I certainly hope any new mods are informed of rules they should follow so that this shit show doesnāt happen again. Saying āYes, I want to be a mod!ā feels insulting currently, before the matter with Bill has been cleared up. Donāt want to replace someone who was not only an outstanding mod, but also a good friend to many of us.
Also, thereās a Leader trust level on discourse, which grants permission to change titles / thread categories, split posts, etc, but not extreme actions like deleting. (Read more about trust levels here)
Me and @Flasher used to be leaders for a short while, until policy changed and it was decided that either youāre a mod, or youāre not. I suggest we bring back this rank, at least until the new mod team has gone through prohibition period.
@longhairedboy claims that he fired Bill because Bill told me about Mike reading my PMās before talking to the rest of the mod team and getting the green light. Also because Bill shared a screenshot of the back end of the forum.
Damon claims his reason for not allowing Bill into his own account is that āhe deserves the best responce we can give himā.
Personally I have a hard time believing either of those claims. If the entire mod team was in agreement with informing the users that their privacy was breached, then why wait? Kinda seems to me like Damon and the rest wanted to brush it under the rug. Thats why I called for rules to be publicly established stating that mods have a responsibility to inform the users or a privacy breach like this. Damonās answer was unenthusiastic in my opinion.
The fact that Mike, the guy who was reading everyoneās PMās, is still allowed to post freely (though is not making use of that freedom and seems to have fucked off from the forum) while Bill, the ACTUAL warrior for truth is bound and gagged?
Getting off topic here, but waiting would have allowed us/them to possibly catch more mods reading PMs, if not just more examples of it, to help figuring out the motive.
My understanding is that the mod team had already informed Mike that they caught him at the time that Bill privately informed me about it. So any further evidence collection was already off the table.
Short story: yes, in discourse it is very easy to read otherās messages as a mod an admin. It was agreed mods wouldnāt do this, but Mike did, and possibly (if I understand correctly) disabled logging for it to hide his tracks. very sad, everyoneās mad.
Yep. Welcome to forum drama: where all the important context is in a thread thats now deleted, and any good TL;DR is buried in shitposts
What Damon said on this topic is that Discourse does not have an option in the backend to disable a modās ability to read PMās. They (the mod team) knew it was possible, and were warned never to use that ability because, as you say,
Mike decided he was above the law and did it anyway. Then the mod team discovered a way to log mod actions so they could see when Mike reads a PM he isnt invited to. They turned logging on. Mike turned it off again. They turned it back on, and captured logs of him reading my and another userās PMās.
For the same reason, i feel than the āonly people who are investing financially can decideā as i saw somwere at the begining of the thread is fucked up:
We donāt want conflicts of interest nor a pay to play thing.
Itās a community about building thing: participing financially is totally lodable, but helping people participating and creating content as well.
If itās about selling, comercials, or paying : itās no longer a comunity of friends united in the same passion, but politics and personal interests,
Even though I have no real opinions in who should be mods/admin and all this drama, the friendship and light atmosphere on this forum was the reason why iām now refreshing the home page more than my facebook actuallity thread, and I donāt want this to be lost.
My understanding was incorrect: Mike had not been confronted at the time that Bill informed me of the privacy breach.
That being said, the most team were planning to approach Mike privately soon after Bill reached out to me and Zach made his post exposing the issue. So it still seems unlikely that the mod team would continue their sting operation onve they had sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.
From everything I have heard, it sounds like Damon wanted to sweep this under the rug. Zach and Bill were not down with that, and they both took their respective actions (informing the community and informing the members affected). And for doing that without giving Damon a chance to control the narrative, they were demoted amd (in Billās case) silenced.
This is very recent is it not? I recall looking at mod lists regularly for a sense of update and seeing bill as leader rank. Now heās a simple level 2 member. Did something happen in between?
Iād like to hear @longhairedboyās version of the story, but if what you say is true, then I am 100% on the side of Zach and Bill, and find their silencing worrying for the future of this forum.
Bill still was a leader for quite some time while everything happened. Thats why i was so confused as why some people talked about bill being booted even though he still had his rank, compared to the others.
This is why I am so suspicious of Damonās stated reasons for dismissing Bill. If those reasons were really the only reasons, surely he would have been dismissed ASAP, not halfway through the mod teamās responce to the issue when they were struggling to control the story.
