Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-209421-20130314105636/@comment-1272757-20130320035052

InMemorium wrote: Flashfire212 wrote:

InMemorium wrote:

4. I'm not skipping the election process again. Done it once, accidentally created a monster. As much as I've seen a lot of melodrama on the wiki's chat in the last few days, this point still intrigues me. When did this happen? Years ago. As I said, I hand chose the first four admins. I didn't found the site, but the founder had abandoned it, so we were overrun with trolls. I asked Wikia Staff to intervene, and I chose four admins at that time - KittheCat, Manta-Bee, Guyviroth and myself. I thought, back then, that Guyviroth and I would counteract each other, but I was wrong. Kit became the first bureaucrat, and promoted more users into admins, and they started making all of their decisions off-the site in private votes, which I was not privy to, despite being an admin. As such, most of the fights within the admin group was me against them, because I didn't agree with their choices. So, in essence, I created the original, near-secular administration team, and at the same time, I gave Guyviroth (who was demoted and banned after that point repeatedly) his first run with power. Well I decided to take a look at Guyviroth's page and I noticed a few things that caught my eye;

1) With over 4000 edits, very few of which were roleplaying and most where his own articles, I'd say he did quite a bit for the site in terms of bulking it up. His drawings are pretty amazing too, but that's just a personal taste.

2) His ban list is a bit... redundant, for lack of a suitable word. I mean, most of his bans were overturned within 24 hours. A couple were long-kept, naturally, but it's a bit fishy to me that this "monster" has had a number of bans, meaning that he'd also have to be unbanned numerous times.

3) Joining the wiki since 2009, I'd think a "monster" would have been banned, finally, within the first month. Not three years later.

4) You said his "first run of power". That would mean he's had more than one oppurtunity at adminship? Wouldn't that also mean that the users had some sort of confidence in him, what with needing nominations?

Now I'm not saying I like the guy, or even defending him, but he's clearly not one of these fire-and-forget wannabe trolls or vandals that often attack wikis. There's more to this than simply being "we made a monster" or whatever kind of melodramatic nonsense people would like to use for a scapegoat.

You're very, very right InMemorium. Guyviroth was anything BUT a fire-and-forget troll or vandal. Somehow, in his three years of being here, he proved to be an annoyance, a threat, an inspiration, an asset, and few words I can't mention here all rolled up into one person. Allow me to address everything you brought up.

1) A 4000 edit on this site is really nothing special. Many people can easily make 10,000 within a few months. Guy's active was very irregular and infrequent; about 90% of the time he was either working on his articles or involved in some sort of big mess or drama.

2) The reason his ban list seems redundant is the very reason a group admin decision was made for his final ban. Guyviroth would repeatedly use other wikis or chat systems such as Xat to bug and on several occasions outright harass the admins into unbanning him. On other occasions he would even go to other admins in order to get himself unbanned. He got himself unbanned by either pressuring the responsible admin or telling another admin his side of the story, often filled with half-truths or twisted facts to make himself as sympathetic as possible.

3) As you said, Guyviroth wasn't a fire-and-forget troll. He had friends on this wiki. For the first few years, most of them were either admins or bureaucrats. As for how he wasn't already taken care of until last year, I refer you to answer 2.

4) Actually, his first run was his only run. During a huge incident shortly after I joined Guyviroth convinced the other admins and crats that crossover articles (moves, characters, and the like) needed to be deleted on the grounds of "copyright violation" (which in retrospect doesn't make a lick of sense since none of us made any sort of profit). I know these to not be rumors as Flash suggested because one of the 'crats involved told me this fact a year or so after the debacle. The crats and admins listened to him because he had experience. Anyways, the mass-deletion lead to a huge fallout on the wiki and for a while many of its members temporarily left the wiki. During that time Guy's behavior and actions towards others were so volatile and near-abusive of power that he was demoted. He would have originally been permabanned then and there, but after being banned he went to Genesjs, a bureaucrat who had left the wiki and been inactive for some time already, and convinced Genesjs to unban him. Even though he was unbanned and continued to be an enormous thorn in the sides of many Users and admins, I do believe that was the last time he ever gained power on the wiki.

Guy is an incredibly complicated case to explain for those who weren't there personally, mostly because his actions or involvement often lead to major incidents of "melodrama" on the wiki. The only reason I can go into such detail about it is because I had the very dubious honor of being the one person to fight with him the most during his time on the wiki, and I though I'm rather shamed to admit it I had roughly as much of a hand in some of the drama as he did because of our vastly differing views on how a wiki should be run. Talking to him has been attempted many times; the problem is you can very rarely ever get a straight truth out of him. Either he twists and interprets events in such a way that you believe him, or you've dealt with him so often that you can't believe a word he says. In fact, I don't ever recall Guyviroth taking responsibility for the issues he caused or apologizing to the people he insulted or otherwise mistreated. Truth be told, the reason he was finally banned wasn't just because of all the actions he had previously taken and bans he squirmed out of; his belittling and insults towards the admins just got so frequent and so harsh that one admin had to ask why we were taking what amount to harassment, a default bannable offense. No-one came up with an answer. Combined with his experience and track record (which means he really should have known how to treat other wiki members with respect by then as well as the consequences) and the fact that his only saving graces, his experience and coding expertise, not only were not put to any constructive use but also were already supplied by equally experienced/skilled Users who were much more capable of treating their fellow wiki members with kindness and respect, and the simple fact is no-one saw any reason we should take his crap anymore.

I apologize for giving everyone a massive wall of text to read. If you want the TL;DR version, here:

TL;DR: Guy was a capable and experienced User who used to be and could have continued to be an asset to the wiki, but his immense disrespect for the wiki and its community and counter-productive actions eventually just outweighed any good he could have done.

Sorry for the lack of timeliness on this post; as you can probably tell it took quite a while. I dealt with Guy more than Flash due to Flash's timezone and my less passive methods of trying to help the wiki, so I had more to say. Feel free to get back on topic.

Speaking of which, if you don't count this demotion as legitimate I've actually never been legitimately demoted. The first time was due to a fight with a friend off-site that kinda got pulled onto here (not to mention a misuse of corruption call where no policies had been broken), and the second time was well... this one.