Note: This is the 3rd version of this thread, despite never having been discussed before on these forums and Keith stating previously we were fine to discuss these things in the off-topic areas, he deleted the first and second versions. This third is being posted after i was requested to edit out “misinformation” “allegations of abuse” and “personal attacks”. I am editing out things that even vaguely approach the third item, there is no misinformation, keith is welcome to publically disagree and provide his own alternate facts, and allegations of abuse are the entire point.
So it’s been about a week since an I-Novae moderator decided to abuse their powers to kick a personal enemy after being goaded into it in a public channel. Following this they also started deleting other people’s messages, messages which broke no rules. This fact was admitted by the moderator themselves.
Since then, the person kicked by the off the rails moderator was voted to be permabanned by I-Novae, the moderator has gotten what they’ve wanted and are parading around that “there was no abuse”, solidifying the fact that this person hasnt learned, has no interest in learning and will never learn. Lets consolidate the facts, so there’s no room for ambiguity or rationalizations.
So how about we start by going through the list of mistakes.
- keith publicly @'ing the entire community to announce cybercritic had been banned. There is no circumstance in which pinging everyone to celebrate banning someone is warranted.
- Voting on whether to immediately permaban someone. Maybe you should play more forum wolf games to see why this obviously makes no sense. Since you did it though an explanation is warranted. By voting you diffuse responsibility in the outcome, encourage all the other failures in this list to happen since no one person has to actually think about it or make sure there’s been sufficient procedure or warning. especially in a company, once you start a vote then if someone domineering votes yes, everyone has to follow suit.
- Permabans as the first ban
- not immediately removing a moderator for abusing their powers and instead endorsing them and following their recommendations.
- Not giving sufficient warning (1)
None of this is acceptable behavior let alone community management.
(1) Of course, there is some limited debate. At first I-Novae was claiming there had been more than plenty warning given. Since then I-Novae has piecemeal admitted no real warning was given for the permaban. There had been no recent warnings, you can go back over a month in public chat without finding anything and no PM warning had ever been given. As i spoke to team members in turn it became clear they were all just pushing the responsibility for having giving warnings off to someone else, and settled on vague, diffused “sufficient warning was given”. Anyone can find their warnings in public channels and judge for themselves whether something from months ago was worth a ban given flavien has stated directly “critic wasn’t banned for this specific incident”, okay then why was he banned in response to this incident? When you need to rotate half-truths to rationalize, its time to stop.
This is an absolute disaster. I’ve been told twice that it would be handled later and both times now it’s turned out to be a straight up lie, instead just another appointment to make things worse. We understand a learning experience, but you aren’t learning, the many community members that have sent complaints about these actions have been noted, and said complaints stuffed in the trash.
So what now? Is it time to recover or keep making it worse? It’s all on you, if you keep making it worse then you can only expect your limited reputation to get associated with awful community management, thats just what happens when small indie games do this kind of shit.
