On 5/23/07, Skyring skyring@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/23/07, Philippe Beaudette philippebeaudette@gmail.com wrote:
My thoughts (as a regular user - I'm not an admin) -
I'm gravely disturbed by this whole process (or lack thereof). Through my eyes, I see a political vendetta that was pursued within the ranks of the admins, who I would wish that I could trust implicitly, and my confidence in that is shaken. There's nothing scary than a mob of villagers pursuing someone with torches. My natural instinct is to jump into the fray on the side of the "wronged" party, but obviously, that's not appropriate here.
Hell, no! If there's admins on one side and someone else on the other, close ranks and hunt the bastard down. If he turns to defend himself, hound him all the more. If he strikes out against his tormentors, be doubly ferocious. If he complains of the injustice, stop his mouth.
Look, please keep this civil.
What happened to Jeff was a travesty - which even Jeff's harshest critics immediately recognized and publically stated as such. People with the logs (participants and Arbcom) can assess blame among those present, but I think that this episode has made it very clear that such activity is really bad, that we don't want admins doing that, and that it shouldn't happen again.
The one thing this clearly was not was an organized pack attack by a large abusive admin community against an unliked user. Whether one admin made a mistake, or he was egged on by others (knowingly or unknowingly), I don't know and won't speculate. The admin involved has publically apologized in depth for what he did. The "incident" was almost over faster than Jeff could even notice in (the autoblock had to be resolved, but the rest was fixed very quickly).