Evening everyone, Ferrell here, speaking as part of the Mod Team and for the Mod Team of the Forums.
First off, apologies for letting this thread get completely out of control; until today none of us had been able to check back in and see things were getting out of hand, and we were trying to stay hands off until we all had some agreement on the text we wanted to post in response to everyone’s inquiries. Unfortunately, this lead to the original thread going away from a request for Volunteers and into a discussion of the issue before we had a chance to respond. We apologize for this and want to rectify the situation, so that thread has been locked but preserved, and it has been linked to this message, and this message linked back, so we can ensure full transparency, and avoid any implication that we are trying to bury or hide the problems that must be addressed.
The text we agreed upon up to this point is as follows:
In late June, the person responsible for the day-to-day running of the Gauntlet community spaces abused his power over a personal dispute and has since then stepped down from those responsibilities as well as stepping away from the community side of the Gauntlet entirely - namely, Slack and the gaming calendar - and hand the reigns over to Lowell. For more information, see these posts:
https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/blog/these-games-i-love-part-two
Gauntlet ChangesSince Lowell has taken over, the Gauntlet Care Committee was formed and has been working to form a more concrete and agreed-upon Code of Conduct and while it’s been slow, issues are being addressed and worked through.
On November 9th, Shane locked down the forums into read-only mode and made a post (The Future of the Forums) indicating his desire to step away from the Gauntlet over decisions made by “the management of the Gauntlet”.
Given that Shane set the forums up and was responsible for many of the resources required to maintain the forums, stepping away from the Gauntlet was a process that would include transitioning maintenance of the forums off to someone else. The lockdown of the forums came as a surprise as Shane didn’t let anyone know ahead of time that this was his plan. Shane provided a backup of the forums which was then used to set up a new environment for the forums to run in. That process was completed on November 10th.
In addition, we have had individuals decide to leave the message board for their own reasons. In the case of these moderator/admin team of these forums, the departures included Shane & Joao (formerly admins) as well as Cass (formerly a moderator). Yoshi has also stepped down from the moderator team though he has indicated that he’ll still be around as a member of the forums.
Despite any disagreements or anything that’s happened, the moderator team would like to thank Shane, Joao, Cass, Yoshi, and for everything they’ve done in service of getting these forums up and maintaining them as a place for high quality discussion of TTRPGs and LARP play and design.
As the first sentence of the Gauntlet Inclusivity Policy states, “The Gauntlet strives to create an inclusive, safe, fun and engaging community for gamers of all kinds.” That is still the goal of the remaining mod team and we’re dedicated to uphold those values. The only change anyone should notice from here on out is maybe a few new faces on the mod team.
We would now like to open this up for discussion and feedback. We want to stress that anything posted in this thread should still follow all guidelines (https://forums.gauntlet-rpg.com/faq) - we ask that you please be civil and constructive in your feedback. If you have any feedback that you don’t feel comfortable posting publicly, we encourage you to send a message directly to the mod team.
We still welcome your feedback and inquiries, but we will be heavily moderating this post to keep it on topic of looking for help being a moderator on this site. Some comments on the post “Seeking volunteers for moderator team” have been moved here, as they better suit this topic. We will leave comments open on the previous post for 24 hours, and lock it on 12/3/2019 @ 8PM (GMT -6) so that people can have their say and ask questions, after which that post will be locked.
To go back to our original request, I will copy the former Opening Post below:
Right now we have a skeleton crew of forum moderators helping out – we are looking to expand that team to make sure things continue to run smoothly here. We’d especially appreciate members of marginalized communities to help bring better perspective and more representation to this space, and to make the voices of PoC, disabled or non-cishet people heard clearer. Going forward we’re asking that moderators (and other volunteers) serve at most one year, to keep people from getting burned out and reduce exploitation.
If you’re interested in volunteering to help out, please contact @SabineV5 or @Robert and one of us will reach out to discuss further.
Thank you to everybody for your participation in the forums and for what you do for this community.