outcry seemed to be that something needed to be done, and done quickly. By the time Dark came back, he had had enough. This was the article that cemented it for him and nailed the coffin shut, and the way the majority reacted in that topic only helped keep it shut. It was clear a fair amount of people wanted Dark to step down, so he did. for some that would have been good enough. for others, there was a need to punish both him and Lori in order for some semblance of justice to be felt, so allowing Dark to step down still felt like something that was a privillege rather than a punishment.
My angle was simple... I would lend truth to as much of the situation as I could, for better or worse. to this day I still hold that if Smoke had come to me first I would have practically written his article for him thus legitimizing it further, letting him take the credit. He obviously never trusted me for God only knows what reason since I neither know him nor had ever knowingly spoken to him... I still have a nagging suspicion that he holds a grudge against this forum, though what it may actually be is beyond me. What I do know is that this article was the turningpoint. It dismantled the mod panel, allowed people to question any decision they felt was a personal attack, throw down the gauntlet when things were turning against them and pushed forward the concept of disagreements translating to personal attacks.
so there you have it; a ghuy writes an article and claims it's not meant to be taken as an attack. The problem is that even when being factual, the article is subjective and showcases a clear bias against at least one person. The author in question says that he has managed to separate himself from the whole mess, but had he bothered to take his writing seriously, he would have truly done his best to approach the whole panel collectively. He did not. I can honestly, factually, truthfully, with all integrity and no question say that I was not approached and, I reiterate, had I been I would have come forward with any evidence of my own for the sake of transparency. This article did what it meant to do. It punished a site and the consequences are stil reverberating through the halls of our minds. No amount of transparency is good enough anymore, but that's ok if you can present yourself as the silent minority because to question that silent minority any further is to silence it further and assume the role of a dictator. That's what Jayde is to these few who disagree with him, and it's what Dark was before him. No, what Dark did was not a good, let alone great thing, where Walter and Lori were concerned, but it just gave everyone who already had a burning resentment toward him more fuel to burn.
The difference here is that Jayde is hardly calling himself head of or chefi of anything. That he is currently making a ton of decisions is happening owing to him being more active than the rest of the mods... I say happening since we have only recently received two new mods and we'll have to see how this ends up playing out. Jayde came im during one of the most chaotic seasons this forum has ever had to try and moderate it as best he knew how, not really knowing how because he'd never done it before. He made mistakes. He has not been allowed to recover from them, because those who truly, already didn't like him never gave him that opportunity. Deathstar has always been one of his greatest detractors if not the greatest, perhaps second only to Simter. They claim that there are otheres who are too afraid to speak out for themselves on this forum. Funnily enough, when the bsg article was released, the perceived minority quickly found that they were the great majority and they managed to trash a team.
In conclusion, I ask you, are you holding back? Are you sitting around on your hands basically talking smack behind Jayde's back? Are you in fact against him for everything he's tried to do on this forum? Because if you are and you have reason to be, you're doing the rest of this community a disservice by remaining silent on the matter. If you are remaining silent because your place on this forum is more important to you than making sure this community has mods that really make a difference, you're just as bad as any mod you claim is a liar and who is not being transparent enough. but if you're going to speak out? Make sure you do it with a reason, because saying that Jayde is trying to hide things without pointing out what he's hiding, or saying that he's just blowing up at people because he wants to without being able to point out the where and the when is simply sitring things up because you think you can get away with it. Let this serve as a reminder that good will in the end, always prevail, so whatever intent you have will show up eventually. Right now though? I side with Jayde; the guy is practically a lone general with a select few warriors standing solidly behind him. If Deathstar is to be believed, there's an opposing army of goodness only knows how many, who agree with her and Simter, but they do so in silence. In my mind, that just conjurs up the immage of what happened with the Smoke article, because that's how I remember that situation playing out. In the fight for god, it has been said that there are thousands hacking at the branches of evil, while one bravely strikes at its roots. In my mind, Jayde takes that character, because he could have just as easily lost is patience a long time ago, just like post 92 points out, and people could be getting banned for much less than is currently going on. You got rid of a moderation panel already; do you seriously have to undo another?
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