Open discussion about issues with project management and hub enforcement

I was made aware of this thread a day or two ago. I thought about compiling a document about all this stuff at the end of December when things were more heated, but I thought I’d just let go of it and move on. Then I noticed more misinformation being spread about me both here and in the Wizden Discord so thought I’d offer some rebuttal.

Here is the document that I’ve spent about 7-8 hours working on, compiling as many screenshots and fact checking dates as best as I could. I offer my response and correction to a lot of them, and also offer the full conversation with PJB from my perspective.

All responses to these forum posts is in the bottom in sections labelled Figure RF. This includes a response to Powder who has tried to slander me here because they got removed from a trial moderator spot for bringing drama to our community among other things.

I am honestly approaching this from a point of neutrality. As much as I imagine this will piss people off for how it makes them look, I’m willing to put an end to the drama from where Singularity is concerned. If that means leaving the EE council then that’s fine, but I do not respond to threats so that was never going to happen in December.

And thank you to members of the community who have stood by me or at least knew me enough to question what they’ve heard. I encourage everyone to do their own research and I’ve you’ve dealt with me in the past, consider if what you’ve been told is accurate.

The document. Very long and probably not formatted great but I just wanted to tell my story.

And here’s the actual response, this time I’ll go in order of posts, but I’ll continue to group replies to keep things organised. Also, I’ll use the actual quote feature for the sake of variety.

It would have been very difficult of me to respond to (almost) everything she said point-by-point without having read it all at least once. I just don’t accept being upset, rightfully or otherwise, as an ‘explanation’ (ie justification) for those screenshots, nor would anyone else if they’re being honest. I don’t think there could possibly be more clear-cut evidence of things being handled unprofesssionally than DMs where the biggest cheese of Wizden is handing out first-strike administrative action while calling the recipient a pathetic piece of shit who should fuck themselves with a rake. You can agree with the source of the anger, but I consider you reasonable and refuse to believe you’re able to look at that and genuinely think ‘this was the correct approach for the sake of the community’. As a counterpoint, if at any point Peptide had said anything along those lines, screenshots of that would have been foundational to the counter-argument. Being polite doesn’t mean you’re morally correct, but being as aggressive as that does mean that you are either unwilling or unable to consider how you’re escalating the situation by doing so, which is not how any of this should be handled.

Sure, I’m only in the SN discord, I won’t be joining the EE one because I don’t have a link. Searching all three of those terms, with a from:Peptide, the closest I get to misinfo is him saying things after the dehub like:
“There’s a lot of bias against us and other servers because wizden control the narrative”
“We won’t be going back onto wizden hub, they would never allow it in a million years because PJB hates us all”

Feel free to search yourself if you’re able, but at least in the channels I have access to in the discord the worst he had to say about you publically was that your treatment of them was unfair, and prior to the dehub he references you exclusively in terms of upstream development and content; it’s honestly kinda depressing to see how unhostile things were in 2023 where he’s talking about you as a trusted peer working on the game together.

Further, though - if the search did turn up results of Peptide being hostile, rude, or spreading malicious lies about yourself, as you seemed to think it would, why would this be a source that couldn’t be provided as evidence and only ‘hinted’ at? You said the reason you can’t provide evidence to most things is to protect your sources - what sources would have been compromised by screenshots of quotes from a public discord server, should they have existed?

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by ‘operational concerns’ here, but I’ll infer from context that it’s referring to low-level day-to-day hubministration, to which the questions begged are twofold;

Firstly, why not? The rules aren’t overlong, I don’t see why there wouldn’t be a brief section touching on how in situations where there are a bunch of intentionally spammed servers, dehubbing is the automatic response, for the sake of covering bases. If it’s a case of niche edge-cases, as I’ve already talked about, why isn’t there a process in the hub rules relating to that?

Secondly, assuming I am interpreting ‘operational concerns’ correctly here, how is that line drawn? Goob is not a small garbage server set up to fuck with you, so why would the rules that apply to low-level routine trash clearance also apply to it, in this case?

Goobstation misleading players only happened after they were told to change initially; ignoring that, shouldn’t the rules be set up assuming harm is potentially being done now? I feel like most cases of hub violation are exactly as urgent, if not more urgent, than misleading players into joining the wrong server. Obvious example being servers breaking the law in a way that threatens the entire game; why are these hub rules, in theory set up to prevent and protect against situations like that, treated as something that needs to be worked around in cases less extreme than that? If that’s an issue, the rules could and should reflect it.

If you don’t want to debate this, that’s perfectly fine, and it would be a tangent anyway. To sum up my position just for the record; I think exploring racism in scifi settings through alien analogue is a trope as old as at least the 1900s; to treat a fictionalised element inspired by racism simply existing in a context of informed consent as the same as the creator partaking in racism is like saying the game is immorally violent because people kill eachother in it.

I do think, however, that the rules should reflect specisism as not being allowed on the hub; that is not something people will infer from the existing rules.

On a second read, I’m wrong on this one. The line is “Strikes expire a year after their cause or causes are resolved”, to which I misread “or if causes are resolved” I’ll cop to misinterpreting that.

This is a pretty dishonest tactic, I feel. I’ve been consistent in my position that all the harrassment that I have seen that you have recieved, which I do not deny exists and there’s plenty of it, is unforgivable. I am not condoning anything, on this topic I’m arguing over facts as I see them pertaining to one instance and one person and I’ve laid out how I see them straightforwardly, while showing my working.

That being said, if the question of whether Peptide’s presence and shared posts in the EE server clear the bar for harrassment is something you’re not willing to discuss further, I can agree to disagree on that point for now, because it’s a small part of a bigger conversation.

The other part of this is, of course, that it leaves me unable to respond to a lot of what you’ve said, at the threat of you walking away from the conversation. I am more than happy to continue discussing the situation there, but under the assumption you’re drawing a red line under the topic, I’ll leave the other points relating to Peptide unanswered for now.

Well let’s see; other servers were rehubbed after leaving the EE server. If I were to have a word with Peptide, and if he’s happy to leave the EE discord server, would you be willing to rehub the Singularity game servers? If I’m right, the issue is that you’re both unwilling to be the first to blink because of percieved wrongs and hostility on both sides, if I need to be the third party to broker and de-escalate, I’ll do that. I obviously can’t speak for Peptide and will have to have the same conversation with him seperately.

If you’re willing to bury the hatchet, and he is as well, and if both parties make an effort to not instigate anything, including keeping their communities from doing so, surely this would be a way to falsify whether anything I’m saying has any merit, and demonstrate to people that think otherwise that you’re willing to come to the table, with practically zero risk to yourself? Worst case scenario it fails and you re-de-hub it and we’re back where we started, but people can’t say you didn’t make an effort to give them a second chance.

I do want to stress this, because I feel like I’m showing as red on your minimap right now - I genuinely do not believe that either of you are fundamentally bad people, though I think each of you thinks that about the other. Having a large community-in-exile is a necrotic hole in the community that can’t be solved through admin actions, but it can absolutely be minimized if people enter the situation looking to fix it on both sides.

EDIT:

I’m skimming through Peptide’s doc now; obviously approaching it with the context of potential bias in mind. I would just like to state for the record that despite me being in a lot of screenshots, this is not something I discussed, arranged, collaborated on or was in any way involved with. Peptide DM’d me a day or so ago after seeing the posts, and I discussed the situation where he did mention he was making a doc, and I offered no coment. If anyone wants logs/screenshots of that discussion I’d be happy to share the full thing, though obviously Peptide gets the right to redact anything from his end if he wants.

Yes for the record, it just so happens that you are asking most of the questions that PJB is replying to, but the title of each section of evidence should indicate who the actual poster is.

And yes, I’m open to squashing all this drama and actually helping out.

Just want to put my thoughts down while we’re here. Cards on the table, I have read through a lot, if not most, of the publically available info here (including the post from peptide just now). Through this, and seeing people behaving in discord as the whole thing blew up, i have come out of it with a pro-wizden opinion (hell i’ve got an admin app up. Which is hopefully gonna be seen soon yay). Just want to make sure my personal biases are fully open. I also want to add that I’ve come to this conclusion after reviewing the publicly available evidence. Of course there could be some other stuff that makes this whole thing moot but. I haven’t seen it. I can only use the info i’ve got.

When talking to others, i’ve described the hub rules as reasonably lenient, being largely ‘don’t fuck with other servers/the infra and don’t do anything actually illegal’. For the most part, this seems to get enforced pretty well (like this whole thing kicked off recently over DDOSing, DMCA, and some really weird claims, which i think falls under those categories), and while i can definitely understand the reasoning for (much of) the dehubbings, I do think that the perception of guilt by association, and an itchy trigger finger, has created a sense of unease with some people (and like. We’ve all had Warden shifts like that, at least I have.) Not really sure what a better solution would be honestly but it is what it is

To add my thoughts to this, in a project like this it is impossible for a hub to be neutral. This is a volunteer project, noones being paid, and everyone does what they do because, for whatever reason, they care about this game, and passion begets emotions. While people should try not to let these cloud their judgements too much, its frankly naïve to assume something like this could be ran truly impartially, and overall I think WIzden handles it generally right.

Overall, Peptide seems genuine in their document, reasonable where i’ve seen them interacting, and open to communication and change. (Also I find it hard to believe someone writes a 44 page document with sources without it coming from some genuine place). I could be proved wrong (and am open to be if it comes to it), but hell. I’d rather believe that most people are generally alright until proven otherwise yk? I would really like to see Wizden being open to communicating and finding a way forward, to hopefully allow as many people as possible to put this shit behind us.

From what i’ve seen Peptide is an excellent contributor and an asset to the project as a whole, and does seem to have been mostly swept up in this whole thing (similar to Arcadis), and at the very least is clearly willing to be cordial for the betterment of the project, and i really want to urge PMs to be willing to hear them out.

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I think everyone should be pro-wizden on this issue insofar as there’s a distinction there; without wizden none of us would be here discussing this, because there would be nothing to discuss. I’d consider the teamsports division and grudgebearing to be the enemies, rather than any one person or group - it’s about outcomes.

And to that end, fixing this dispute would be a meaningful first step towards improving things more broadly, and pre-emptively dealing with the causes that would lead to it repeating and amplifying - which seems like the likely outcome if nothing changes to me.

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Have you made a staff complaint? I think that what was said to you in those DMs is in clear violation of wizden’s staff policy.

Some people are above the staff policy and have been on previous occasions, hence the walk outs of some staff and some of the situations we’re in now. At least that’s the perception of a bunch of people regarding accountability and transparency. But yes, after being censored I messaged a discord mod to complain about said censorship. Obviously nothing was going to get done about it.

Just checked that policy too and it doesn’t seem to have the actual policy? Just definitions? Regardless I think it’s pretty clear what those DMs fall under.

Regarding Mithrandalfs last message, I’d like to remind everyone that I’ve always been pro upstreaming content and pro developing the base game as best and fast as possible. Until it became prohibitive to do so.

So yes, It’s been nearly a week now with zero response either here or in DMs so I imagine I’m being ignored.

In the CoC section: “This policy applies to all project members, regardless of rank, and is effective only within the scope of the project.

It has a definitions section, but this part is outside of it which means it is policy:

  • Respect: Members are expected to interact respectfully with others.
  • Zero Tolerance: There is zero tolerance for harassment, discrimination, or victimization. While disagreements are normal, personal attacks and insults are unacceptable.

I don’t think anyone is obligated to respond to your DMs. The proper channel is to submit a Staff Complaint in the Staff Complaints forum section.

You missed my point. Whether it’s written down or not it’s not the case we have seen.

And I meant to this thread.

This is still going?

When you write something with AI inside of a debate and all that comes out is complete nonsense dont be suprised when people dont reply to you because of the fact it was not written by a human. /:

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