Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.

In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)

If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.

I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.

During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.

Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    4 days ago

    Are there any updates with regards to figuring out who spun up all the alt accounts and started harrassing users? That's what I care about most to be honest, I only had one comment on this entire issue before that happened.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        4 days ago

        So that's a no I take it. I have a doctor's appointment now, hopefully I don't get told to kys in the meantime by one of the 20 alt accounts, or have to hear about how my parents should be killed, or whatever nonsense they come up this time.

              • Gribbli@lemmygrad.ml
                ·
                4 days ago

                Hey, appreciate the answer! Spose I'll just block em then lol, didn't realize that federation worked that way.

            • Gribbli@lemmygrad.ml
              ·
              4 days ago

              Odd, that is. They're comments on my end. Starting here https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6206836/5484003

                • Gribbli@lemmygrad.ml
                  ·
                  4 days ago

                  Shrug, it was more funny to me than anything after a while. That said, this person is directly responsible for a large part of this shitstorm so I don't want the fact that I was fucking around to obscure my disdain for them. REgon didn't deserve to catch and keep that ban after arguing with this shithead for a hundred comments.

                • Hexboare [they/them]
                  ·
                  4 days ago

                  That person has been going for days on many, many accounts.

                  They (I think She but no tags there) also gloated about REgon being banned, and REgon was then temp banned and remains banned.

                  • propter_hog [any, any]
                    ·
                    4 days ago

                    So you think it's one of the mods doing that? That shit is not cool for any user, but a Hexbear mod doing that would really make me question why I'm here.

                    • Hexboare [they/them]
                      ·
                      4 days ago

                      I think it's more likely than not, they were very vested in an argument that I understand had mainly been occurring offline between mods and admins.

                      I don't think a mod doing that is necessarily representative of the site, almost all applications for mods are approved

                    • CARCOSA [they/them]A
                      ·
                      4 days ago

                      We have confirmed that this person is not a hexbear mod, we know who it is and have checked to ensure all their hexbear accounts are banned.

        • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]
          ·
          4 days ago

          It doesn't look like the same poster to me

          Holy shit I was looking at the wrong posts I think they might be

    • Lyudmila [she/her, comrade/them]A
      ·
      4 days ago

      Haven't figured it out but we're banning any that pop up. It's not the person that was accused previously as they haven't had internet access for a couple of days. I'm not going to doxx them, but several mods were able to confirm that they were and still are in a location with no internet access.