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#1
Hi folks. As NeoGAF gets back to a more healthy, grounded, rational place, I've been asked by several folks about their account status. We all know a big clusterfuck happened last October/November, but there's a lot that went down actively against the interests of the site and the community that the present sysadmins and I did not know about. Our old platform had terrible system logging and there was one shortfall in particular that ended up causing problems: permanent bans were on an unsortable list that couldn't be checked over expediently to see if something was amiss. We relied on manual ban recording by mods and admins and general communication, and I vetted those aspects and the non-broken temporary ban list in the admin panel, and referred to the very inefficient raw moderation/system logs when something seemed fishy.
Mods and admins are human. I select NeoGAF mods carefully, but sometimes they don't turn out to be good fits when they take on the role. And sometimes, it turns out, one will work in secret and lie to everyone and sabotage the forum in various ways if the opportunity presents and they get emotionally tilted. That happened.
In 2016 US election primaries season, it appears some bias entered the picture on the moderation team regarding pro-Hillary sentiment and anti-Bernie sentiment that ended up with many of our reasonable Bernie supporters banned under suspicious justification. A lot of this happened in the "PoliGAF" subcommunity thread, however, which was very active but not something I kept enough tabs on since it was more like a chat room at times. Throughout the 2016 election season, Republican/conservative leaning voices were shouted out and baited by the community itself and some members of the mod team into getting banned, in part because of the lead-up where the forum was turning bizarrely aggressive with its Hillary support after incubating in that PoliGAF community thread. NeoGAF became one of the top 5 referring urls in the world to HIllary's campaign website according to Vice News. This was...weird.
Then the election happened and Trump won. One of my ex-admins, bishoptl, got angry about election-related matters and actively sabotaged the forum. He logged his bans that were justifiable within the site rules, and generally gave people appropriate ban explanation messages in those cases. However, he also banned several hundred more people in quick succession, out of anger, for *not being angry enough* about the election. He didn't log these bans administratively, he generally told the users something along the lines of "fuck off" in the user-facing message, and he lied to me at every turn when I was mobilizing to find out what the hell was going on with Off-Topic that seemed to be depriving it of all maturity, reason, sense, and moderate opinion suddenly. Finally I saw something suspicious enough play out that I checked the system logs, and everything revealed itself plainly. We were descending into madness because all the sane people were being stealth banned en masse by bish. I reviewed approximately 100 of the stealth bans one by one and reversed ~90% of them per the actual rules governing the site. But discourse here was already falling apart and our old platform sucked for communicating with users during mod actions, so people started account suiciding after I reversed the bans -- rightfully pissed off about the unjust nature of them. It was all a mess and I focused on trying to be a voice of reason on GAF itself and get the mod team onto a more neutral page going forward instead of going through the remainder of the bish bans.
Anyway, fast forward to last October's big drama. Angry mobs aren't rational actors. The people tasked with calming down angry mobs in a non-violent, just manner....well, sometimes they spray the crowd with rubber bullets and concussion grenades instead. Recently it's come to light that at least one of our ex-moderators mass stealth banned reasonable voices during the October drama who were saying nothing inappropriate and just arguing for a bit of calm. This changed my perception of events, too; it sank my heart to see my community apparently so willing to burn this place to the ground and say horrible, untrue things. But...a lot of the reasonable people were being actively silenced by rogue moderation. This came as quite a shock, but made sense immediately when I found out who it was. It also explained why about 75% of my PMs were supportive and yet it seemed like everyone on the forum itself was screaming for death and destruction. This was not a coincidence.
After that, too, we had an overstressed skeleton crew here and I knew there had been bad actors in the mix during everything, since private conversations under NDA had been leaked and so forth, so I brought in pro contractors for a while to moderate the forum while we regrouped and got some much needed rest. They weren't, shall we say, big on nuance or critical thinking. They were more following a simple flowchart and using a sledgehammer, so a lot of people got permed for relatively benign things and I don't know that it actually helped matters any in retrospect.
Way too many people lost their accounts unjustly. I apologize for my part in it. It was a difficult time and we didn't have great tools on the old-ass platform to detect foul play, and besides that the political circus in the United States introduced significant bias into the site moderation here.
I've pulled the rest of bishtoptl's post-election permanent bans, and the permanent bans performed by the ex-mod who stealth banned over 100 regulars simply for not participating in the witch hunt going on last October (sigh, what a wretched way to be), as well as a big chunk of the October/November permanent bans site-wide that were not performed up to our typical standards. I will review each ban personally, one by one, and reverse them as appropriate.
If you or someone you know has been banned unjustly, especially if it was around the time of the October 2017 drama or the post-election drama around Trump/Hillary time, or any other politically charged time like that, care will be taken to ensure fairness to you, so feel free to disclose it to me. I have a list of several hundred accounts from the known saboteur mods I will begin reviewing now and update with the results in here. If you would like your account reviewed and don't currently have NeoGAF posting access, email support@neogaf.com with Ban Review Request in the title and your account name in the body and I will add it to my list. Or tweet @NeoGAF with the same info.
If you ended up re-registering already and have a second account in good standing here that replaced your banned account, no worries, we're not going to punish for punishment's sake. Just mention it in this thread or PM me if you'd prefer discretion, note what your old account name was and anything you'd like to note about the circumstances, and I'll review your situation personally. In many cases I will be able to restore your old account and merge it with your new account so that you retain everything new and get your old account and post history reintegrated, too.
If you foamed at the mouth and said some stuff in all caps that wasn't very pleasant around drama-central, well, maybe PM me with some words about it. Time has passed and it was an intense situation where a lot of people were behaving irrationally. Some folks I've know on here for a long time participated in unfortunate, hurtful behavior. I'll tackle all that case by case too and I will hear everyone out. No guarantees in those cases, 'course.
We had at least a couple aggressively malicious actors internally that drastically changed outcomes at key moments in NeoGAF's recent history. Hundreds of bad bans happened directly against the policies and interests of the site and community. Things are chill here again and operating as intended and people are starting to want their accounts back. Time to undo some damage. Sorry for the mess, but let's get housekeeping.
