Townhall meeting this weekend!

[Camryn]

EDIT: this was written prior to pope and Azungar's latest responses.

not that my message changes in anyway, but I figured I should make that clear

my honest opinion on all this is that the players/mentors don’t need to see or hear any of this. We aren’t owed anything. It’s just exerting extra energy.

, but we should definitely be careful about peeling back too many layers of separation between players, coders, and admin staff. A certain amount of professional detachment should be held

said what I was trying to say in a better way. Infighting is not the players business. They should be kept in the dark, if anything. Too many cooks spoils the broth

No.

That sort of blackbox information policy is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.

It is disingenuous and harmful to both players and staff.

As representatives of the larger playerbase, admins should be able to be held accountable by the people they represent. Hiding inter-admin conflict to maintain a veneer of respectability prevents this from happening.

More importantly, it deprives staff members of a valuable pressure relief valve. Ultimately, admins are still people. Conflicts are going to happen. Stress and tension are going to build. In a closed system like the one proposed in the current revision of the admin guidelines (see spoiler at bottom of post), there is nowhere for this pressure to go. Eventually the container will fail, and we'll have another blowout on our hands.

If we want to actually respect the mental and social wellbeing of our admin team, we can't force them to bottle up their emotions and try to "settle" things internally. Especially since that tactic has already been tried and clearly hasn't worked.

While I'm here, I'd also like to address Azungar's comments about Goon no longer being "politically neutral ground."

There is no such thing as "politically neutral ground." To even view "politically neutral ground" as desirable is to support a false equivalency between the values of the right and the left. To give equal credibility to both the ideology that seeks to eliminate the rights and freedoms of entire groups of people for just being different and the one that seeks to protect those rights is tremendously misguided at best and morally abhorrent at worst.

Even if you decided to create "politically neutral ground" by forbidding any political discussion, you would be inherently taking a political stance in favor of the status quo.

The same status quo that values profit over the lives of employees and sees prisoners as tools to be exploited rather than people to be reformed

The same status quo that genuinely oppresses a large portion, perhaps even a majority, of our player base.

The members of our community deserve to feel safe and welcome in our digital family, regardless of their rank.

That includes our admins, coders, and other staff.

That is why I cannot in good conscience support in any way, shape, or form this proposed guideline:
Spoiler!

Under no circumstances are members of staff to communicate internal issues or secrets to the players or general public. This includes, but is not limited to: Interpersonal arguments between members of staff, opinions of specific players or groups of players held by members of staff or staff in general, planned or future game functions, or information about administration structure that has been decided will be kept quiet. The sole exception is that you can talk about secrets and other game features IF AND ONLY IF you are either the sole person who created that content, or have explicit permission from the person or people who did. You probably want to screenshot that permission in case it’s challenged!