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This is a fantastic idea, and in keeping with the "make a bad ting good" ethos of the PPC as a whole. Hell, I'd be inclined to whip up a pair of DoA agents commenting on proceedings, but I'm not sure how well that'd go down. Or fit with our stance on RPF. =]

Because I know that if there was a situation where I buggered up, got banned for a bit, and then came back, having apologised and accepted the blame and all, I certainly wouldn't want a tongue-in-cheek play about the whole bloody thing, and about how much of a big git I was through it!

I do get that reporting this stuff is important, and that you can't just sort of leave things lying around and pretend they never happened, but at the same time, I dunno - I just feel that the whole thing might be rather awkward, for the people who were actually involved in it. It's the sort of activity (from what I can figure about it, so far) that you'd need to ask permission for from the fellows involved (assuming they're still about, obviously), but then it's also an official report and response to community drama. Which is a somewhat odd mix, that.
Although I suppose I do support, in general, reports on those kinds of events, in order to take them apart and look at what broke and what went well, and how to avoid them? That, in general, sounds very useful, indeed, for newbies and such.

Anyhow, Tomash's mentioned a long sort of wait following incidents, and then them being written by neutral sources, which is a proposal I know I support, taking it away from the heated situation and all. Assuming this is a thing that happens.

I'm probably horrifically misunderstanding heaps of things, here, but them's the thoughts I got. I mean, I'd certainly be interested in seeing an example of one!
Gives a real good excuse to not go about getting banned, too, I suppose.

Like you said, the best place to start is probably old-ish (as in, you can actually go re-read it) uncontroversial stuff (like, say zdimensia or Rifle Caliber Guy) to establish a style.

You also might want to reach out to some of the people who've been around for a long time (hS, Delta, VM, Nesh, etc.) to see if they can't think of anything important to cover from before my time.

- Tomash, who looked up that bit of Ancient Greek in a dictionary to make sure it was what he thought it was

As someone whose memory locks away nothing, having this record is personally important to me.

Yes, I'm volunteering as tribute against my better judgement. As for the backlog. . . I've got all summer! It would be best to start with incidents like zdimensia, which everyone agrees are over and done with (because they're less-sensitive and thus easier, and we can use them to set a rhythm and develop a style). Once we get into recent history it'll be harder to determine whether an event is ready for a write-up. . . but we can cross that bridge when we come to it (trying really hard to check my urge to overplan/never get started).

Thank you for the luck!

--Definitely-a-Weasel-on-the-Keyboard has never studied Ancient Greek (but would like to) and used a dictionary, hoping for the best

Over here in the good old United Kingdom we celebrated Mothers Day 7 weeks ago. Although I know what you mean and why you've posted.

Cat (or is it Weasel?), thanks for presenting something I'd been thinking about better than I would've done.

My thoughts are that a year-ish (or maybe just a few months) after major incidents, someone reasonably neutral should write them up for the Wiki, and that those write-ups could be collected in one place, so that people who weren't around for whatever-it-was can look it up and figure out what people are on about and also, like you said, to serve as examples of how we think about these types of serious issues. Most information about old stuff is locked away in people's memories, and the remainder tends to be rather scattered. See, for example Thalia. Almost everyone who remembers that is gone, and most people here will probably never see that wiki page unless it's pointed out to them.

Your suggestions of making these reports entertaining as well as informative is a good one. This is the PPC, after all, and we're not a super-serious bunch all the time. Calling attention to them every once in a while might also be a good move. The only objection I can think of is that this would "promote legalistic thinking", but I think we already use past incidents as reference points to help make decisions, so we might as well make that knowledge more freely available.

Obviously, any write-up of things that are visible in the archives will have a stack of links in it, or at least a bunch of footnotes that link to whatever-it-was.

If I read you right, and you just volunteered to do a significant part of the work on these, all I can say is good luck. You've got a bit of a backlog (off the top of my head: 7.65x54R/SHEEP, zdimensia, Jacer, #PPC2 in general, and probably Glarn sometime next year, and that's just a lot of the non-recent stuff I was around for).

Unrelatedly, good luck with finals!

Even more unrelatedly, ahhhh, word-final sigma! One of the go-to examples for why uppercase() and lowercase() are more complicated than you'd think, along with ß and Turkish İ and ı. I should know, I had to wrote them at one point.

As you yourself have apparently noted, though, it probably shouldn't be used as a gurantee that people will follow through with solving a problem, more along the lines of highlighting an issue and getting people to pay more attention to it. One idea I've experimented with once or twice before is to take the circumstances of a real-life drama, and write a PPC mission in which a character does stupid things similar to those that kicked off the drama and suffers painful consequences for it. I don't know how well that'd correspond to the seriousness at hand, or if it'll even work as a means of promoting awareness of the actual problem, but then again I'd tried that approach after the person in question had already gotten banned, and I'm pretty sure trying this idea in response to an actual drama while it's occurring would be in very bad taste as well...

This won't solve/prevent all our problems (it mostly doesn't even address the bullying issues). We should pursue multiple routes simultaneously. I think this might be a good prevention strategy/way to get people to engage with the issues.

--Key

An Ancient Greek god swooping in on a chariot from above the stage to enact divine vengeance on the wrongdoers, clearly explain the ethics of the situation, and establish an annual feast to remind everyone of the incident, concluding the play.

The first two duties of a deus ex machina are obviously beyond the grasp of us mere mortals, but the last. . . we could do that. For me, as a new/middlebie, I often stay out of these kinds of discussions because I don't know the precedent and have to wait for people to link relevant past occurrences. If we wrote up an entertaining, informative report on what has occurred, and called attention to it and similar accounts annually via performances at the City Dionysia in a commemorative Grand Concilliary. This could be a step towards healing the newbie-oldbie split and make people aware of the forms bad behavior can take (allowing them to recognize it when it occurs and avoid committing it themselves), all while being pretty darn fun.

I'm a little nervous about putting myself out there, but I volunteer to compile and write up what occurred, possibly in the style of a classical tragedy. I'm sorry for being so skittish around actual decision making, but I can at least help pick up and organize the pieces afterwards? I have finals, so I wouldn't be able to really get started until a week from now. I know I don't have Permission -- either I could apply for Permission (given another couple of weeks), I could do it as a cowrite with someone who does (or a mixed team), or someone else could do it (I know I don't exactly have a reputation as someone who gets things done thoroughly, efficiently, on-time, or at all).

--αἴλουρος-on-the-Keyboard

This is just an offer. If you want to decline, that's fine.

I know that you don't want to acknowledge the other's existence anymore, but it seems like a few other PPCers aren't satisfied. Maybe you'd both like to get an apology, but you feel the other should apologize first.

If you want to feel less resentful about toward the other, I'd like to try and help. If you'd like someone to listen to you without brushing off your reasoning as just an excuse, without brushing you off and telling you to just "deal with it", without demonizing you in general, I'm willing to listen. I'd like to understand your situation better and I don't mean verifying who did something worse. I'd like to take a look at the actions you were asked an apology for and ask about them. For example, I'd ask about your impressions at the time you were doing them.

While it would be nice if you could apologize to each other, I won't force you to. I'm willing to lend a sympathetic neutral ear.

Ozzielot

It might be worth thinking about setting the requirement to consensus among the Community Managers and one other person, so as to prevent an excess of groupthink among those elected. I suspect finding one more person to weigh is something that wouldn't be much of a problem, On the other hand, I'm not sure if it'd have any effect on the groupthink that may-or-may-not otherwise take hold. I'm just tossing random thoughts out there.

I'd also like to point out that we used something like this procedure (a few influential people and a few newer people in favor of a ban + a lack of objections) in the Rifle Caliber Guy case (references to NSFW stuff in parts of the surrounding thread), so it's not like this is completely unprecedented.

- Tomash

None of the people involved in the incident with me are to my knowledge members of the PPC, which means they obviously weren't involved in the witch-hunt against JF. The incident in question involved a DeviantArt group that has since had to heavily revise its management system, with no connections to the PPC.

That being said, I said before that I wasn't entirely blameless, and that was because I'd angered these people by shoehorning myself into and attempting to take over their existing writing/art project, which is Not Cool and should in theory be handled by simply removing me from their group, which did happen. The smear campaign happened in the months afterward with several of the people concerned posting hateful remarks about my artwork, interests, and personality on my then-active DeviantArt profiles, and ultimately publishing an angry slanderous journal entry in a similar fashion. Only one or two people have made amends with me afterward for it; the rest have since ostracized me and from what I've heard, still regard me in a disparaging light, regardless of how much I've changed for the better. (The person who apologized to me via PM said that these people aren't worth my time, either, partly because they too had a falling out with them later on.)

I joined the PPC partly because I thought incidents of this nature wouldn't happen here. I should've understood that I was dead wrong, especially knowing the nature of communities in general, but at the same time I also know that we're not the kind of people to stoop as low as the ones who publicly humiliated me on dA. That's more than I can for, personally; I just hope we can do better in the future, and I certainly hope the disaster last March will be the last bit of drama I'll be forced to witness for a good long while.

I've been getting that feeling about us a lot lately, come to think of it. Perhaps it's just because I'm still a little enraged and disappointed at how things have been these past few months, though.

First, I'm not sure if the call for Community Managers is a proposal for moderators under a different name or something akin to Delta's suggestion downthread. On the assumption that it's the latter, I'm going to set out what I think you're asking for in more detail.

The proposal is that we should elect a group of Community Managers. On issues of community management (should X be banned? should X be given One Last Chance? should X be given a very stern collective warning? and so on) consensus among the Community Managers constitutes a decision by the community unless objected to. If people object to the decision, there's something controversial about it and we need to have a full vote.

This, of course, doesn't mean that non-Community Managers should stay out of community management (making proposals, voting on them, etc.), and certainly doesn't mean that everyone else loses their responsibility for calling out bad behavior. Heck, if everyone stayed away from that stuff, we wouldn't have any data with which to pick new community managers for if some the old ones leave.

What seem to be the arguments for this system is that we're basically doing it already, except we don't admit to it, and that, right now, the de facto Community Managers can't do anything without a long, arduous process of getting people to actually vote. Also, the current system means that issues that are important but not outrage-generating or controversial tend to never get resolved because not enough people feel bothered to do something about them, which is bad.

My personal thoughts on what I proposed above is that I hope we don't need to do it, but I fear that we do. I'm not currently planning to campaign for this, but if people seem to think it needs to happen, count me as a supporter.

As to minor roles, I don't think we need to formalize that stuff to any major degree. However, it might be a good idea to keep a list somewhere of community things we tend to do (unless we've already done this and I just haven't noticed), just in case someone would like to get things moving but is low on creative ideas.

As to proxy votes, I'm opposed. From what I can imagine, proxy votes (especially what we'll probably end up with, which is revocable proxy votes, where you can have someone vote for you in general, but take back your support on particular issues) will basically create the Community Managers proposal above, but worse. One problem is that you can only hand out a proxy once, which makes the group of proxy vote holders smaller than the hypothetical group of Community Managers. Another that you have serious liveness problems since it's really hard to decide who's a member around here. For example, if I had Laburnum's proxy for some reason, everyone would probably agree that that's completely pointless, since she's not around anymore. But where do you draw the line? That veers into a thorny patch of meta-questions no one actually wants to answer in a rigid way, so let's not do it.

- Tomash

If so, please can you either outline the details here, or email them to me at huinesoron@hotmail.com.

This is particularly important if you feel some of the people involved were also involved in the witch-hunt; if there has been a repeated trend, I feel the community is better off being aware of it.

Please note that this is a request, not a demand.

hS

Please take the time to talk to your moms today, and tell them that you love them as any child should. I'm sure they'll appreciate your gesture and your love as much as you do to them! :)

I think it's not so much a matter of the people the witch-hunt was apparently targeting accepting apologies from everyone who participated in it, including myself, though granted, that is a big hope of mine and I'm still holding out on the possibility that it happens eventually, no matter how long it takes. What's more important, though, is that it doesn't happen again. I've been told consistently in real-life that apologies for a bad habit won't matter if you keep repeating it, and in light of that I'm beginning to worry about the risk of another smear campaign happening to someone else in the future, especially given the hitherto untold issues that have come out of the woodworks in this very discussion. This is, after all, coming from someone who, despite not at all being blameless, was victimized by that very tactic a few years back (with only very about two of the ten or so people involved apologizing for it later). What good would making amends with Desdendelle and JulyFlame do to this community in the long term if, for example, the rest of you go on to turn on me for being, and I quote, "an intolerable and domineering attention whore", without giving me the chance to explain myself and make up for my own poor behavior? Look, even if Des and July forgive us (and mind you, I've already stated above that I sincerely hope they do), what good would that do if we just let this behavior continue?

I tried as much as I could to stop everyone literally while this whole fiasco was unfolding before my eyes, but I didn't have any significant time on my hands, and I certainly didn't want my dad to walk in on me and force an explanation as to what was happening out of me for fear of being forcibly pulled out of this community because of it (as he has done with other online social networks before). From what I've heard, though, the heat of the moment meant that there were far too few people speaking out against the witch-hunt in any major capacity, with Des being the only one to have done so IIRC. Almost everyone else either actively participated in said witch-hunt, did nothing to stop it, or tried to speak up but got drowned out.

And I'm not even going to get started on the accidental doxxing. Everyone's talked about it better than I ever could, and I just hope that senseless act does not happen again.

In any case, I think there's more to be done about the witch-hunt than simply making peace with the targeted people, as welcome as that would be. If it looks like a smear campaign is about to form against anyone, period, then more people need to work harder and speak louder in a bid to nip it in the bud. It also upsets me greatly that I shouldn't even have to explain all this, and I won't have to in most cases. If by some anti-miracle this running out of people for petty reasons ends up becoming a habit, gods forbid, then I'll have lost faith in this community as a whole.

http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7ou-576216916

Sorry I missed the first comment