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Board of Directors Election Results - 2025
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Posts
Boardy McBoardface would have won by a landslide.
They wouldn’t let me put joke option Larlar I’m sorry
I will say that I don't disagree with you. I have a very big task in my shoulders and I am very happy to be able to laser focus my efforts on the needs of the people who often have the quietest voices in the room. That will necessarily mean doing my best to listen and put in a lot of work. Anyone who wants to reach out is always welcome there too. I won't promise to always agree, but I will promise to always put your concerns in the best light I can.
I think you are right we need to work to restore faith on a lot of levels. The board selection itself fills me with joy. We have a lot of people who could have qualified for the DEIA position who went through a much more harrowing experience than I have to get there. We have a lot of valuable voices. It looks like we will have a majority queer board, and a barely minority femme presenting board. I am so encouraged by that! I think it is a great statement of intent about where the forums want us to go even if I think we have a lot more work to do to get there than others.
That said I will also be trying to go out to whatever Discords/IRCs/Signal or whatever else will have me as well to make it as easy as possible to direct concerns, and have a conversation with me in the safest space possible for the person. It will be a lot of work on my end but I volunteered for it. I want to do it. I want to make this place better. So please tell me what I can do and I will listen to the best of my ability.
Anyways, this is a democratic process and frankly the response in this thread is pretty messed up. You may not like the results, but as has been said multiple times before, most people on the forums have NO IDEA anything has happened or that these conversations about specific people are an issue for some folks. It's wild to me people will say things like FUCK THIS ENTIRE GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO VOTED THIS WAY, again, most people have NO IDEA.
Congrats to all the winners, I'm hoping for some good leadership at CoRe.
kinda weird you'd take issue with people's response to this process immediately after a snarky, sarcastic, shit-stirring drive-by response to part of this process that you apparently didn't like
sure but I'm actually involved and know about it, you'll note I didn't have any issues with the election itself but on a personal level i think a specific mod/admin decision is wrong so I'm being snarky about it
edit - also my snarky comment has nothing to do with this process so..?
Okay.
I keep seeing people allude to this, in the QA threads and elsewhere, always very carefully not naming names or saying anything that actually sheds any light, and I still have no idea what the fuck y'all are talking about.
For the record: I didn't vote for ElJeffe, but that's purely because I could see from the QA threads how strongly people feel about them (can't find explicitly stated pronouns right now; erring on the side of ambiguity). I know about the mod forum thing, but obviously there's history there and a lot of people are assuming everyone knows what it is when that is very much not the case.
(@syndalis, I quoted you because of your concise phrasing bolded above, not for any other particular reason
I'm active in (parts of) D&D and (parts of) SE++ and the biggest difference I see is tone.
Which means I must not be in the right threads to see/grasp the vitriol. (Which makes sense, because I don't like to spend time in threads where people are yelling at each other. Not my circus, etc.)
Which probably describes a huge majority of posters on the forums, both those who voted for ElJeffe and those who didn't. Which makes it extra obnoxious when people act like everyone 1) knew the things they're vaguely alluding to and 2) deliberately picked the wrong side. Whatever that is.
edit: removed batsignals, sorry everyone
Honestly I don't know either, what I gather is that maybe some of us straight/white posters don't always understand the ways in which we can be unintentionally hurtful to marginalized people. So we might think we're asking a perfectly innocuous question or making a very reasonable, in-bounds comment, but we aren't aware of the hurt we're causing. We do this enough times and the other party flips out and gets themselves banned, and we don't realize what we've done.
There appear to be some smaller issues like I think people feel strongly about retaining the SE++ style of a random board with topical megathreads, but I think this is the biggest issue.
People have not been vague about it at all. These threads have moved fast so I understand if you missed things but there have been extensive discussions about this
It is difficult to summarize everything but if I was going to boil it down:
-the mod forum thing. This matters more to some people than others; it matters to me! He lied to us and others lied to us on his behalf. I don't know why anyone would trust him with anything at all after that.
-lanz posted a very long and detailed accounting of how, in her view, jeffe targeted her and harassed her for years under the cover of just enforcing the rules. Maybe you believe her, maybe you don't (I do), but the charge being levied against him is in essence that he will find a way to abuse whatever authority he is granted and will launder it under just being an aw shucks just trying to do my best I'm kinda the forum dad shtick
-more generally, many, many people have talked about how they feel dnd has fostered a toxic culture, where bad faith actors and assholes can run roughsgod over people as long as they use the right tone/hold the right opinions/are friends with the right people. There have been at least a half dozen threads hashing this out, I couldn't possibly sum it all up here, but as one example of the kind of toxicity dnd is accused of fostering, look back at when a bunch of dnd regulars argued very hard against a rule about treating others with empathy and dignity and respecting their lived experiences. Jeffe is not solely responsible for this, however, as a very active and very long-running dnd mod, people who assert that dnd is toxic put a significant portion of the blame on him for not doing a better job moderating it.
You can agree with those assessments or not but that is the long and short of it
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Is that what people mean when they say minorities get bullied off the forums?
I've said some unintentionally hurtful things, and the people who were hurt pointed that out to me - like adults - and I apologized, and we all moved on, as far as I could tell.
I can and will take responsibility for hurting people, but only if I know I've done it. I do not think this is unreasonable.
(edit: I know it's not about me; I'm just using my own experience as an example because that's what I've got)
then perhaps we should listen to them instead of elevating their abusers.
alas.
I'm willing to maybe grant you an element of "aw shucks I'm just a well-meaning straight white cis guy, I didn't mean no harm" if you're willing to grant there's also an element of "I know exactly what I'm doing and when called on it I'm going to hide behind the evergreen 'aw shucks' defense"
like it's undeniable that there are people on this forum who weaponize their privilege specifically to target and push away already marginalized folks
we're specifically upset about a person who was in a position of power and did not take responsibility for hurting people, over and over, despite them being told how they were hurting people, over and over
like, that's kind of the crux of the whole thing
I don't disupte this. I usually check out of political threads when they turn angry so I can't speak to any of it personally. I'm trying to say that if you haven't been educated on equity issues there are a lot of ways to get it wrong.
you're not wrong in a vacuum but we're all adults here, none of us are rowdy teens who just don't have the life experience to know what the issues at play are. the longer you've (royal you) been around any part of these forums the harder it is for me to believe that you just aren't aware these issues exist. at some point it's also your responsibility to be pro-active and take at least a couple steps into the world outside yourself
The bit here about having empathy and respecting lived experiences is kind of funny, because you're not doing that *at all* in this post. Specifically, you're ignoring why some of us had concerns about that rule to pretend we're all toxic assholes. Here's a quote of one of the posts talking about the *actual* concern a lot of us had:
http://www.audioentropy.com/
So are you just going to keep talking past Lanz' documented history of being abused and harassed by Jeffe while you cherry pick examples that support your completely disingenuous argument?
Because seriously, it's cited right there in the post Speed made that you're chastising him for while conveniently talking past the available evidence that Jeffe engaged in abusive behavior against a community member he disliked, among all of the other patently disqualifying actions he took.
Then again, I can see how tacitly acknowledging that you're defending a known harasser and abuser would be devastating to your attempt to grasp at straws to disregard the credible record of his victim.
Here's that famous SE empathy and respect folks! If a post misrepresents you and *also* mentions ElJeffe, you aren't allowed to respond the part of it that misrepresents you.
It gets a bit complex.
Say you vote, and your preferences are:
#1 A
#2 B
#3 C
And say the candidates need 100 votes to win, but the final results are something like:
A - 200 votes
B - 150 votes
C - 100 votes
(other candidates also received votes, but that is not important here)
With the system of STV that was selected (Meek system?), candidates that have more than 100 votes overflow to the next candidate based on how many votes they needed to win.
As A only needed 100, but got 200 votes, they keep 50% of your vote, and 50% of your vote flows onto your next candidate.
Then B only needed 100 votes, but got 150 votes, so they keep 100/150 => 66% of your remaining vote, and the rest flows onto the next candidate.
So from what I understand, at the end your single vote looks like:
A - 1/2 a vote.
B - 1/3 = (1/2*2/3) a vote.
C - 1/6 = (1/2*1/3) a vote.
Your vote flowed on, until all your vote was distributed.
Or until you stopped listing candidates on your ballot, or until the number of candidates left in contention matched the number of vacant positions.
These fractions are updated every time a candidate overflows past the number of votes needed to win the election, and these are shown in the graphs in the OP as decimal fractions against the winning candidates.
You know, the weird thing is you could actually respond to both points being made.
Unless you actually don't want to disavow abuses of power and targeted campaigns of harassment that caused significant emotional harm to another member of the community because you think it's more important to defend an abuser.
That would be pretty fucked up, though I guess based on some of the aforementioned grasping at straws that has gone on, there are members of this community who don't think serial abuse is a problem if a guy they like is the one doing it.
Also: SE empathy and respect? I thought we all voted to tear those boundaries down in the interest of creating a more harmonious community. When you say things like that, it makes me think maybe you aren't taking that whole "blank slate" request super seriously. I'm very surprised by that. Completely.
I'm responding to a thread that makes D&D out to be The problem in the community and you're surprised I'm talking about SE people. Well, "surprised", considering you're mostly just talking to the post you made up in your head.
Nobody said D&D is the problem. People were (justifiably upset, IMO) that Jeffe got votes at all in spite of his documented history of abuse and malfeasance as a moderator and supposed community leader.
It's rich you're accusing me of talking to a post I made up when you're the one who immediately leapt to "See, see, it's the SE++ people being mean to D&D again!!!" in a complete void of any statement to that effect.
I would recommend examining that instinct. Though probably after you actually interrogate why it's so important to you to keep going to bat for Jeffe when he can't even defend himself or answer basic questions about his conduct.
Did you actually read the thread you're replying to?
Meek STV is one of the best STV systems, but it is also a bit more complicated and I think you could only really do it if the vote was electronic, but this is definitely the right of it.
This link explains it a bit more.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Octopath Traveler - MY BLADE IS UNBENDING
I did, in fact, read that comment, and it's irrelevant to the actual conversation being had here about how you keep talking past Jeffe's documented history of harassment and abuse.
It's also not a wholesale condemnation of D&D, but pointing out that an atmosphere of hostility was being fostered there - which isn't a false statement in the slightest, there's a reason we voted to restructure the board, and it was also intended to address issues with the culture of SE++ - and pointing out how several users from that community took issue with the stated goal of the new rules. These are objective statements, not wholesale condemnations.
If you do read them as wholesale condemnations, that says more about you than anyone else.
Your example is a person who has posted 9 times since 2003?
Also, I don't think Phoenix or Speed cited Jaguar's post.
If they did, I missed it, and I'd like to make it clear that I disagree with that sentiment.
Jeffe on the Board is an affront to the stated goals of our community, but stating we're just returning to the old culture of toxicity isn't fair to the work of the Transition Team or the interim mods in my mind.
Just to clarify: I didn't see Lanz's post because I didn't read to the end of the QA thread (assuming that's where it was posted?) because I'd already decided whom I was voting for and I've only got so much time, so that's on me. Thanks for the explanation, though!
"so much for the tolerant left" ass post here
it's almost funny how stringently people are clinging to the whole outdated SE vs D&D "schism" bs
Apologies have been sent out to the affected parties and I hope that you will all do the moderation staff and the community at large a favor by moving on.
Let's get out there and make something really special!