Discussion Regarding the Current Staff

Since HiGuy and Derp have stepped down as moderators of our little community theres been a lot of discussion regarding the current staff team, mostly revolving around re-promoting Kalle to moderator. This thread is meant to be a place where the community can voice their opinions and or concerns about this subject, As well as let us moderators voice our opinions publicly.

The story as I understand it so far (please if I've misunderstood or left something out let me know so I can correct this).
HiGuy, Derpking, and Matan promoted Kalle on June 12th, 2015. Since then he (Kalle) has had a less than happy relationship with the old staff, disagreeing on nearly every decision they've made as a team. In early January 2021 decided to demote Kalle "Due to considerable differences of opinion about how the community should be run". The Old Staff had been increasingly upset about the state of the community as time went on. They had wanted to resign for a long time, and in late January 2021 finally resigned as moderators, promoting Me, and Go'way in their place. Since then I've had extensive discussion with Kalle, the community, and the other staff members about what to do with all this but we failed to come to any definitive decisions.

Thus, in the interest of getting results in a timely manner and with the community's input I have created this thread. Please post information I may've missed, this is meant to be a big overview not a comprehensive recap, or your opinions about this situation around Kalle and re-promoting him to moderator. Please keep this discussion centered around Kalle and how/why he was demoted and why/why not he should be re-promoted to moderator. There will be another thread for discussing everything else the community should do that I will create soon, please save those discussions for that thread.

Please keep everything civil. I look forward to our discussion.

Edit: Fixed typos. Removed misinformation from the summary

That main message was meant to be a brief overview of the topic as a whole I tried to leave my own opinion of the situation out of it. That said here is my opinion on this whole thing.

Kalle should be promoted to moderator again. HiGuy and Derp may've said that they demoted him for "considerable differences of opinion about how the community should be run" but I think they simply didn't like him and demoted him because of that.

A detail I left out of the main post because I'm uncertain of its validity
- Kalle donated to the staff, but I'm uncertain if Kalle did that in order to get staff or if its just coincidence. And I'm uncertain if the Old Staff promoted him because of it, or if again, it was a coincidence. Or maybe I've misunderstood this entirely I'm not sure. I thought it was worth mentioning.

Before I come back later and discuss the actual topic at hand, can I just take the opportunity to kill this long-standing myth that I somehow bought a moderator position?

I donated $100 on the 14th of March in 2015 completely unconditionally; we had no form of agreement, neither official nor informal. This was also several months before I became a moderator (around June 14th the same year). I was promoted because I was active and over 18, not for monetary reasons.

Sorry for misrepresenting what had happened Kalle about ur donation that was not my intent. I just thought it was worth mentioning though now I know the full story I see that it was not. I'll remove it.

I think it’s best to tell you all how this situation arose. I myself truly became active in the community in 2014, though I had lurked on the forums for almost a decade prior to that. Back then the community was less split. Drama had always existed, but we still seemed to have a unified community at the time. I became a moderator in June 2015 after my year of high activity and even before then I had talked a lot to the staff on Skype. Even at this time, with the more lenient style moderation, I was still standing out somewhat among the other moderators by being the most lenient in what I deemed acceptable to post.

And I do think that the style of moderation at this time is why some of us fondly look back at this period of the community. However, a lot did happen that foreshadowed where we were headed. In 2016, we got the “Webchat without mods” discord server, run by noby (who was recently unbanned). This event partly split the community since some didn’t like the complete lack of moderation in the server, so people split off to different servers. In August 2017 we made an official server. It was meant to be a combination of noby’s Webchat without mods and my “The saltmine” since these were the two biggest servers that we used. That’s why in the early days of the server we had some odd channels that might not make sense now.

Now, all of this is already essentially public info. So here I will start to explain some things that went on behind the scenes. hPerks became a moderator at this time due to his help in setting up the new official community server, and already at this point he wanted me demoted. There were several group chats made with both staff and regular members in which hPerks talked about how he wanted me gone. He compiled chatlogs from DMs and noby’s server, consisting mostly of political discussions and hPerks’ annoyance with them, and tried to use it as arguments against my position as moderator. These logs were spread around to the new moderators to try to pit them against me. hPerks hated me on a personal level even before he became moderator and he has been completely incapable of separating that hatred from his role as moderator. And he has also been actively pushing for me to be removed even after his departure from the community as well as pushing for Go’Way to become a new staff member. Derpking has also hated me on a personal level for a long time, which was obvious in the way he talked to me. This made it hard to discuss things in staff chat and I was often simply dismissed or ignored when I tried to bring something up. Instead, staff talk often happened in DMs and in hPerks’ server The O-zone where I couldn’t see what was being said.

Before I continue I will tell you that I did try to reach out to all relevant (previous) staff members and only HiGuy responded. I couldn’t message Matan or Derpking, and hPerks said that he didn’t want to talk.

Now I will say that HiGuy definitely could have done a much better job as community leader, and simply direct other staff members to the staff chat when they had something they wanted to say. However, this was not out of malice, but rather a case of him having to deal with more responsibility than he could handle. I didn’t know it at the time but having to moderate did cause him great amounts of stress.

I will also say that early on in my moderator “career” we did try to have monthly staff meetings, and were successful for a while. A staff meeting, to put it simply, consisted of discussing what had happened during the past month, voting on issues, and talking about what to do going forward. When I was demoted, we hadn’t had a staff meeting in years.

And this also touches on another topic, the fact that most of the staff already wanted to leave. Matan had wanted to leave since at least 2016. So not only were there internal conflicts within the staff team, but several of them didn’t really want anything to do with the community in general.

I myself knew I was on thin ice for years and therefore didn’t try to push too hard when I disagreed with decisions (which was most of the time). But when it came to Yoshi’s ban I definitely did give some pushback, and I even gave pointers for how to deal with the situation better. I intended to make a big post in the staff channel for how to deal with bans in the future to make the community less upset when it happens, but I was demoted before I could do that. To give some context here, when Yoshi was banned, HiGuy, Derpking, and Matan were all in support of banning him, DKman and I were not. All three of the staff who were in support of the ban outright said that they’d ignore the community when people were starting to get upset. I pointed out that the situation could have been handled much better, to which Derpking said that the community would have reacted in the same way regardless of how we as staff had acted, which is completely untrue.

The tension among staff members became even worse. Matan had a long conversation with Azful in which he explained that he was upset that he never got invited to breakout servers. As I was informed that he felt this way I sent him an invitation, which he instantly rejected due to Nockess being present in the server. And due to poor communication, a lot of misinformation got spread here. To the other staff members, this looked like I was pulling the community to a different server that I had made. In reality I had not made the server, and the only person I invited was Matan. So this very tense period got even worse by this, and it sort of was the straw that broke the camel’s back – especially considering how much Matan disliked Yoshi and seeing me defend him.

And since I have now touched upon the topic of breakout servers, I just want to quickly say that the fact that several breakout servers exist shows some level of unhappiness with the way the community is run. And I absolutely do think that it’s the job of the moderators to talk to the community about what the people want. A moderator should essentially be a servant of the community, not be seen as a type of nobility with special privileges. Talking to people publicly about how to go forward rather than making decisions completely in a private chat (which has happened several times) should be the standard.

Now this is also largely public knowledge, but I was not in any way made aware of my demotion until after it had happened. I found out by seeing that I no longer had access to the staff chat, only to shortly thereafter get a DM from HiGuy in which he explained that I was demoted for disagreeing too much. While this might be true, we must also understand that a big part (all?) of the personal hatred towards me is because of political views. And it has always been worrying to me how it seemed like other moderators were unable to separate political disagreements from moderating the community.

I will also say that the community needs a clear leader. The current state of the mods shows this. Two of the three moderators are very passive and don’t really take an initiative in anything. The staff should be leaders and be on top of issues as they arise rather than shy away from them. And having a single leader with other co-mods would also remove a lot of the bystander effect, i.e. mods waiting for other mods to act while they don’t want to do anything themselves.

All in all, I will say that I am glad we don’t have to deal with the corrupt nature of the old team, nor the malice of hPerks and Derpking. I don’t think HiGuy or Matan ever wished harm like the two former did, but they were not cut out for the position.

Everyone's added so much more detail than I thought there would be. I've obviously left a lot out of my initial post but I didn't think I was capable of giving an accurate, and comprehensive overview of the situation like Kalle did. So I opted to make a brief summary. This issue obviously goes much further than it just being about Kalle. There needs to be some big structural changes to how things are run around here and I don't really know what to do about it, but I think Kalle does. At least he would know better than I what to do, so I would welcome him back to the staff team to help us figure it out, with the community's help of course.

Just voicing your opinions on how things can/should be different. We'll figure that out after we make a decision on Kalle.

I don't really have much to say other than I'm fine with reinstating Kalle.

Would you want to bring them back?

Absolutely, they are a great tool to improve the community. One of the things I disagreed most with the old team on is that I always wanted to listen more to the community than they did. To me it's quite an obvious thing to do since it makes the community happy and it puts less pressure on the staff team to come up with improvements on their own.

I know it's probably not worth it, but let me know if you want to elaborate on what you disagreed with the staff about. It would give more insight into the vague "disagreements" reason that HiGuy gave for demoting you.

As stated above we disagreed a lot on how much we should listen to the community. We also disagreed on transparency and banning. The other staff members (Matan, HiGuy, Derp) would semi-frequently joke about banning people and almost made it into a game when it came top the banning of Yoshi. It was extremely unprofessional and they were laughing about it in staff chat. There was also a problem with the staff simply not listening to people when they were told that their methods didn't work. Yoshi himself didn't think it was too clear that he was about to get banned but the other mods simply didn't listen and just said that they had "Dm'd him before". I offered to talk to him myself to make the situation clear but they didn't want that, i.e. they were looking for a ban.

And since Go'way hasn't responded I will assume he doesn't have any differing opinion. He's free to correct me if this is wrong, but the thread has been up for a while so I think it's time to move forward and right this wrong as soon as possible.