Concerning Zamujasa / Xkeeper

[Flourish]

I am making this thread, on behalf of the admin team, to clear up misconceptions about what’s been happening with Zamujasa / Xkeeper. I’d like to share why we removed Zamu from the team, why we did not provide an explanation to players when we removed her, why we are now removing her from the community, and why we are telling you all of this now.

Why we removed Zamujasa from the team

Zamu was removed from the team via admin vote. Zamu was not removed from the team for disagreeing with other admins or for advocating for certain changes to the game. Zamu was removed for consistently being hostile and disparaging towards other admins whenever she disagreed with them, as well as a history of selectively leaking information to stoke player outrage. This behavior spans many years and many, many incidents. After yet another argument, Zamu outright stated she was not willing to change her behavior. So we decided to start a vote to remove her from the team. This decision was the culmination of years of conflict and hurt and we did not take it lightly.

Why we did not provide an explanation to players when we removed Zamujasa from the team

Because Zamu's removal from the team was largely due to interpersonal conflicts and did not have much to do with the actual game, we assumed it would not be necessary to share the context with the community and that it'd be counterproductive for players to know or have to deal with what was, bluntly put, admin drama. We also did not want to pour salt on the wound and speak badly of Zamu right after her removal. Despite feeling wronged ourselves, we took, what we thought, was the less bad option of staying silent and (attempting to) keeping the peace.

Why we are now removing Zamujasa from the community

After we removed Zamu from the team, she's continued to engage in the same behavior that got her removed, minus some of the more egregious personal attacks and jabs. When she keeps talking about how this sucks and that fucking sucks and the admin team sucks and why aren't the admins listening to the players and the admins should really be doing better and etc., I don't think it's because she's genuinely trying to help or improve things, but because she simply wants to complain and encourage division and conflict within the community. To me, it's clear that this isn't being done in good faith. And we don't have to put up with that. The admin team is not here to be anyone's punching bag. The players are not here for anyone to weaponize as part of their grievances with the team. So we are removing Zamu from the community as well.

Why we are telling you all of this now

Truthfully, we could’ve just continued to stay silent and weather this all out. We’ve already been doing it, and we’ve done it for so many other cases. Seeing all of this happen and its reverberations throughout the community, though, has made us reconsider. If we’ve made a mistake in not telling you this earlier—and it feels like we have, based on recent feedback—then the least we can do is tell you now. We don’t want to alienate players and have you believe that there’s some grand admin conspiracy or that we’re not communicating with you simply because we don’t respect you, when, in truth, things are far more complicated and we’re just a bunch of tired and hurt people who simply wanted things to stop hurting.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the admin team is perfect or faultless. Nor am I saying that Zamu has only ever been awful to other admins and never nice or that no one has ever wronged her in turn. (I realize that, whether we stay silent or speak out, we will always “lose” to some degree.) Our goal isn’t to convince everyone that we’re right and Zamu is wrong, but to share our perspective and explain why we did what we did. I've asked some other admins to respond to this post with their own experiences, in their own words, to further contextualize everything that's happened—use your own judgement and take of this what you will.

I’m sorry it came to this and that we didn’t do anything sooner. We intend for this to be a first step towards clearer communication with the community.

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For the sake of this thread not getting derailed, only admins will be able to reply. If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, feel free to either DM me (@5amsky on Discord), use the ]report or ]reportanon function via MedAss (the Discord bot), or make a private or public admin feedback thread.

If you are reading this thread and going "I have no idea what's going on" or "I do not care", that is totally fine and you do not have to care. This is intended for those who may feel confused or disillusioned by the admin team and recent events.

[Flaborized]

The entire set of admin chats basically feel like nicer, more comfortable places now that she's not around. While I don't think Zamu was treated fairly at every moment, she was obviously frequently acting in bad faith and would be mean frankly for the sake of being mean to other admins, in my view. We really were adverse to removing her for a long, long time because she's contributed very good things often and because we're generally adverse to removing admins (and adverse to conflict to some degree), but there's only so much strife one person can cause while seemingly never learning from their mistakes and improving on it. She admitted outright that she wasn't going to change her behavior, even. And it's not just that she held different views about the game or admin team than the rest of us, it was that she'd push her views in a very combative way. It felt like she wanted to get into big arguments and it left seemingly everyone including her very exhausted and upset. We as admins are historically pretty bad about identifying these situations when they come up; it seems obvious from an outside perspective: "If she's being so aggressive why don't you just remove her admin position." but most of us didn't want to get into any argument of any kind with zamu, and we did genuinely think she could work on it and improve until she said she wasn't going to. She has legitimate grievances with the admin team and game and useful insights but they're never presented respectfully.

I'm very glad that we're at least putting our experiences out for people to understand. One of the things zamu really believed in was allowing further transparency for admins, and letting us talk more openly about our individual experiences. Ironically now that she's not on the team anymore we've been moving towards that more, and I think part of that is that any discussion of it would've turned into a big Fight before, now we can actually talk it out in a respectful manner and do it. I don't mean to insinuate that zamu is a horrible person or anything, lots of people saw the contributions she made to the community and the positivity she was able to bring, but I also think it's important that I and other admins share these experiences, because I think we were genuinely treated very poorly by her quite often and I think few (if any) non-admin players know about it and that feels unfair. I think given the mental toll her behavior has taken on many admins and how she's very clearly acting in bad faith and trying to rile people up more than actually make meaningful positive change in the community, I personally think the removal of her from the community is very justified, and I hope our posts here help people understand where we're coming from on this because none of this has been pleasant and I think lots of admins want to just finish this up so we can have a space where we're comfortable working on the game. This whole situation sucks and I don't think anybody is happy that it's gone down like this!! And in the future I personally will be more cautious about this kind of behavior when I see it so it's less likely to go on for multiple years.

[Mordent]

Whether from going over an individual's ban through to major game development decisions and the details of their implementation, I've had to weigh up how much I care about the topic against the energy drain that is going to be having snarky snipes thrown my way, all the way to having stuff I work on and have enjoyed working on insulted.

This isn't to say I don't welcome criticism; I do. This wasn't criticism, though, but just a snarky beat-down, where it felt like I had two choices: take the high ground and be polite and professional back, and just wait for the next time, or step away.

More recently I'd felt like I couldn't talk about anything in any of the admin channels, because it could be sliced-and-diced and taken out of context and then used to weaponize the playerbase against a strawman version of my stance.

I understand the desire from players for transparency. I assure you, truly, that you do not want a window into the kinds of things we have to deal with from the players on a daily basis. You deserve better than getting a tiny, inflammatory slice of what goes on shown to you or brought up with the purpose of causing outrage.

The threat of having the people for whom I actually try to make the game safer, better, and more fun up in arms against me because of fires Zamu stoked has had me having to be guarded in what I say, and frankly I've been so detached from development in part because of it.

I've not felt empowered to do what I want to do without tacking on double the time that takes in heated, one-sided arguments. I didn't realize it would be quite so striking, but I haven't felt that way since we showed Zamu the door.

Sorry, Zamu. I know you're going through a lot, but you made being an admin not only not-fun but like a second job. I've come close to quitting several times because of it, and took numerous breaks from it as well. I'm sorry we couldn't do this sooner, rather than drag it out for you, as clearly none of us were having fun with it.

[jan.antilles]

For my part, I'll start with the most transparent thing I can share. Here is a screenshot of the de-admin thread that l made for Zamujasa.

   


I just want to clarify, now that a lot of folks have talked about why we did have to get rid of Zamujasa, why it took so long for us to do so. The biggest reason for me personally, even though yeah, I'm the one who made the de-admin thread, was that I didn't actually want her gone. She added so many good and unique things, she had so many good interactions with players, and a lot of the things she argued with the team about were things that I agreed with her on. This wasn't some like… comic book villain that needed to be taken out. This was someone who I wished could be my friend. She just kept hurting me, even when I agreed with her. And she was doing it to people I cared about. And she wasn't going to stop.

When she first left, she seemed happier. I hoped that she would be. I hoped that maybe this could be the beginning of something better. But it wasn't.

To Zamujasa: I'm sorry that it took me so long to rip off the bandaid. We all needed it. You needed it.

To the rest of the admin team: I'm sorry I've let all this get to me so personally. You needed a steadier hand than mine ended up being.

To the players of the community: I'm sorry we weren't clear about this sooner. It was easier when she was just venting to us and attacking us. I hoped that we could keep the drama contained so that it didn't need to be a distraction and a downer when we're all just here to play a game. I was wrong.

[Flourish]

I know I wrote the original post, but there I was also speaking on behalf of the team. Speaking only on behalf of myself, Zamujasa often treated me like shit whenever we disagreed on something. She'd mock me, make passive aggressive jabs at me, and refuse to communicate sincerely with me. Like, legit the "cyberbully on Twitter telling you 'maybe this is why you have no friends'" type stuff. I put up with it because I thought that was just what I had to do and that I should just try to be more understanding and a better person and that things would change.

My desire to "be the better person" has very much also been influenced by how Zamu was severely mistreated and wronged in the past. If you were here in early 2020, you may recall how a bunch admins left, after trying to (and temporarily succeeding in) remove Zamu from the team. Long story short, the instigating admin, Azungar, was a transphobe and a bigot and really wanted Zamu gone. He tried to hide his motivations under the guise of "I just genuinely care so much about you all and the community and Zamu just consistently makes life miserable for everyone else" and I, personally, nearly bought it. I hope you can see how that'd affect us, Zamu especially, and contribute to my deep ambivalence about this all. But, just because you've been deeply hurt doesn't mean it's right for you to keep hurting others.

[LeahTheTech]

For me it just came down to looking back at how many admins and devs had quit or been burned out as a direct or partial result of Zamujasa's continued presence on the team. I truly hate that it had to come to this, I'm not proud of the part I played in it, but I couldn't see more people I care about driven out. That's it.
I think with hindsight we should have made this post immediately, and the whole spiralling loss of trust that followed is a lesson in communication.

[Tarmunora]

Let me preface by saying that I don't think Zamujasa and I ever partiularly got along well. We did not vibe, and after some early butting of heads a number of years ago, I started actively making an effort to reduce/avoid conflict, because the majority of the time, Zamu was making good contributions, and good adminning. So I did my best to maintain professional courtesy, weathered her various slights and snipes, and for the most part kept myself out of the constant arguments Zamu was always starting with other admins, and hoped that things would get better. That when Zamu said things along the lines of "I know that \[these arguments are\]/I'm a problem" and "I'm sorry, and I'm working on getting better" that she meant it. But things never got better. Zamujasa's apologies started ringing hollow as she went on the same self-righteous crusades against anyone she vaguely disagreed with, throwing stuff from years ago in peoples' faces that they thought were resolved, and then saying "sorry I'll do better" after another admin leaves the server temporarily over the verbal abuse. This didn't change until after her final blow-up where Zamujasa took the mask off and said outright that she would never change, and that our only options were to put up with her abuse or deadmin her.

So we did. And while I'm disappointed that it ended in anger and unhappiness instead of reconciliation and personal growth; by her own words, she didn't leave us any other viable choice.

[ZeWaka]

one thing that was extremely tiring to deal with was the constant re-hashing of events that happened far in the past. like, events from literally 2019 - when the server, admin team, and coder culture was extremely different. things that were done by people who haven't been here in years. it was ceaseless.

zamu had a good point about these things like 70% of the time, but the way she conveyed that point was through extreme snark and aggressive behavior.
like, she would literally egg on people to make deadmin votes if they disagreed with her.

another big thing is we regard admin chat as a private channel to talk about the game - a shared safe space.
therefore, obviously, sending screenshots of it to non-admins is kind of a big breach of trust. zamu has been leaking admin chat for years.
here is a recent quote:

ADMIN: I was being an ass and I'm sorry but can you not randomly leak admin chat just to be pissy at me
zamu: frankly? no. ...

all the above, amongst everything else the other admins have said, just made me not want to talk to her at all, much less work on problems she had with things I coded.
kinda sucks that this all just went on for literal years :/