For those of you who don't know or aren't sure; moderation on the discord is handled by a team of moderators called "Operators" (or Ops) a name I originally put in place as a holdover from the IRC when I made the server, but I've always found it kind of nice and it's stuck around. It's our
(Crushita, Hugsim, Pengu, Nox, Wuufu and myself) job to try to maintain the discord by keeping discussion civil, enforcing
the rules and overall trying to keep the server a nice place absent of flaming, harassment and bigotry. The Ops are a team assembled by Moot and while we will defer to him in difficult decisions for the most part we operate on our own in the moment. Wintreath has always aimed to have an open and fair community where anyone can feel welcome, we've gone to great lengths to facilitate that on the discord and I want anyone to know that if they ever feel like there is something preventing that to let me, or any of the rest of the team know.
With that introduction out of the way, I want to get right down to business here. Over the past several weeks we have received a fair bit of criticism, it was brought up in the new weekly meetings Wintermoot held, and we have had several people come to us with the issue personally now. I'd like to think that anyone on the server would feel comfortable coming to me, Moot or any of the other Ops about any issues they had with the mod team or anything else on the server but for a while it seems like that wasn't the case.
A prominent point in this discontent with moderation seems to have been last month (in October) with several issues, a main one being comments Chanku made in the #CitizensPlatform channel, me and Chanku spoke about this in private afterwards, and she admitted it went too far; unfortunately I was asleep during the actual specific incident and none of the Op team or Moot were altered to it at the time, so all we could do was take action later, which involved a warning to Chanku.
This was an unfortunate incident and has acted as a decent vector for people to get across what they think was wrong with the moderation. Based on what we've heard out we've tried to adapt to it, Wuufu graciously has given his time to make a private reporting system, as a team we've been trying to come down harder and sooner and have a more firm overall presence, and I've been working on an updated set of the rules and recommended actions so that there is more clarity about what we should do.
I (and the rest of the team) did not know people were not happy about how things were until after that time, even during the event. As I said we didn't receive any reports and it was not made clear that this is how people felt until much later, this has been the same with many other issues that have arisen overall this is the clearest indicator to me that something is wrong.
I have to admit that the moderation on the server has never been strong, it's always been a very casual place, people come and go often, I myself am particularly guilty of this; and as such I feel immense responsibility for people's discontent with how things were handled. I'd say we are doing our best to change that, I hope the mod team has been more visible and present throughout the last week and that people think.
However it has come to my attention that there is still some significant discontent on these issues, this is a public request, that I hear the concerns out here where they can be seen public ally and in the open. The actions of the mod team and those raising these issues have frequently been in back channels and behind the scenes, I think all of this has caused a lot of miscommunication and I couldn't put together a firm list of grievances or who holds them and why if I wanted.
I can't make this more explicit, if the issues are as serious as what I have anonymously been made aware of I simply can't sit idly by, I have the power here to affect active change on the server, and it has been immensely frustrating to not have open information in order to do anything effectively. Let me hear you out here, I simply can no longer operate here without making a lot of this smoke I've been tackling concrete.
