Hey everyone, I’ve removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn’t restore your account yet, let me know and I’ll fix it.) Don’t worry! We’re not gonna just ban people for no reason.

In case anyone hasn’t seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I’ve talked to the other admins and mods, and we’re all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)

If you’re afraid that there’s been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that’s absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you’ll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.

I’ve seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can’t get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.

During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it’s the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven’t been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren’t making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn’t foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.

Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.

    • CriticalOtaku [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      12 days ago

      Yeah, I saw some of what was posted and it was really not cool, and it did a lot to rile up people and foster a sense of paranoia.

      Also makes sense that an ex-mod (see edit) would know enough to talk like they were a current mod and (rightfully) cause the user’s to doubt the sincerity of the staff given how long it took to deal with (they ended up having to de-fed the linked instance to stop the harassment) + TC69’s ban wave was REALLY bad optics.

      Our past mistakes come back to haunt us foucault-madness

      Edit: Apparently the wrecker is probably an outsider, which actually is even worse because a lot of accusations were flying- we might have done their job for them kitty-birthday-sad

    • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      12 days ago

      Don’t forget Melina/dsplayer/whatever their original account name was creating a bunch of alt accounts to harrass people with and saying all kinds of vile things.

      I think I remember dsplayer or dsplayer IIII whatever the account was called. One of the last things they posted was like this anime mousepad and then they asked for their accounts to be delete not long after (At the time if you pressed the delete account button, it would just delete your comments).

      There was also another user whose name I can’t remember, but he sent nudes or something to people and refused to stop, which was very strange because he seemed like a normal person. And there was a trans woman who posted a suggestive video and was banned. I don’t think she was a bad person, just strange.