[Scourge of Ages]

To a lot of people, this place is bigger than just FreeSpace. It's a community they continually keep in touch with. There's lots of people who don't play Freespace anymore and they still come by because they have internet friends they like hearing from.

Hi, that is me, at least.

I have an opinion, by the way, on the matter at hand.

I am willing to accept the decision of the moderating staff. And while it is difficult, in light of things, I am willing to forgive Goober for his transgressions, even without a real apology. I strongly believe in second (or third, or seventh) chances. If he says it won't happen again, and the staff say it won't happen again, I will trust that everyone means it.

I will not be forgetting though, and I doubt anybody else will. And if something like this happens again, without provocation, we will all know exactly at the thread to point at.

[karajorma]

...what we are dealing with here is abuse of power by an admin threatening legal action against members...

Wrong (but I understand the confusion). Anyone is "free" to threaten legal action against anyone else, on or off the forum. Doing so has nothing to do with an abuse of admin power. The latter only happened when he deleted the thread.

So, in other words, abuse of power by an admin who was threatening legal action against members is what we're dealing with here?

On HLP, that doesn't exist. Instead, it is run as benevolently as possible by admins and moderators who%u2014when push comes to shove%u2014decide (sometimes unilaterally, sometimes as a conglomerate) on actions to take.

No. Not unilaterally. That is what the moderation staff have been trying to move away from for years! We've spent years pointing out that a single moderator or admin can make a bad call based on their own personal biases or even their mood at the time and as much as possible we should try to go with what will be the consensus if all the moderation staff had been present. No one wants users thinking that the result of an appeal to the moderators will be determined simply by who happens to be awake at the time. No user can possibly feel comfortable posting on a board where the admin they have been arguing against can just suddenly ban them. The days when single admins got to hand down pronouncements from on high have been consigned to the dustbin of history and I'm not unhappy to see them go. The way we are trying to do things now is better for everyone.

[Rhymes]

Ignoring the asinine and tone-deaf statements of an admin who's barely on the forums anymore and returning to the actual heart of this discussion, I have a question for Goober.

A description that something "is grounds for legal action" is not the same as a threat to actually take that action.

Do you actually believe this, or do you just think we're all stupid?

[karajorma]

The distinction itself is a fair one, but Goober was given plenty of opportunities to make it clear which one he was talking about and didn't.

[Nightmare]

Ignoring the asinine and tone-deaf statements of an admin who's barely on the forums anymore and returning to the actual heart of this discussion

Didn't Sandwich actually do quite some working on the website recently?

[jg18]

I was initially reluctant to jump into this thread, given that what brought me back from hiatus was the chance to help out with Knossos support in ngld's absence, including support requests like these two and bug fixes like these two, and certainly not the chance to get embroiled in heated discussions.

But the fact that a forum admin can make serious threats at other forum members—especially highly respected contributors with track records going back years—and then delete the thread due to the conflict that he chose to escalate not going in a way he liked, with the only personal consequences being very minor restrictions on his moderating powers, really, really bothers me. I was so angry about it last night that I had trouble sleeping.

The non-apology apology, while frankly unsurprising, has just made it even more obvious that the staff's announced resolution hasn't resolved anything.

My $0.02.

[The E]

So, as a conglomerate group of admins and moderators, we arrived at the decision that has been presented in this thread. You are more than welcome to continue voicing your thoughts and opinions about the topic and the decision and whatever else comes to mind, because we're not "lording" anything over you.

I'm sorry for perhaps presenting it in a way that bothered you—that was not my intent. I just want to explain why you shouldn't necessarily expect a different outcome on account of all the opinions being voiced. Hope that helps you understand where I was coming from.

Shouldn't we, though?

I've been posting here for as close as makes no difference 13 years now. I've been a moderator and global moderator for at least 10 of those. In that time, we have never had a member of the moderation team do something as egregious as Goob has here, and there never, ever was that much of a public outcry about any action taken by any moderator as far as I can recall.
This, to me, says that there must be consequences, and as I argued internally, these should be visible and absolutely NOT limited to a verbal agreement.

[jg18]

@Sandwich: Yes, I get that HLP is an oligarchy and not a democracy. I am cool with that and always have been, and I don't even think it's necessarily a bad thing.

But if those oligarchs want to have a community worth governing, then they might want to listen to it every now and then, especially when a number of its prominent and/or longstanding members are all saying essentially the same thing.

[Colonol Dekker]

I've been coming here since 3dap/game spy days (21 years give or take) and it's definitely one for the books.

[Grizzly]

"Authoritarianism is good actually" is probably not a good thing to champion in the best of times, Sandwich. Especially when one of your colleagues is under critique for taking said authoritarianism to an absurd degree.

[Colonol Dekker]

Nah HLP in general is pretty sound regarding the regulation of behaviour is my belief, and this is coming from someone who suffered a perma-ban in the past (due to hot-linking early Meme images which unbeknownst to me had failsafe in place).

Just a shame that one egg is spoiling the basket,  his apology is pretty specific,  but I would suggest a downgrade to mod if it didn't affect his capability to assist with backend infrastructure,  but this is not possible it seems.

[Sandwich]

So, in other words, abuse of power by an admin who was threatening legal action against members is what we're dealing with here?

Let's be exceedingly precise.

An admin deleted an entire forum thread to remove the offense of personal attacks against him. That action was an abuse of power. Concurrently, that admin had also pointed out that the offense against him constituted grounds for legal action. Said pointing out was phrased poorly, in a way that made it appear to be an actual threat of legal action, instead of the intended purpose of communicating that the offense was serious enough that it would qualify for grounds of a legal action, if legal action were the intended purpose.

Do you agree that that definition is factually accurate, without hyperbole or bias, or do you think it needs further tweaking?

On HLP, that doesn't exist. Instead, it is run as benevolently as possible by admins and moderators who%u2014when push comes to shove%u2014decide (sometimes unilaterally, sometimes as a conglomerate) on actions to take.

No. Not unilaterally. That is what the moderation staff have been trying to move away from for years! We've spent years pointing out that a single moderator or admin can make a bad call based on their own personal biases or even their mood at the time and as much as possible we should try to go with what will be the consensus if all the moderation staff had been present. No one wants users thinking that the result of an appeal to the moderators will be determined simply by who happens to be awake at the time. No user can possibly feel comfortable posting on a board where the admin they have been arguing against can just suddenly ban them. The days when single admins got to hand down pronouncements from on high have been consigned to the dustbin of history and I'm not unhappy to see them go. The way we are trying to do things now is better for everyone.

Sorry, evidently that too was an insufficiently-precise phrase, made for the sake of brevity at the time. Let me continue to be precise:

I definitely agree that, when dealing with arguments, strong feelings, personal biases, topics of differing opinions, etc... group decisions are the way to go.

When I mentioned "unilaterally", I was referring to the other moderation actions that fall outside the roiling cauldron of conflict... responding to requests such as "Please split this thread as it's gone off-topic here", or "Hey, there's someone posting links to warez over here". I don't think anyone would argue that those types of moderation actions need to be made as a group, right?

[Grizzly]

Guys you had ****ing three weeks to discuss this internally. I assumed you had already reached your conclusion and were merely waiting for Goob's apology.

This makes y'all look bad.

[Grizzly]

I also more in general question the notion of saying someone holds far-right views is offensive when that person has frequently espoused  them. I realize you're not actually on these forums anymore Sandwich, but there's been quite a few accusations of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" thrown about without any moderator action, why would suddenly the classification of one's political beliefs be cause for moderator or legal action? Accusations of far-left political views have, similarily, gone unremarked upon.

[The E]

Let's be exceedingly precise.

An admin deleted an entire forum thread to remove the offense of personal attacks against him. That action was an abuse of power. Concurrently, that admin had also pointed out that the offense against him constituted grounds for legal action. Said pointing out was phrased poorly, in a way that made it appear to be an actual threat of legal action, instead of the intended purpose of communicating that the offense was serious enough that it would qualify for grounds of a legal action, if legal action were the intended purpose.

Do you agree that that definition is factually accurate, without hyperbole or bias, or do you think it needs further tweaking?

As I said in an earlier post:

You chose to a) proclaim mjn's statement to be defamation and libel, b) mention that this is grounds for legal action and c) command mjn to retract that statement.
This is, clearly and very unambiguously, a threat.

It doesn't matter that Goober now claims that he didn't intend to make a threat or that he didn't intend to pull through with it. He posted something that, were it uttered in normal conversation, would absolutely be taken as a threat; That he didn't use the words "Retract it, or I'll sue" does not change that analysis, because he chose to double down on those exact words when he was called on it.

You're engaging in the same level of "but I technically didn't make a threat" argumentation that goober is trying to do, you're trying to be extremely literal and extremely precise in a way that simply is not appropriate to the circumstances.

[Mobius]

Many of the recent comments seem to point out that there's a community consensus over what should happen to Goober5000 as an admin, except there isn't. Many of the community members (and I'm one of them) posting on this thread actually disagree with the big-red-button-termination protocol, and our opinion is treated as some sort of background noise. Those who ignore us should at least acknowledge that they're not speaking in the name of every single community member on HLP.

By the way - speaking of consensus! - according to official stats, this community has 17,039 members with fully registered accounts. Good luck trying to determine what's the consensus on anything, and good luck trying to do that in one thread. More importantly, there's no mechanism by which someone's opinion should be preferable over someone else's just because of modding and coding accomplishments throughout the years.

That's why we have forum administrators (hence the "oligarchy - benevolent dictatorship" thing), and the admins themselves have issued an official statement on the matter. Policies on moderation have changed, too. Can't we just move on and hope that future interactions between community members will be better?

[Grizzly]

Many of the recent comments seem to point out that there's a community consensus over what should happen to Goober5000 as an admin, except there isn't. Many of the community members (and I'm one of them) posting on this thread actually disagree with the big-red-button-termination protocol, and our opinion is treated as some sort of background noise. Those who ignore us should at least acknowledge that they're not speaking in the name of every single community member on HLP.

I would like to point out that me, and a few others, have changed their minds after reading goob's "Apology".

[Mobius]

I stand by my statement, and I confirm it's impossible to determine community consensus on anything.

[The E]

Many of the recent comments seem to point out that there's a community consensus over what should happen to Goober5000 as an admin, except there isn't. Many of the community members (and I'm one of them) posting on this thread actually disagree with the big-red-button-termination protocol, and our opinion is treated as some sort of background noise. Those who ignore us should at least acknowledge that they're not speaking in the name of every single community member on HLP.

I do fully ackknowledge that I do not speak for you. There.

By the way - speaking of consensus! - according to official stats, this community has 17,039 members with fully registered accounts. Good luck trying to determine what's the consensus on anything, and good luck trying to do that in one thread. More importantly, there's no mechanism by which someone's opinion should be preferable over someone else's just because of modding and coding accomplishments throughout the years.

...and you wonder why your arguments aren't being ackknowledged? Out of those 17000 members, who is actually active right now? How many of those people are actually in any real sense active members at this point in time?

The actualforum population at any given time is, in a very real sense, less than a hundred people. Right now, I think it's actually less than 50. The people who disagree with the consensus represent a large number of the actually active people in this forum who care about issues of forum moderation, which in itself is a subset of that small number of active users.

That's why we have forum administrators (hence the "oligarchy - benevolent dictatorship" thing), and the admins themselves have issued an official statement on the matter. Policies on moderation have changed, too. Can't we just move on and hope that future interactions between community members will be better?[/mobius]

No. No, we can't. Not in my opinion as a member of this site, and not in my opinion as a member of the moderation staff.

[Grizzly]

Guys you had ****ing three weeks to discuss this internally. I assumed you had already reached your conclusion and were merely waiting for Goob's apology.

This makes y'all look bad.