This forum report by Me and @Swiffe. on Ethan/Jabba will consist of 4 major failures he has committed as a Director: Ineffectiveness, Inactivity, Inability to Work as a Team, and a Hyper Fixation on Monetization and Metrics.
Ineffectiveness
Overall with all of this evidence, we conclude that the community is not sustainable with Ethan as a Director. It is not just his inactivity, ineffectiveness, or belligerence, he has actively threatened our operations and credibility of the staff team. He is no longer the lead admin that he used to be because the power has gotten to him. We are calling for his resignation.
Everyone that has signed this document:
Swiffe
J3kawesome
Lordy
Ryan
Nuno
Danstorm
TragicMagic
Aawolly
Titan
Panda With a Gun
Helix
Spitefulvenom
The Muffinman
FrogDoggo
SavannahBanana
martinandrew970
Kythol
Ainoyu Yunomi
Azaelus
Acnologia
Syn
Chewie
ParkRangerMoon
LadyCloudia
Moleman
Sera
BARTHOLOMEW
Pauly
CodingMachine
Pacifist
Ahalan
Kamoflajh
alex_
Any of the responses that were too hard to read will be uploaded here
Ineffectiveness
- Ineffectiveness in handling GSU cases
- Ethan was put in charge of handling the GSU cases here on AHG. He had the all the information needed to report the accused person to the police and failed to act on it. He blamed it on one website not working on the two occasions he attempted to fill out the form while there are other websites and places that he could have used to report the user to the police or higher authority. Instead of owning up to his mistake, he decided to defend his handling of the situation for hours until he finally gave in and reported the user to the police after being pressured from several leads and a director.
- Ethan was put in charge of handling the GSU cases here on AHG. He had the all the information needed to report the accused person to the police and failed to act on it. He blamed it on one website not working on the two occasions he attempted to fill out the form while there are other websites and places that he could have used to report the user to the police or higher authority. Instead of owning up to his mistake, he decided to defend his handling of the situation for hours until he finally gave in and reported the user to the police after being pressured from several leads and a director.
- Provided no guidance for the Community Relations team
- Ethan had an idea for a Community Relations team which would be led by an admin. We implemented this team and from the start, Muffin was set up to fail. Ethan provided no guidance to Muffin or Ryan on what the Community Relations team should do. He also shot down Muffin's ideas/initiatives, but then failed to give him any direction. Ethan also dumped many personal projects onto the Community Relations team and admin which were not proper tasks to be handled by this team.
- Ethan's activity as the Director in charge of the staff team
- Ethan has been the Director that is in charge of the staff team since the inception of AHG, but has barely acted in that role this whole time. Most of the leadership of the staff team has fallen on the leads and Pierogi. When it comes to pings for Leadership, he very rarely answers or partakes in the staff team.
- Not answering the questions from the community
- On multiple occasions, Ethan has been contacted via DM's about bans he placed on users in certain channels in Discord, such as #friendly-space. When the users DM Ethan, he ghosts them and provides them with no answer.
- On multiple occasions, Ethan has been contacted via DM's about bans he placed on users in certain channels in Discord, such as #friendly-space. When the users DM Ethan, he ghosts them and provides them with no answer.
- Disboard Situation
- Ethan added a bot that exposed our Discord to the public without any heads up or consultation from the Leadership, let alone the Directors. This bot posed a security risk for our Discord as he left us vulnerable to attacks from spam bots, something which did end up occuring. After this and a lot of arguing amongst the Leadership, he removed our invite link from the Disboard site, but did not disable the bot. Once he finally disabled the bot, he did not announce it to the public -- only to the administration team. Since August 8th, your bumps in the channel were doing nothing for our server. (That means that a total of 145 bumps were useless). He finally archived the channel on September 13th
- Ethan added a bot that exposed our Discord to the public without any heads up or consultation from the Leadership, let alone the Directors. This bot posed a security risk for our Discord as he left us vulnerable to attacks from spam bots, something which did end up occuring. After this and a lot of arguing amongst the Leadership, he removed our invite link from the Disboard site, but did not disable the bot. Once he finally disabled the bot, he did not announce it to the public -- only to the administration team. Since August 8th, your bumps in the channel were doing nothing for our server. (That means that a total of 145 bumps were useless). He finally archived the channel on September 13th
- Disturbing Content announcement to the staff team
- We decided as an administration that Disturbing Content was an admin+ punishment, so if a moderator wanted to punish for it they would have to go to an admin. On September 4th, Ethan announced to the staff team that Disturbing Content was not an admin+ punishment and how that was the case on SGM and has been the case here the whole time. In the staff channel we have a message from an admin that has been pinned outlining that Disturbing Content is an admin+ punishment, a fact that was well known throughout the admin team. This protocol change/announcement is very detrimental because he is going against the decision that was already made and announced to the staff team.
- We decided as an administration that Disturbing Content was an admin+ punishment, so if a moderator wanted to punish for it they would have to go to an admin. On September 4th, Ethan announced to the staff team that Disturbing Content was not an admin+ punishment and how that was the case on SGM and has been the case here the whole time. In the staff channel we have a message from an admin that has been pinned outlining that Disturbing Content is an admin+ punishment, a fact that was well known throughout the admin team. This protocol change/announcement is very detrimental because he is going against the decision that was already made and announced to the staff team.
- Staff Meeting Scheduling and Agenda
- Ethan decided, without consulting anyone else, on the timing of our first full staff team meeting as AHG. This led him to schedule a staff meeting at 12pm CDT on a weekday. This is a severe planning move as he did not talk to anyone, did not take into consideration that people are working, in school, and just the fact that it is a work day. We know that that time was chosen to be considerate to the EU staff, but again there is the critical flaw of making it during a weekday in which people have school and jobs. Making the meeting on a weekend highly boosts the availability of staff members to attend the meeting so that we are able to have as many staff there to have a complete staff meeting. He also promised an agenda for the meeting was to be posted prior to the meeting, but when we went to attend the meeting he opened it up by saying that he had not put together an agenda. This ties back into the idea of planning and team work as we did not have a guide for this meeting which led it to be unstructured and chaotic which is detrimental to our cohesion as the staff team.
- Ethan decided, without consulting anyone else, on the timing of our first full staff team meeting as AHG. This led him to schedule a staff meeting at 12pm CDT on a weekday. This is a severe planning move as he did not talk to anyone, did not take into consideration that people are working, in school, and just the fact that it is a work day. We know that that time was chosen to be considerate to the EU staff, but again there is the critical flaw of making it during a weekday in which people have school and jobs. Making the meeting on a weekend highly boosts the availability of staff members to attend the meeting so that we are able to have as many staff there to have a complete staff meeting. He also promised an agenda for the meeting was to be posted prior to the meeting, but when we went to attend the meeting he opened it up by saying that he had not put together an agenda. This ties back into the idea of planning and team work as we did not have a guide for this meeting which led it to be unstructured and chaotic which is detrimental to our cohesion as the staff team.
- MC Developer Situation
- Earlier this month, Ethan reached out to say that you wanted to invite a person who you knew to be a developer for the Minecraft server. The way that you described this to the Minecraft staff team is that he would come into the community brand new and play around a bit and then subsequently get a development position in October. This had a lot of consequences. Firstly, it was decided that a developer needs to have the trust of a Lead Admin as they would have server access. I can confidently say along with the people who support us that a person who we just brought into the community like that does not have the trust of a Lead Admin. This also follows a discussion about how we would not allow staff members that have been working on Minecraft since the start that they would not get access to the server. Secondly, Ethan did not discuss this with any of the other Directors as this has a direct impact on our operations. As stated above we would be bringing on someone and putting them in a very high position of trust and also, this has financial implications because it is highly unethical to not pay developers for their work and code which we use. This would be a decision that would need to be discussed with the governing board of Directors here at AHG before any sort of mention or promise or inkling of hope should be spread down to the MC Staff Team.
- Earlier this month, Ethan reached out to say that you wanted to invite a person who you knew to be a developer for the Minecraft server. The way that you described this to the Minecraft staff team is that he would come into the community brand new and play around a bit and then subsequently get a development position in October. This had a lot of consequences. Firstly, it was decided that a developer needs to have the trust of a Lead Admin as they would have server access. I can confidently say along with the people who support us that a person who we just brought into the community like that does not have the trust of a Lead Admin. This also follows a discussion about how we would not allow staff members that have been working on Minecraft since the start that they would not get access to the server. Secondly, Ethan did not discuss this with any of the other Directors as this has a direct impact on our operations. As stated above we would be bringing on someone and putting them in a very high position of trust and also, this has financial implications because it is highly unethical to not pay developers for their work and code which we use. This would be a decision that would need to be discussed with the governing board of Directors here at AHG before any sort of mention or promise or inkling of hope should be spread down to the MC Staff Team.
- Introduction of Forum Ranks
- One of Ethan's plans was to introduce Forum Ranks which would provide at most, some cosmetic features that we could roll into other donation ranks like VIP or even the Global Ranks. This idea is just a cash grab and looks bad for our community because this is a community, not a for-profit business with margins to the moon. AHG is a group of people who love to game. If we go on to monetize everything it will cause a failure for this to feel like a community.
- Prioritizes AHG Profits over pretty much everything
- As stated above, AHG is a community. Though we do need money to further our servers and keep us afloat, making a massive profit is not the end goal with the community. A lot of Ethan's ideas seem to come from the desire to make more money from AHG instead of furthering the community feeling and development of our current and upcoming servers
- Wanting to make Staff take a Personality Assessment
- During our last staff meeting, Ethan pushed strongly for the staff team to take a personality assessment and he still supports this idea. Here is the problem with those tests, most are pseudo-science. To use these type of tests as an actual measure of performance or to determine deficits in your personality relies on self-reporting of behavior- in which we are the worst judges of. There are personality tests that have validity to them, however they are supposed to be done with the assistance, and presence of a licensed professional in order to provide accuracy and counseling to the results. By using some online test to determine this, this causes problems in several areas including 1) Taking the responsibility from admins and leadership from evaluating their own staff members and placing it on to a silly test. 2) Relying that the test be accurate and based on science, which any online test is not going to be, and asking someone to actually change themselves based upon it. 3) In this specific case, Ethan was doing this based on a recommendation of the mod without even looking at the test. Staff argued that in order for it to be instituted that it should be based on peer-reviewed science, but Ethan seemed to brush off this request.
- Sacrificing the Soul of the Community for Money and Metrics
- One major thing Ethan largely focuses on is the metrics especially for Discord. Instead of talking about how as a staff team we can further our involvement within the community, Ethan went on a 15 minute tangent about our Discord metrics and how we need to post more within the #memes channel in order to boost the metrics there because he said that our views to post ratio was very off. This obsession with metrics would be warranted if we were a community of 10 thousand players and looking at how we interact and what channels are good, but we have less than a thousand users within our Discord. With these low numbers we should be focused on just interacting and growing our community, not boasting our metrics.
Overall with all of this evidence, we conclude that the community is not sustainable with Ethan as a Director. It is not just his inactivity, ineffectiveness, or belligerence, he has actively threatened our operations and credibility of the staff team. He is no longer the lead admin that he used to be because the power has gotten to him. We are calling for his resignation.
Everyone that has signed this document:
Swiffe
J3kawesome
Lordy
Ryan
Nuno
Danstorm
TragicMagic
Aawolly
Titan
Panda With a Gun
Helix
Spitefulvenom
The Muffinman
FrogDoggo
SavannahBanana
martinandrew970
Kythol
Ainoyu Yunomi
Azaelus
Acnologia
Syn
Chewie
ParkRangerMoon
LadyCloudia
Moleman
Sera
BARTHOLOMEW
Pauly
CodingMachine
Pacifist
Ahalan
Kamoflajh
alex_
Any of the responses that were too hard to read will be uploaded here
This is not a personal attack on Ethan, anyone harassing him will be taken very seriously and will be taken care of quickly.