Open discussion about issues with project management and hub enforcement

General
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The following hub rules are being repeatedly and openly broken / ignored by certain individuals within wizden leadership:

  • Strike system:
    Currently not followed for the overwhelming majority of cases, might as well remove. Numerous recent examples.

  • Enforcement Procedures:
    Servers are being dehubbed without the owners being reached out to. Recent example being Arcadis.

  • Section 2 rules:
    Goob was dehubbed briefly before being reached out to about naming issues. If the individual who did this would have followed their own hub policy; said interaction would have resulted in a stike at most, but more likely would have been resolved within DMs without need for preemptive dehubbing.

The following issues, while not directly stated in hub rules are extremely problematic.

  • There are currently no rules about deauthintication:
    Despite this; deauthintication is being used as a weapon against other servers. If nothing else; create rules that the community has access to about deauthintication rather than using it against people silently and without a procedure.

  • The current wizden stance on servers being “Guilty by association” is blatant misuse and abuse of the hub rules:
    If an individual truly is guilty by association for the crime of being within a discord server, I regret to report that several wizden staff members past and present were within a server that pedophilia and grooming took place. And while these members did not speak much in these servers and likely did not know what was going on; if the current guilt by association behavior were followed it would be a very bad day for everyone involved. It is very obvious as to why procedure should be followed for each and every server.

  • Harassment is undefined and used as a blanket punishment:
    It is used dozens of different ways and has lost all meaning. I have personally been told that the incident in which a wizden staff member told someone to “fuck themself ten times with a rake” and called them “a pathetic piece of shit” is not harrassment. I was also told that it would harrassment be if directed at a staff member. Defining the term would likely help communities to not harrass anyone, because as of now it seems no one knows what it means.

  • A standard of professionalism is needed:
    As the official Space Station 14 servers a standard of professionalism is fair to expect. It would also go a long way in earing your communities trust and respect, as well as making it less likely people will stumble upon messages sent by leadership and become alienated. If angry and emotional outbursts are not allowed in the discord server; staff should not being having them. Recent examples include a message within the SS14 discord servers announcements stating: “I FUCKING HATE THIS PROJECT” as well as numerous examples of insults / needlessly aggressive interactions both in and out of DMs while the other party was extremely calm and collected.

  • Transparency would go a long way
    Currently, quite a bit of wizdens operating procedures are extremely secretive. For example; I have been requesting for months any evidence of “prolific community members harassment” and have been repeatedly told that such evidence will not be sent as to protect the harrassing community members (who were still named despite the supposed desire to protect them.) If nothing else proving such evidence would make previous tantrums that have taken place seem more justified. Dehubbing is also an extremely secretive process despite its importance. For a community to be dehubbed there should be quite a large amount of damning evidence provided in the announcement. Unfortunately until recently there has been no attempt to provide evidence for any hub actions that have taken place, and recent evidence is lackluster at the best and nonexistent at the worst.

  • Staff should be background checked
    A few months ago, an individual who was guilty of grooming, pedophilia, and incest among other things was briefly allowed to become staff for around a week before being removed from the staff team for unrelated issues. This same person was discovered to be all those things in a matter of hours by a small group of individuals. There is absolutely zero excuse to allow such a thing, it does not take much effort to conduct even a basic check on someone. This is also in direct violation of the hub rules and could have resulted in a strike for other communties.

Over half of your staff team has left and more continue to leave due to mismanagement. Numerous players have done the same and reached out to me with concerns about the project. Several ex-staff members I spoke with provided me with some of the above issues. I would implore those who remain to work to fix the many issues before they continue to spiral and damage more of the community than they already have.

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All cases in which this is done are warranted.

This was because Durk was intentionally playing chicken with their server listing, and if you ask him he will happily tell you this was fully justified. They changed their name in rapid succession to the following:

  • “NO FELINIDS IN COMMAND”: blatant speciesism, asked them to remove it, they did.
  • “/gb/station Terry”: Impersonates TGstation in SS13. I contacted TG staff and they were not pleased. Asked to remove, they did.
  • “Goober’s Den Grasshopper”: Impersonates Wizden. Dehubbed and told them they can get back on if they fix their shit.

Don’t harass us or send us legal threats and we won’t. Guess what people did.

It is absolutely justified to call somebody a harasser for openly engaging with harassers, even after this is pointed out to them.

Harassment is actually quite well defined. And we follow this definition.

It would be harassment if this was a repeat occurrence. What actually happened is the the “target” of this harassed our staff for months on end, and I wrote that message while fucking sick of his shit. Forgive me for having human emotions in a one-off occurence.

If I constantly lied about somebody in our staff and that was an example of it, this would be a valid argument. As it stands, you’re just taking things out of context and siding with abusers.

Sorry but I’m too tired after getting harassed for 2 years. All of our staff is.

This is completely untrue. We cannot provide evidence of actions in all cases to protect sources, not perpetrators. Basically half the reports about hub shit, especially harassment, are from people that don’t want people to know they reported it.

Furthermore, even when we do provide sources, people just fucking ignore it. It is just not worth our hassle to neatly organize 10 pages of evidence, because people will call it “abuse of power” no matter what we do or how true it is.

I do not understand how you can say this when it’s trivial to disprove this when looking at the recent list of hub actions.

Please elaborate what kind of checks you think we should have done to avoid this specific issue.

This is not true. We have told people to remove staff before, they have, everybody moves on with their day.

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I just read the blog you published. Making publicly available documents like this disproving common criticisms is a good step in the right direction. It would be good to show the community that you are making steps in the right direction, like explaining what you have done to prevent more predators from getting into positions of power after what happened with the last one. It is probably not the best idea to start such documents with messages of how much you hate people though, doing such is just going to get rid of whatever good faith people had left for you and cause even more alienation.

Again, I’m only discussing this type of thing because this community has a ton of potential and I am quite invested in it. I do not hate you. There is not a single person on the staff team I hate.

Forgive the strange formatting, I could not find the quote button.

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Another small point I would like to bring up is the harassment definition. If wizden does go by “consistent bothering is harassment” then why are people consistently banned for first time instance of bothering staff with harassment as the ban reason. It cant be both ways.

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I agree, and will continue to agree with everything games sweatshop has said/will say and I will provide no further explanation as he does a better job at stating the facts than I possibly could.

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If you are talking about the “background checks” part, we have not. We do not believe it to be a systematic issue as we acted immediately upon getting notified and we consider that to be sufficient. There was no evidence of any staff failing to forward the evidence or anything like that, and no evidence that anybody got harmed thanks to their staff position.

Like I said, I would like to know you think we could have done.

I am asking you this because I know at least one harassment document about this situation said we should have used Fucking Kiwi Farms as a source of background checks. Which is such a laughable statement anybody reading it should instantly close their browser tab and block the person that sent them the document in question.

I know it’s not true for everybody reading it, but I did make my post as an honest good-faith attempt in the hopes that the people that do hate me (and I know they exist) at least read this. And yes, I did send it to those. So I figured it was worth acknowledging for those people.

Select a line of text in a post, it’ll give you a button.

It really depends. I do give out warnings a lot on Discord and Steam, but Reddit doesn’t have a good way to do it. Generally I go for full bans in this case only if it’s obvious they’re not engaging in good faith. People spreading the same old tired shit accusations and harassment from somebody else, people disregarding entire evidence posts, etc.

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Gonna provide my two cents on this because I feel like the more input from everybody the better.

PJB, the lack of any evidence for any of your issues for harassment has been very concerning, you cannot throw around harassment accusations without making a paper trail.

The statement of “people won’t care” doesn’t remove the fact that evidence is crucial when talking about removing people off of hubs. You need to create an official document for why exactly a community is getting removed, as the way you’ve gone about this has lead to a lot of confusion in your own community as to what exactly has happened.

In addition there has yet to be any “official” statement on the Wizden Server as to what has been going on, and it’s doing nothing but hurting your own reputation as the Project Lead. Mostly everyone’s been left to speculate with the images that have been circulating around other communities. Images that show you yourself saying “On a personal note, I hope you and everyone else you regularly interact with in your pathetic community goes and fucks themselves with a rake 10 times over so I never have to see you again.”. How exactly would this benefit your own image in the wider community other than making yourself appear extremely emotional?

This may be how it appears to yourself, but to the wider audience it appears spiteful and full of hatred for the people you’re hoping to reach, you have to control yourself when you’re writing a response to an issue. I think I can say for a lot of people that the emotional way you’ve handled yourself with the italics and swearing and the issues with being able to talk responsibly with server hosts in addition to you being unable to provide evidence makes you out to look like the bad guy.

I know there are issues with people in Einstein’s Engine and they’re not good people, but you need to hold yourself accountable as the Project Lead, you’re not someone who owns a small fork of Space Station, you are the Head. You need to show yourself to be someone who can actually handle themselves and persevere through repeated harassment instead of someone who is an easy target FOR said harassment.

I would really recommend taking some time away from the project and stepping down if at all possible, some time away from the community to get some fresh air from the harassment would be, in my opinion, a decent way to maybe refresh yourself and come back with a better mindset on how to actually deal with the issues of harassment and bullying within your community, as the path you’re currently taking seems to be making the situation worse and worse by the day.

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I do not know how you can see this when you have read my blog post, which clearly contains a lot of evidence. Or the EE dehub, which has a lot of evidence.

And we do that, when we can. I have already explained in this thread why we sometimes cannot.

There literally is? [2024/12/17] Dehubbing of Einstein Engines servers

I don’t know. I kind of expect people to be rational? That image is from a DM thread. That means there are two people that could’ve leaked it. One of those got striked for hosting a harassment community.

We post the most benign shit and people take it out of context regardless. There is no amount of “just be more professional than them” that will stop us getting harassed, they always find reasons to. I am a human being doing this in my free time, forgive me for having emotions.

I would be open to suggestions, because, as I alluded to in the blog post, we have nothing we can do except consistently put our foot down and ban everybody involved in harassment. All our attempts at communication get blown off. So that is what we do.

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What is aggressively daft about the circumstance from the EE side is that this is a FOSS game, both Robust and Wizden are under MIT, and the amount of effort to set up some superior alternative hub away from the tyranny of PJB being mean in DMs is a comparatively trivial amount of work.

IIRC even in the EE dehubbing thread there’s a screenshot of one of the ringleaders talking about “getting an alternative hub set up” or somesuch. But invariably this gains no momentum. It should! If folks don’t like the Wizden moderation, then folks can just move on.

The only value in Wizden is the contribs/maints/community that surrounds it; if folks don’t like it, then folks should go make a better community. That’s the beauty of FOSS and “we don’t like you, we’re going to go do our own thing” has been the underlying logic behind the balance between the BDFL and the development community underneath them since the term BDFL was coined back in the 90s!

For the folks involved, this really isn’t about anything other than attacking the Wizden leadership. There’s no money in this game, other than the Patreon money that goes on keeping the servers up, I guess.

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I’m going to add my two cents on this thread!
PJB, if anything, this thread AND your blogpost, made me gain lots more of appreciation about you, before today (I did a somewhat deep dive today), I had the wrong idea about you, but after going around, investigating all of the drama and issues and things that have happened as of late… I can say for sure that all of my worries about you and wizden in general were completely missplaced! A very good thing that armok pointed is the “lack of information”, not saying that no information was ever posted or published, but what I notice is that some venues such as discord and/or reddit, do not have posts/info about the issues in an official channel, it is spread around in different places and etc!

I did learn some things from kiwifarms, but the MAJORITY of the stuff said there is just ludicrous, I’m hella sure that a lot of those stuff were also said by people because they didn’t verify, they didn’t look around, they didn’t use their god damned heads!!!

There were issues in wizden, there were decisions done too early about things and etc, BUT, so much of everything was so overblown because people speculate when faced with the unknown, and then unfortunately they assume the worst, they see a tempest in a tiny drizzle!

Don’t focus too much on this whole thing during new years, enjoy festivities PJB, have fun, try to take your mind off of this issue just for a bit, and remember: whenever you feel like all people hate you, that is just not true, it is a product of anxiety and of emotion.

Like armok, I like the entire what is “SS14”, I know there are some bad apples around, but the community and the game so far is amazing, and that would not have happened if you didn’t take that first step back then, and did the work you did and everything.

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I’d suggest you stop justifying your actions to idiots. You wont convince internet trolls using text, it will only make them feel more justified out of pure spite. Every word you respond is just potential ammo.

There’s literally no point in communicating with someone acting like that.

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Interesting that this is about EE. Isn’t that the one downstream branch that refused to remove the salvage shuttle?

The delist couldn’t possibly have something to do with that, but still. Interesting.

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goob also has the salvage shuttle, whats your point?

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Hey PJB, here’s a serious proposition—no clowning around this time. Let’s open a channel and actually talk. I would like to step in as a mediator because, believe it or not, I’m pretty good at sorting out messes like the ones plaguing the Space Station 13 remakes. We both know the so-called “curse” that follows these projects: everyone’s so busy arguing that the game itself gets lost in the shuffle.

I realize we have had our differences, and I must have robbed you of countless hours you could’ve spent productively. I told myself, don’t be sorry, be better. And I do believe people can change. Empathy and kindness are skills we can practice and grow, just like training a muscle.

So imagine a future where we’re not caught in endless drama, but channel all that creative and emotional energy into building an awesome Space Station 13 experience, finally free from the remake curse. Let’s make that happen.

1 Like