very-recently (5 minutes ago when I started writing) reactivated user here, basically a no one that joined the community in 2020 due to quarantine boredom and mainly focuses on a Complex Doom addon.
A few premises that I hope won't cause any issue. I know exactly who I'm targeting with this:
1) Hello farmers, don't bother screenshotting this, I don't like to be screenshotted
2) @[bigotry] banned comrade, sorry but Russian Overkill works way way better with Clusterfuck monsters XD
3) @banned "you know who you are": you can keep saying until year 2525 that your friend is easy to manipulate, but accept the fact that that doesn't justify "uwu shota balls"-like reactions. Do you think she has nothing to do/ask/want with/to/from children? Ok, so then you must realize that the problem is a possible bipolar disorder, because none of us "sane-minded" would ever reacted like that to such a disgusting thing. I myself would never have my mouth water in front of pizza made of actual shit; if I ever do that, while jokingly calling myself a food gourmet, then I'd check if I have a wood chip stuck in my brain. Was all this a super secret plan of some transphobes against Marisa and she is not what she's been banned for? Ok, bring me CONCRETE PROVES, like a paper from a psychiatrist telling us all that those reactions happened during a non normal state of mind, because the easy-to-manipulate excuse justifies a bunch of things, but not all of them. Mind that even people that are in such a mental state and can't fully understand what they are doing in that moment are supposed to pay if they commit a crime, otherwise I could just train myself to commit murders while sleepwalking et voilà. [edited to add a last sentence here]
Done with premises.
Let me start saying I mostly agree with what Krakken said about losing a bit/lot of esteem in the Zdoom staff. Even tho I will continue "bullying" some of them whenever I need ZScript advices, it would be hard for long time to see them again as normally fair people... not a nice thing.
I'd like yall to realize that even for people that "live" in the niche of a niche of this community (with enough known drama already), this whole situation was quite shocking. Even more so, because it was brought to light from a random, for me that I didn't know who Marty was, video. So, sorry to disagree with the head of the heads in person, Graf, but that video was necessary, because from the other side there was no intention to come clear and clarify the situation with "us plebs". I know it feels like it's an exaggeration because those types of videos are done in a way that the speaker can easily convince the 99% of the viewers, exception made for who parties Marisa apparently, that he's 100% right and admins are 100% wrong. That might not be completely true, but you can't seriously talk as if Marty is less than 90% right here, maybe only because it created "drama".
I understand that when it comes to such accusations to a friend, or someone who is seen as a community pillar, it's tough to detach from the first emotional reactions and do what's needed to be done, BUT since the admins are being responsible of a whole community, full of minors too, that's something you'd have to face sometimes, hopefully a very limited amount of times. Someone here before mentioned the line of his work and that applies to you too. As an example: a policeman is allowed to befriend a crime committer, because he can't know that at the first meeting, but the same policeman is not allowed to excuse, justify or protect that same friend if he knows he's committed a crime. That's the major mistake you tried to do with Marisa. She, as any other random user that could have been involved in those screenshots, should have been blocked and temporarily banned immediately, until investigation would have confirmed or confuted the thing. I know the risk is to create a tiny crack in your relationship with said person, but the risk of compromising the whole community is much bigger; (un)fortunately the logic would want you to choose the smaller risk every time. If the person, in this case Marisa, is clever enough, she would have understood your move in case you would have later found her to be completely innocent. Hard to be done, but has to be done all the times. Policemen risk their job for similar exceptions, as so should admins/mods. If you are unable to do this, I'm sorry to be caustic here, but the role is not for you.
Another major mistake is trying to apply the same rules differently to different people, because of whatever I don't care: that's called abuse of power. If I was the subject of those screenshot, I would have been perma-banned, without ANY chance to defend myself, to justify, to contextualize, to anything. I know also that every person that would have even dared defending me would have been muted/yeeted/banned almost instantly. This is one of the reasons I had a small discussion with Marcaek once for *insert random Complex Doom drama here*, that luckily solved in 0 time. That kind of behaviour really irritates me, because I'm a constant victim of power abuse, tho in real life, not on forums or discord servers. This wants to be another reminder to yall that this is a community: once you start applying rules only to some and not to yourselves and your friends, then you're looking for a sect, where whoever joins is going to be your personal yes-man. A community is made of a lot of different people with different opinions: one thing is to kick out "extremists", a different thing is to randomly ban whoever doesn't agree with you, and since this happened even inside the FunPolice, then "us plebs" are basically cannon fodder for some of the admins. The reason why the community has so many people is mainly the common passion for Doom and also because there are people that can appreciate gzdoom without having to really like the people behind it. Some people are inside small niches and servers and try to have nothing to do with any of the devs, so basically all this bs means nothing for them. I'm quite sure tho that it can't really last forever, because some people might take longer to get tired, but they will eventually end up migrating elsewhere.
Other thing: the anti-Rachel feeling is quite clear, there's no point to keep flooding this post repeating the same things against the same person (that might soon regret reactivating my account lol). She did mistakes, indeed, it's clear. I don't really know, except a few screenshots here and there, what happened to these actors being named randomly, like Carnevil, the skulltag guys, the realm667 guys etc... so I can't speak for any of them. I can only say this is another major problem: if Rachel has been the problem for many for so long (if I understood correctly, some of those events happened 5-10 years ago), this topic should have been talked WAY FUCKING BEFORE Marty's video. I know that a popular YT video is quite a strong weapon, but someone, specifically the same admins that are now somewhat convinced of Rachel bad behaviour, should have noticed this really long time ago. I can't do a witch hunt because I'm too new to the community to know old facts about old and current people, but try to think about how and what to do exacly. De-admin Rachel seems the right options for many, but do you also know what to do after? Who's gonna be in charge? Who's gonna be in charge of controlling Rachel's replacement? Who's gonna make sure that the replacement doesn't make the same mistakes? Rushing solutions would be as stupid as not doing anything, because if you don't know how to maintain the new after-Rachel reality, said solution is gonna fail too, maybe in one month or in 5 years, but it's gonna fail guaranteed. This wants to be more of a suggestion to all the people the wrote in this topic to try to come up, possibly together and unanimously (including Zandro and TSPG guys, why not) to a solution that can work. How exatly? I don't know. Call some expert forum administrators, copy someone elses (good) strategies, follow North Korea "very diplomatic" government example, whatever you could all agree. Considering that you have different ideas and opinions, a solution that makes everyone happy should be fine in theory.
Guess I spoke already too much.
@yum13241, you're wrong. The Electric Boogaloo is Skulltag 3; Skulltag 2 is "The Spread Rune's return".
...and I got my anti-climax too
I was pretty shocked when I read it.
