Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

I know this is a sensitive subject to a lot of people, and I understand. But regarding recent events with Epyc Wyn, I have to criticize the forum staff for being exceedingly lenient on your bans.

You might think it's strange for me to criticize this, but honestly, letting him fester on the forums was the worst thing you could have done. You made yourselves the villains in his eyes unknowingly by continuing to give him chances. It was clear he would not have left on his own – with a long enough ban he would have gone to other places.

Even if he didn't go onto ED, he still continued to flood the forums with shitty threads constantly, which were made even worse by the peanut gallery.

I know it's in an attempt to be nice and lenient with him, especially since he might just not know any better, but there's simply no other appropriate way to deal with this kind of stuff.

Now I don't think that you're to blame for his behaviour directly, since its entirely possible that he just went to ED thinking "lolol memesite" but I think that by continuing to reprimand him lighter more often instead of just giving him the banhammer convinced him that he was being actively oppressed here by the moderators, and gave him a reason to try to get a personal army rallied.

In addition there is no real reason to be light with bans. Rules are rules for a reason. He was warned nigh infinite amount of times. On any other forum he would have been gone for good ages ago.

tl;dr you should have just banned him months ago and not wept a single tear. We would have been spared the stupid threads and he would have sperged elsewhere on the internet without likely trying to get ED involved.

we couldn't ban him because the admins didn't want him banned

I thought that was made pretty obvious serveral times

Sorry, I'm not blaming the moderators specifically, I wasn't sure who it was. I don't pay attention to those social doo-dads. You know what I mean.

It's not meant to be taken personally but yeah. I just thought I'd like to say my two cents on the issue.

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In all seriousness, Epyc's issue couldn't be summarized in a small forum thread, nevermind a single post. On one hand he was, by both common opinion and according to most mods, deserving of a ban. That being said, much of Epyc's "wrongdoings" were vaguely, if every against KYM's rules. This brought the solidity of KYM's rules into question, but it also raised the subject of how much KYM's mods were allowed to deviate from standard procedure. (Turns out they aren't, thats the admins job, as we saw with the forum ban)

Adding to this, much of the mod treatment Epyc received was actually quite unfair to him. Every time a mod overstepped their bounds to punish Epyc for a minor offence (if any offence occurred at all), it lent that much more support to his side of the argument. Epyc's claim that KYM and its mod team were out to "get him" weren't unfounded, but neither were the claims that he was intentionally inflammatory, provoked other users, and generally a troll. From an outside (read: an admin) perspective, it could appear that KYM itself was feeding Epyc the material he used to bother the site, thus earning more backlash.

By the time it became apparent to everyone that continuously dealing with Epyc was fruitless, the forum ban was placed as a way to keep him away from the community itself without banning him from the site. The idea was that if the community was bad for Epyc, and Epyc was bad for the community, cutting him out should solve the problem without forcing us to resort to a full-on ban for someone who didn't necessarily break the rules.

TL;DR KYM wronged Epyc, Epyc wronged KYM, the forum ban isn't so much a punishment as it is a way to stop conflict. Stop discussing it.

I think Roy explained it best once: Wyn is that guy at a party who double dips and uses up all the toilet paper. Technically they're doing nothing wrong and are just there to have fun like everyone else, but they're also misbehaving and should be removed from the party as they are ruining it.

Let's be clear, it were the entries that saved him. At the end of the day, KYM is a business and the entries are our money maker; the forum comes second. If Wyn didn't have entries as a redeeming quality, the admins also would've banned him (and he got close once when he tried to push his opinion through on entries).

I pretty much agree with Doeoeod on everything but I'd like to add, is there any other situations you think the mods were too lenient? Because outside Wyn, I don't see mods being lenient in terms of punishment (except maybe to each other). Are you complaining about this one, really specific case?

Everyone handled the Epyc Wyn situation terribly. He didn't really break the rules as often as people thought; and where he did, mods handled it poorly. Then there were the mods who picked on him because he was annoying, lending credence to the leniency towards him. Being annoying is not against the rules; if it was, I'd be responsible for banning roughly 95% of the site. Keep that in mind.

Also Blind Spy, if you really want us to start being more strict on rules, keep in mind that you've had some really bad contributions to the community recently.

I'd argue that Wyn broke the rules more than we're giving him credit for to be honest, but in the end it seems all Blind Spy and the majority of users really only wanted to ban him for shitty shitposting and mediocre at best threads, which makes me wonder why you even bothered making this thread. Those offenses you accuse him for are in no way against the rules, and a lot of the warnings/suspensions were out of just dislike of the guy, so really the worst he deserves is a months suspension. Like doed said the forum ban was more of a diffusion of the problem rather than a punishment, as to admins he hasn't done too many things wrong. If you really look at it the mods were never lenient and even if they were Wyn never did enough wrong to be banned only to be nearly, so really what is the point of this thread?

While some of Wyn's warnings/suspensions were not deserved, he also wasn't punished for things he did do wrong, especially near the end (after MScratch banned him) because we were unsure how the admins would react. In the end, part of the reason Epyc got forum banned was because the admins didn't trust us enough to take our word on a ban, which they normally always do. I don't blame them for that. So, the last thing we needed was to do anything that the admins would not approve of. When asking if we should ban him, I even PMed Don to make sure we weren't gonna mess up.

I think Epyc was a fluke. Someone who wouldn't learn and was always right in their eyes, but at the same time only made minor offenses and actually contributed. That kind of combination is pretty rare. It was made more of a mess due to the fact that he was unfairly treated, and that the admins weren't really paying attention very well to what he was doing. It was a perfect storm of sorts that I don't think could be replicated now that the mods had experience with Epyc, and Don is more active in the comments and the forums.

Let's finally put the Epyc discussion to rest. We've been talking about him for far too long. Say what you need to say and be done.

At this rate, whatever you decided to do or how it ends, Epyc will go down infamously.

Well, at least that's probably what he hopes for.

Ok but like, on the topic of epyc can we stop going on his wall?
Some users are legit making fun of him and downvoting every post he makes, its just rude and if you don't like him you shouldn't bother.
Just had to say that.

^This. I thought we went over this back when Gaben was the big target, and we've gone over it multiple times in the comments, there is no excuse for taking this kind of thing to people's walls, keep off it.

the witch hunt problem that you pointed out before. something that a user has been doing it and left alone just because it was only him going to peoples walls and post bait comments .
now this….

So then why aren't you warning them??

We just went over this a week ago.

I'll go do that right now. As Wyn kinda made his wall his own personal blog, basic questions regarding ED stuff will be considered fine, but any bullshit beyond that will get a warning.

Would you mind if I issue the warnings? I need to get used to my zero tolerance policy now that I'm not allowed to argue with people.

Also, I haven't been paying attention to his wall. I figured the smart thing to do after he was done away with was to ignore him; although, evidently, intelligence is far too hard to ask for from the community.

Same here; I only decided to read his wall after the posts in this thread, and upon checking discovered no warnings were handed out yet.

Warned them already.