NOTE: I will not submit this blog to be featured, but I nonetheless believe that this needs to be in the public's eye.
Let this live on as an old man's rant against the world he lives in.

Hello, hello! I write this in the wake of an incident involving a certain dark pigment. I would appreciate if you would lend your time to listen to my thoughts on the matter.

I personally disagree with how the moderation team handled the situation. Giving everyone a temporary ban, although rather light in terms of punishment, was completely uncalled for.

Let me set the scene as I remember it. A few days prior, the owner of the group decided to drastically renovate the look of the shoutbox. Admittedly, it was groundbreaking, and the idea was completely original. I, myself, liked the novel concept. Make a shoutbox look like a chatroom and manipulate each user's username.

There was a little ripple in the moderation side when we realized there were certain consequences that could result from such a group design, so we asked lightly if the changes could be reversed, to no avail.

But mere hours ago from teh publishing of this blog, one of our moderators (who I will not name, for fear of retribution) logged on to realize that this issue had not been resolved. As a result, they took swift action, against my objections, to ban all active members of the group. Very little forewarning was given, and action was swift.

With such an event, it is exceedingly difficult to pin the blame on any one actor. However, I would believe that the blame would have to lie more on the party who pulled the trigger.

Indeed, there is fault for the party who was in charge of the group. THey resisted compliance with requests from first low-level moderators, then Overlords, who are essentially the top of the org chart on Paint. This entire fiasco could have been avoided had the group owner relented and reversed the changes they made to the group.

However, I believe the moderation team is more at fault due to the unnecessarily resolute and divisive action that was decided and enacted. This was only condoned with the lack of well-established communication channels. Although some (or most) of the discussions happened off-site, I was only on-site. Thus arose miscommunication. The choice of punishment was not a team effort, either. Even though such bans can be walked back, doing so would cause a loss of strength of such a ban. The choice was also enacted against the wishes of a couple members, including myself. Although only I spoke up during the situation, others later supported my view as well, so an apparent 50/50 split during the fiasco was not true.

This entire incident, I believe, also draws out partifular shortcomings as a moderation team. I am sure that we would benefit from more shared, common values as well as thorough discussion before any irrevokable action is taken. "Measure twice, cut once," as they say.

The demeanor that the moderator that enacted the bans displayed after the fact is also very disturbing for me. It echoes the same utter lack of remorse that some poorly trained police officers display after making an error. That same nonchalantness makes me question whether we are well-prepared for any situation of equal magnitude.

Now, I seriously questioned my role on this team. After all, I was given the ability to ban by the most active Overlord on the site to quickly eliminate any possible alternate accounts of a previous devilish member. I'm sure that any veterans of the site would remember. However, she stopped turning up sometime this year, so I still have this power, hanging by a thread. Should I still have a place on the MODERATION portion of this site, I wonder.

I personally prefer the niche of staying away from the drama of this site and having to deal with poorly behaving members and rashly acting moderators. Although I pride myself in my ability to mediate (at times, at least), it is always a pain to conduct. Simply looking at the garbage code that Hull wrote a decade ago and fixing it up is much preferrable to interacting with humans.

Still, I believe that I would have to balance out some of the shortcomings of the moderation team. Although my powers are very much limited, I still would want to make sure all jobs are fulfilled to the best of my ability.

I could easily just recuse myself from nay such events, but then what good would be my chatmod power?

Furthermore, it was discussed off-site that this site will not last for much longer. It is simply burning too large a hole into Hull's wallet. At that point, there will still be some people using the site. What can they do? I know of at least one person who cannot do any better than this site.

I do have one final ace up my sleeve: rewrite this entire website from the ground up so that it is more modern, and it can be easily maintained. I hope it does not come to this, but by doing so, I hope to give this site a fresh new start and a completely new life.

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Grammar and spelling may be off since I don't want to run this through Gammarly.
Comments may be disabled if they become unnecessarily roudy.