Mike DiCenso wrote:Either way you slice it, I don't see anything getting better over at SBC any time soon. Even with the recent Disney SW canon announcement, I doubt they'll relax one bit against anyone who dares suggest that SW firepower is anything but gigatons or teratons, and you can bet that they'll find an excuse somehow to keep the ICS as a vaild source to back it up.
-Mike
It hasn't worked thus far.
The only way to sneak the teratons through the backdoor is to use the EU in the OP and even that comes with the usual problem of the rest of the EU, so most posters just make it ICS based to begin with (if they go that route). There has been no attempt by the staff to impose gigatons.
Facehugger has also fallen out of the SW debate; he's moved on. The last time I recall him even bothering to weigh in was I think maybe a year or so ago, in regards to Chee suggesting the ICS. Many people used it as a clincher to say that ICS should override everything else. Face's response is that people should just produce evidence and arguments, not bicker and argue over one little piece of errata.
Mith wrote:
Actually, he WAS a supermod. Now he's an admin.
I see.
So now, when someone asks me if it's worth registering at spacebattles, I'll just have to deliver something akin to that in return:
"Since CPL_Facehugger has gone from mod to supermod to admin, absolutely no. Satiate your curiosity with seldom lurking at best."
It also formidably explains why he had so much leeway in his moderating methods and opinions, and how the deck was so stacked against us in ways we barely suspected. You can't tell me numerous people didn't complain about his decisions several years ago when the ICS/EU debates were in full swing.
It also has me wonder what Thanatos really did to reach beyond the line and really get the admins that angry.[/quote]
She didn't do anything outrageous actually. One might get the impression it was the public shaming of Robot Jones/Doctor Nails/Whoever, but the guy was apparently a shit poster (ie, posters were given the function to delete OP posts to reduce on accidental double threads--Robot Jones used it as a means of erasing threads he was losing in. Athene decided to re-sticky it and gave him a spanking in front of the class, so to speak), so it wasn't that.
What we've been able to get out of the mods is that some mods complained about her decisions and the admins looked into it and counted stuff months or years old against her. Then they dropped the hammer. It was also completely unsupported by the majority of the mod staff.
Jedi Master Spock wrote:
Thanatos was the first person on this forum (almost a year and a half into this forum's operation) to earn a temporary ban. (This was back at the end of 2007.) The reason was rudeness (and Thanatos had to be very persistently rude in the face of repeated warnings to earn that temp ban). I appreciated Thanatos's period of visiting our board in spite of that; I haven't had very many opportunities to have shiny formal debates with someone, and my debate with Thanatos was probably one of the best bits of spectacle we've had here.
We've seen lots of complaints posted in this forum section about SB.com moderators being unfair, including Thanatos. More directly, I have seen first-hand that Thanatos had difficulty maintaining an even temper online. Even a moderator who takes pains to be fair and who isn't somewhat rude from time to time will get complaints.
I would suspect a priori that the people who are complaining the loudest about a major personality change are not those observing fundamentally different behavior from Athena, but those who found themselves disagreeing with Athena (and facing her less agreeable side) when they had previously agreed with Thanatos. That's a recipe for losing allies, and it's easier to make enemies out of friends than friends out of enemies. Does that seem like a fair guess to you?
I have to admit to not closely following Athene recently. It has nothing to do with changes, but my habit of going dark for long periods of time. However, she has admitted that in the past, she did try to overcompensate on the macho department simply because she wanted to be as manly as possible (ie, terrified if anyone found out what she really was).
I will say she's been more aggressive against those less tolerant, but from my understanding, this was personal disagreements. She never actually moderated the threads she had those problems with. Like I said, I can't say with total certainty, but the general impression I was getting was that her new life-outlook had made her somewhat overaggressive in the subject, which I suppose is understandable, so I gave her a pass. Perhaps some people didn't.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:And what about Thanatos' responsability in this affair? Aside from the fact that he already was less than a stellar mod to begin with, he was the first aware of what was going on. He, and no one else, should have acted in a mature way and talked to the staff about what he was going through.
I could be wrong here, but it looks like Thanatos didn't exactly come forth openly about what he was going through. It seems the staff more or less got the news in a rather surprising way. And that would be where there's been a huge problem at first.
Regardless of one's opinion on the admins and staff, remember that they're normal folk. Normal folk as your average Joe not used to deal with the emotional breakdown of an individual going through a stressful, nearly mind boggling chemical-hormonal-mental and above all very artificial transition. No one is prepared for that kind of thing, no one has experienced in these matters save for specialized doctors and psychologists.
There's no way the staff could have handled that properly on their own or even guessed what would have happened. It is not their domain of competence.
However, Thanatos knew what would happen because people transitioning are not thrown into the wild with only a pack of cigs, a kiss on the cheek and best wishes. There is a whole psychological support involved here.
Aside from the cock up, I'd put the blame on Thanatos here mainly, as he should have come forth and acted as a responsible adult, told the staff he'd need to take some distance for a consequent amount of time and be temporarily demoded so his rather exceptional case would have never turned into some "nuclear/emotional" rollercoaster fiasco that few would have known how to deal with.
Well, I would have addressed the admins in private about the whole affair, which may have allowed it to be fixed behind the scenes and avoid the problem, which might have been possible if not for several problems.
1) Athene didn't see her PM first; she found out through the grapevine and felt as though she'd bee betrayed. From her end, the Admins had spoken to her once, months ago about their concerns and they apparently weren't very solid then. When they got a complaint or two later, they decided to act without discussing it.
2) Athene is/was very emotionally invested in Spacebattles. Not that it does you any good, but after a while as a mod, she chilled the fuck out in vs debates and basically left it alone. Perhaps that's because no one has led another campaign against 40k biggatons, but she left mod duties to others. Unfortunately, one of those is Super4, but Athene has corrected him before when politically, it wouldn't make sense for her to do so.
3) Athene has had some issues recently. One is her therapist saying that people online aren't your friends, not truly. It's hard to know what angle her therapist is working, but she took it personally. Then she shows up to SB to find that and...well, the damn exploded. The admins caught the brunt of it.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Perhaps the admins were caught by surprise and were afraid of charged of "transphobia" by a vocal part of the local plebe?
Them backing off after the threats would go that way.
No, that isn't Reaper's style. Reaper doesn't accept banning people for their opinions, save for one occasion, where he banned Dayton3 for saying that he wanted the day to come where all gay people were so terrified for their lives, that they'd go in the closet and stay in there, living proper straight lives in fear.
That would suggest that he'd have less of a problem with transgender and even if he did, he'd be less likely to punish Athene for it. The fact is, they fucked up, as people do. Except they did it in the worst possible way, to someone who wasn't exactly emotionally stable, and they had it uncovered in front of a user base that isn't half as objective as it thinks it is.
Really, only a minority were making a stink about it being a transgender thing--most were upset by their approach and the actual decision.
That said, you can make an account on SV if you like. Everyone has a clean slate there, so if you want to make debates, go right ahead. While I won't say that Athene is some sort of figure that can do no wrong, she has improved in many areas as a mod since those incidents.