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Open Call for Board Member and Moderator Candidates [Until Friday, March 28th, 2025]
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I would direct you to my response
For candidate Jeffe. The rest of the board candidates we find out and get to vote on in 12 hours.
Yeah, to be clear, I am specifically not signing up to be mod. That is a whole different kettle of sharks, and I think having sober discussions with a small group of peers would be a very different beast from actively moderating.
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
Honestly after this thread I'd really struggle with the decision to be active on the new forum, which is not something that has been in question until now
I didn't have a strong take on Jeffe before this but it would significantly shake my confidence in moderator selection and overall caretaking of the forum
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so you're seeking a position with even more influence than a mod?
I definitely agree with this, what the precise decision tree that led to this... weird state with perms being retained but other indicators not is something I'd definitely want examined in more detail-- that shouldn't happen and I hope to fuck it doesn't happen in CoRe in whatever incarnation it takes and whether or not I take part in it. It's a pretty fucked state.
I suppose our point of disagreement is where the onus on fixing that lies.
let your surrogates help you out, dude
Sorry, that's embarrassing. I went and looked. A board position seems to be about the same level of responsibility, if not maybe even more than, a mod. Suffice to say, I wouldn't vote for someone who's needed multiple mental health breaks from their forum position already, mostly because if that's true I think they are setting themselves up to be once again stressed and need to step down, which means they'd have to be replaced in the interim. And maybe they have an expectation they would be reinstated like the old days? Idk I'm not them
But to say the least, your response doesn't materially address that Jeffe has been afforded special treatment while also denying others similar such kindnesses
Regardless of everything else, I think it is pretty unfair to hold someone needing a mental health break from a previous position against them, honestly.
Insane Clown Fiesta is the name of my Insane Clown Posse tribute band
Especially moderation. Dealing with people is exhausting
It's a forum volunteer position. There's nothing wrong with needing a break, but me hearing "this dude has been consistently stressed out by forum duties" and then me saying well whatever and voting for them anyways is like almost enabling self harm. I've had to step away from the forums multiple times now for similar reasons, and I wouldn't nominate myself for any leadership position because I simply know that when I inevitably need a break, I'll be not just inconveniencing other board members or whoever, but I'll also feel bad knowing I let down all the people who voted for me knowing I simply can't do what they all said they believed I could do
Sorry that's weirdly meta because in these situations easier to relate it to myself, the major difference being I both have no desire for any such role and also, I know I would be quite bad at it
I think more people if they reflected on themselves and their actions might come to the same conclusions
Now that I know he won't keep his nose out of stuff it doesn't need to be in, I would have very strong reservations about maintaining my account on CoRe.
This thread has unfortunately given me a list of such names.
It is remarkable to paint yourself as the victim of a massive conspiracy to inflict coercion.
The so-called penalty here is that, in the run up to an election for a position of public authority and trust, your own recent breach of trust has been explained to the voters.
Anyone with an ounce of shame would have simply withdrawn.
Re bolded : please learn from what happened today and don't use that information to bludgeon people not to run again.
Being civil but wrong is a hallmark of some echelons of the forum.
This thread is an excellent use case of people baiting reactions that we are supposed to be look upon more harshly.
None of that happening lessens Jeffe's breach of conduct, and to be frank, the administration's allowing of it. The choice to revert Jeffe to a regular user with access to the moderator forums was an active choice to have been made, in direct contravention to how it was publicly being presented. We know this because he has now been stripped of that privilege. The constant caginess at every turn has been tiring, particularly when reservations continue to be proved justified.
It was made clear, in words he himself used that I quoted earlier that he had no interest in being involved with moderation. This was on the tail end of a long history of problematic modding where he at times leapt into other parts of the forum outside of his own purview to infract people along with creating a toxic culture of bullying, piling on and to be charitable, dismissal of concerns of minority forumers.
People's reticience about him having a mod badge after he was no longer a mod was informed by this. We were told don't worry, he isn't a mod any longer but we can't unmod him or the shaky pillars holding up the forums will collapse. The mod forums are simply being used as a social space
Then it turned out, no, actually, not a problem demodding people. He has a special retired badge now.
Then eventually he was demodded, was just a regular user. Has a regular user profile.
Except we have come to learn that he's not just just doing that, he's interceding, litigating and cajoling mods on disciplinary and moderation actions. This continued duplicitousness is why I'm still surprised that the option to keep Jeffe's actions on the downlow was even entertained.
To be frank, for many of you I don't believe there is any level of evidence you would accept and it is not lost on me that you in the past have shown that you will not believe your own lying eyes at times when your ego or interests lie in the other direction.
I only agree with this in the sense that whoever decided Jeffe should be a secret mod should probably be made public now to save us all the time and to be transparent since it seems exceedingly clear that information will come out.
I’m sure absolutely none of them have ever said or done anything that might be considered objectionable at some point…
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-do-I-create-a-server
I would hope that everyone is running in good faith but I would also hope that if anyone else has been secretly reading and commenting on posts in the report forum then yeah, I truly would like to know who else has been violating our privacy
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The admins seemed to have wanted him in the mod forums. Having someone you trust to help in a role they've been volunteering in for decades makes sense. It's a good way to get help without them having to be responsible for handing out infractions and warnings or taking the brunt of their complaints.
I mean honestly, I expect some of that may come up! That is unfortunately part of the nature of this process, and I wouldn't be surprised if we have people bringing up past faults of the candidates for the board.
I would hope that each instance there doesn't turn into... what this turned into, but I think it's a messy bit that we are going to have to be prepared to potentially deal with.
Creating the appearance that he is a non-mod user without making some kind of public articulation of how his technical permissions differ from most users is a deception.
Yeah, they fucked up too
We've clearly got a lot to address here, so please forgive me if this goes long. I'd have written something shorter if I had more time, etc. Some of this may be inconsequential by the time I get to post it because this thread is moving faster than I can even keep up with, but here goes.
I should start off by saying something that some of you might have picked up on about me: I read everything. I've read every single post in every thread on the planning forum. I've read every post in the various forum reckoning threads from a year+ ago. I read every single message in several forum discords. I read every forum and discord DM I get. Many of the other folks involved in the transition and forum planning are similar, but hopefully they give themselves more of a break than I do.
So, when I get hit up by half a dozen people in DMs and see another couple of dozen more begin to spiral with outrage in discord because they've learned something that they see as a breach of their trust in the forum moderation has been going on, I take them seriously. Just like I've taken every other person who has approached me with a serious concern about the forums, current or future. Doesn't matter whether I personally think Jeffe exhibited poor judgment or crossed a line to abuse his privileges. A lot of people felt that way, so we took up the discussion about it. Specifically, the chief complaint was that Jeffe's status on the forum was shown as "Regular User", not "Mod" or "Retired Mod", and so the assumption was that he had "Regular User" access only. It was pertinent because we were starting to work through related things in the Governance committee -- things like board member misconduct, what constitutes "good standing", malfeasance, abuse of authority, etc. Part of our job is to build our the guardrails to protect the community from all of those things.
After a lot of discussion (this went on for weeks, on and off, because we didn't want to rush this) and a lot of differing opinions on how to handle it, we (the interim Board, the Governance Committee, and a couple of the PA mods who could help to confirm and deny the facts of the issue) landed on what felt like the most reasonable solution.
Despite some sides arguing for it, we decided that it would be unjust to bar Jeffe from running for a board seat for two main reasons:
With that in mind, we tried to settle on the best course of action. This information was out there already, and we were (or at least I know I was) being asked every few days by someone or other if we had decided how to "handle it", with the clear implication that people were pissed and would absolutely make it a thing if it wasn't addressed. The complicating factor is that Jeffe had opted to run for a board seat. It'd be naive to think that if his name showed up on the ballot that none of these perturbed folks would make it a point to air all of the hearsay they've come across about the issue publicly.
We decided to leave it up to Jeffe. I'm disappointed it was taken as "blackmail" because I don't see it as anything of the sort, and to be clear, despite what I've seen implied or inferred, we had no plans to spring any of this on the community as an unprompted warning to try to tank his chances. It was painfully obvious that this situation was going to be brought up by others within minutes of the ballot going live, and we'd be obligated to be honest in explaining the situation as we knew the facts, and it doesn't take a genius to predict exactly what a mess that's going to turn into (has now turned into). The alternative we offered is that if Jeffe preferred, he could not run and all of this no longer matters because the real crux of the problem was the idea of someone who had betrayed people's trust running for a position of authority on CoRe. We'd still address the fact that access to reports had been allowed to non-mods on PA, but that we were closing that loophole on CoRe. And this would be done in the appropriate thread about these policies and there'd be no reason to dig into naming names and pointing fingers over who had access because it's in the past, and we're simply ensuring it never happens again.
You can take issue with the wording or presentation, that's fair. I drafted the message and had the other board members look it over to ensure the intent was clear. We thought it was. If it was more muddled than we intended, I can only really say that this was a delicate, messy situation and I'm not entirely sure there would be a perfect way to tell someone that they're walking into a shit storm and offer them a way to mitigate it. I fully understand that there's probably no scenario where that's a fun message to receive. But this was my attempt to be as neutral and direct as possible, lay out both paths that we saw clearly, and leave the ultimate decision up to Jeffe.
Now, in a few hours, it's up to the community.
As always, I'm available for any questions, but please tag me because I'm still catching up on this thread and other messages.
Sure but what happened is Jeffe said he wasn't gonna be a mod anymore, said he didn't want to moderate anymore, and then kept on reading Reports and commenting on them.
Echo also was gonna step down as Mod. Then the Shutdown announcement came, and echo walked it back and said he would stay on through the transition.
Which is entirely reasonable
buuuuut the way it was handled wasn't great to say the least
Probably good to totp this
And uhh, some of the mods want to get some sleep, so we're gonna shut it down for a bit
I'll unlock it in the morning if nobody else beats me to it
Geth, lock the thread