Mystic removal discussion - The good and the bad

On Jeck Jims's models thread, I wanted to say, "I really like these, thank you for making them!" But, in such a large thread, with so many other comments, a single positive comment feels like unnecessary noise. I don't like creating extra distractions for other users, and each new post requiring more attention.

In fairness, I think something like that would be more welcome in that thread than another batch of "why haven't you made a model for <character wad I've never heard of> yet???" comments.
 
I am posting on behalf of the banned user Spazzo. Just to be clear, his permaban still stands with the new guard and this is just to give more context on the situation from someone who was affected heavily by the old guard.
Spazzo said:
Hey everyone. Before I give my sentiments regarding my experiences with the ‘old guard’, I’d like to note that I am making this post with the explicit permission of the SRB2 Staff team, and I’d like to thank them for granting this request.

--------------------

For those who don’t know me personally: I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of interesting stories about “Spazzo” over the last decade (mostly from the likes of Mystic, Rob, and Prime 2.0). You might have heard that I tried breaking up the dev team, I stole some developers from the project or convinced them to leave, or anything else along those lines. Well, like most teenagers, I did make mistakes - some big ones, in fact! - but none of these claims are actually true.

Now, if you’d rather skip the history lesson and jump right into my feelings overall, here’s a TL;DR: Mystic and I got in a spat, he didn’t think I was being serious, I was, I got mad, he went nuclear, he made my name a sin, and he (alongside the old guard) are the reason you might have a preconceived notion of who I really am. You can skip ahead to the next line break for my general thoughts and feelings.

To get a proper backstory, I’m going to refer to Mystic’s objective viewpoint of the situation, found here:

https://mb.srb2.org/showpost.php?p=780364&postcount=20

Let me be clear: I’d say ~75% of his write-up is accurate. A lot of what Mystic accuses me of doing is true. I am not here to deny my wrongdoing. I brought those frustrations to public locations where they didn’t belong, and I found my own hill to die on, ten years ago. I do not question the ban. That being said, the full story was never actually told.

The remaining ~25% is what’s important. As many people have noted in this thread, Mystic has a very black-or-white view on things, and once his mind is made up, there’s no changing it. Once he was convinced you were an asshole, there was no undoing that image.

Our dispute stemmed from a suggestion I made after v2.0.5 released, the last release I was part of STJr. for. The suggestion I made: We should take our combined assets, skill-sets, and resources, and move to a modern engine where they can be leveraged to their fullest extent. We would sunset SRB2, and work on something bigger and better. Perhaps even a commercial release! (Note: I was not yet affiliated with Spaddlewit/Roly Poly Putt when I made this suggestion, nor was I aware of it)

Mystic thought I was downright trolling him. I was not. I had that much faith in the team, and was so passionate about the project that I wanted to see what we could pull off when unshackled from the Doom Engine. I genuinely thought we could do it, and projects like SRB2 Kart and Roly Poly Putt have since proven that you can start from ground level and make something new and interesting from SRB2’s building blocks.

Mystic hard-deleted the thread - a moderation mindset being improperly applied to a development conversation - and banned the discussion from continuing. For those who aren’t aware, when a thread is typically deleted by a mod or admin, it is still visible to them. A hard-delete literally removes all traces of the thread from the forum database, preventing any ability to archive its contents. It is very unusual for anything to be hard-deleted by staff.

Where I erred was continuing to push this suggestion after Mystic shut down the conversation. Due to the manner in which he dismissed it, I boiled over.

I deeply regret the bridges I burned in those moments. I knew there was a good chunk of the team who silently supported moving towards a more “open” and “community-driven” effort, but were too intimidated by Mystic to ever voice it publicly. The evidence of my post, and other threads in solidarity of my post (like CobaltBW’s) were also hard-deleted so that Mystic could control the narrative. The actions weren’t questioned; no oversight existed. People took his word verbatim and mine was silenced. To quote Mystic, “some things are swept under the rug for good reason”.

I don’t deny that I handled that situation poorly. That said, Mystic turned it into a full-out blood-feud. He vilified me to the extent that SRB2 users who I’ve never even spoken to are foaming at the mouth at the mention of my name. It was paranoia and fear-mongering dialed up to 11. He confessed to having installed a plug-in that allowed admins to read the private messages between anyone on the forums, just so he could keep tabs on my conversations.

Furthermore, when Mystic gave his objective testimony, he neglected to mention that he publicly threatened to “googlebomb” me, ie. make it so searching my name would return terrible results, effectively making it near-impossible for prospective employers to hire me. That was the degree of vitriol that he had towards the situation, and the sheer lack of oversight Mystic had when it came to administration. There are staff members who were given a stern talking to simply for associating with me, even if that meant following me on Twitter. To make a long story short: It was ridiculous, it was petty, and it was personal.

I came across this old AIM log the other day of a conversation I had with Mystic, right when things were coming to a head...you could change my name out with any staff member and you can see the parallels in the conversation immediately. https://web.archive.org/web/20110220124916/http://spazzo.sepwich.com:80/files/mystic.html

While I cannot remember the full context of the conversation (it appears I joined #srb2fun incognito pretending to be a newbie sometime around 2010-2011?), there are other bits that are worth noting. I really tried hard to talk to him about how PR was terrible, our strategy with new users was toxic, and the apathy he had for development. He even acknowledged the aforementioned apathy, but in a “yeah, stop telling us over and over” mentality rather than understanding that I was trying to help him out of this rut. I was once credited as the “Official Mascot” right in the SRB2 Credits - this was more than a symbolic nod to my ego. The mascot is the individual who keeps everyone else happy and productive while working on a project, and I had the personality to fit that description.

In spite of all the bad blood, I actually agree with SSNTails: If it’s your thing, pray for the guy. I am sympathetic towards Mystic - not for his reprehensible behaviour in the last few months - but because he has let all this hate consume him for over a decade. He already brought up the many attempts I have made to reconcile with him in his write-up. I have reconciled with other members of staff (such as Rob and JEV3), but Mystic’s mind was set, so that was that. It is for this reason - and this reason only - that I sympathize with him.

--------------------

Now, it wasn’t ALWAYS like this. SSNTails mentioned that Mystic was picked for dev lead after he left the team, and he was the logical and only viable choice at the time. Nobody else on the team had the experience or understanding of Sonikku/SSNTails’ initial vision, as well as having exposure to multiple aspects of the development process. I do have positive memories of Mystic - we balanced Knuckles for v2.0 multiplayer based off of how he would fare in a 1v1 with me, he put the finishing touches on my CTF level, and there are some moments that I do look back on fondly when things were more relaxed and we were friends.

That all being said, being a developer 10 years ago wasn’t a cakewalk. There were a lot of times when Mystic flat-out rejected weeks worth of hard work and never looked back, which angered a lot of content creators. It got to the point where I was appointed “Middle Manager” - developers would send me their completed work, I would screen and send them to Mystic and SSNTails, and I would spin their replies to the developers so that they wouldn’t get burned if their work was not suitable for release. With SSNTails, this was more of a necessity because he had very limited bandwidth, what with a wedding coming up and his focus needing to be on coding. With Mystic, it was done to insulate the dev team from what Mystic really thought about a creation, and so that the team could vent their frustrations directly to me instead. I was happy to be a “punching bag” if it meant the overall morale would stay in an upwards trend.

I’d like to travel back in time even further, back to 2005...I was thirteen years old, and was a newbie in #srb2fun. Suffice to say, I was like any other kid - hyperactive, immature, a prime target for harassment/tempbans, and someone who could easily get on the team’s nerves. I was met with the cynicism, discontent, and malice that so many other people have explained better than I can. Like everyone else, I was bashed for being a newbie.

After reading this thread and having some old IRC logs shared with me, it is clear that I emulated this newbie-bashing behaviour when I became part of the “inner circle”. I’d like to take this moment to sincerely apologize to all those who I have antagonized, especially to Monster Iestyn. I am incredibly remorseful for my actions as a young disciple of the gospel according to Mystic. It does not justify my behaviour, that is simply the “edgelord” (as Ritz put it) mentality that was in place. I am ashamed and mortified that I ever acted in this manner, towards anyone. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now.

One thing that people in this “inner clique” liked to complain about was hangout servers, or people playing SRB2 in any manner that wasn’t consistent with what the game was “designed” for. This drove me bonkers as a staff member. I recall SSNTails trying to push back against this mentality as well. It’s a game, so what if they want to chill out while playing? Designing the master server room system and removing the vast majority of rules is by far my proudest accomplishment during my tenure with STJr. It took several months of back-and-forth debate to get Mystic to sign off on the idea. I spun it by suggesting he wouldn’t have to moderate it nearly as much, as by that point, there were users who would join netgames just to find roleplayers/rulebreakers. Seriously?

In addition to Mystic being a very “static” force, he was also a bit old-fashioned, especially when it came to website design. That’s fine for your own personal website - who am I to judge there? - but not when dealing with srb2.org, which gets a staggering amount of views a month. You might be surprised to hear that SRB2.org runs off WordPress instead of static HTML. This change was made in 2008-2009 by Cue and I. We actually took things a step further and pitched a complete redesign of the site aesthetic that was more Web 2.0-friendly, and spent about a week refining it. Mystic dismissed it, and made it clear his intentions were not to deviate from the existing design at all...so Cue created a custom theme that replicated that Web 1.0 feel. To our surprise, Mystic was still upset when the migration was completed, over the fact that he could no longer edit the raw HTML files to make website changes. The silver lining is that because this WordPress migration did happen, the groundwork has been laid if the staff ever wishes to redesign the website without disrupting content!

I could go on about Mystic, but there were incidents with others that I would like to bring up as well.

In regards to the Saph/JTE situations: I should take this time to note that I was never groomed, nor was I ever aware of any grooming. The events involving Saph and JTE were beyond my time, and I am disgusted by the stories I have heard.

Okay, so with regards to Rob: He perpetuated a lot of rumours about me, including a baseless one that I caused developers to leave SRB2. They had their own reasons for leaving; some of them have already posted about it in this thread. In any case, Rob and I reached a truce around 2018. We had friendly conversations every now and then. I do not condone the behaviour which sparked his removal from the team at all, but I also feel that he may have been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Mystic was genuinely looking for an exit, but Rob defending Mystic’s accusations removed his ability to choose whether to stay or go. Speaking as someone who has struggled with leaving SRB2 for a decade now, it is very difficult to leave a project that was such a big part of your life, in terms of length, impact, and relationships. I believe him to be a good person who made a terrible mistake, not unlike my predicament 10 years ago.

With regards to Prime: I’ll be honest here...he always creeped me out. I found out through colleagues that he was trying to dox not just me, but one of my parents. I was livid (to say the least!), and went to Mystic privately to demand serious action. Citing the Streisand effect, he refused to do anything about his reprehensible behaviour. I never really trusted Prime after that. He was sharing some early v2.0 dev material in his IRC channel, and when this information came to light, I used it to help SSNTails remove him from the dev team.

Here’s a fun little side note...That “they're/their/there” CAPTCHA test was suggested as a joke by SSNTails, in response to Mystic’s issues with the influx of uneducated users. He took it at face value and had it programmed in. Suffice to say, we too thought it was absolutely ridiculous.

We were all influenced by Mystic to a degree, be it negatively or positively. SSN already glossed over this, but we could see people emulating his toxicity within his ranks, as well as those who turned their back to the project because of it. As someone who has gone from User->Moderator->Developer->Administrator->Banned...I’ve seen all sides of this coin first-hand over the span of 15 years. I’ve seen how toxic people can be to newcomers; I myself have been toxic to newcomers, and Mystic’s static nature only made it worse when my ban fractured a lot of the community, as CobaltBW mentioned.

This mentality got to the point where any time I spoke, suspicion was drawn over my actions. Nobody could ever say a word about “Spazzo”, as the mention of my name was enough to cause “drama” to Mystic. Of course, all this “drama” consisted of was mere conversation, but even that wasn’t kosher. This resulted in this stigma of being a rabble-rouser, a guy who would entrust new users and then send them off to do my deeds for them. This can make it very tough to keep in contact with old friends, as you might imagine. If the co-founder of Sonic Robo Blast 2 can implicitly trust me, I can’t see why anyone else shouldn’t be allowed to converse with me, if they so choose.

I’m not going to deny all the accusations - as I have said before, I am certainly not innocent either. That said, over the last ~3 years, I have made a concerted effort to stay out of the hair of the administration, and I have kept in touch with the SRB2 community members who I grew up with.

It seems that this thread has been somewhat cathartic for those who experienced (or even perpetuated) the problems in the SRB2 community. I hope that more people continue to speak out and share their feelings. I can’t properly explain just how much closure this has given me.

SRB2 was my life for half a decade, and had continued relevance for a full decade after that, despite being banned. I would play netgames regularly with Ritz, LXShadow, FuriousFox, Cue, and Jazz, just to name a few. While I share SSNTails’ perspective on v2.0.4 being the “completed version” of SRB2, it’s been a treat to see SRB2 taking on a life of its own over the last decade, especially with Kart’s exploding popularity. The amount of passion and work done in v2.2 is staggering; I could never have conceived SRB2 being capable of all that’s been accomplished.

Thank you again for the opportunity to finally close the book on this.
 
some remarks on his post:

one of the few things I can 100% agree with Mystic on is his opinion about the kind of person Spazzo is. he is a manipulator who constantly pretends to be this saccharine caricature he's created for himself, as a cover to hide his true intentions. you need to be careful when interacting with anything he says, because his "embellishments" are never an accident.

for reference: he was the primary person involved with hijacking my account to use it for the April Fools' event. would troll and harass people constantly in typical belittling SRB2 flavor. when he was permanently banned, he randomly added me on Steam acting as if we were friends (I'd already been long gone from SRB2 at this point, doing college junk) and being all like "haha hey dude! I just joined the permaban club! wanna be friends?". who DOES this? lmao. when Mystic was removed, he gave me an invite to his private Discord server, like almost a decade later, never interacting with me once in between this period of time.

his demeanor is exactly the same as I remember from long ago, and just as people called Mystic stagnant, I'd be similarly weary about Spazzo. dude's just an all around strange guy who I sincerely hope can find closure in this and move on, but I really kinda doubt he will, lol

i want to point out:

Spazzo said:
He confessed to having installed a plug-in that allowed admins to read the private messages between anyone on the forums, just so he could keep tabs on my conversations.

this shit's craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy like what the hell? i can believe it, but i also can't be sure which parts of his posts are exaggerated, and there's no proof to accompany a lot of his accusations, here. can anyone confirm if this plugin is still installed on the boards? it's *massively* disconcerting tbh

also, wordpress sucks. let me rebuild the site in react 😔
 
  • It might not be "convincing developers to leave", but Spazzo definitely tried to pull dev members off into RPP modding when they prepared the PC port of that. I can probably find some logs of his IRC messages to me if I dig into my old laptop.
    • Quite frankly, this is hardly necessary if you read the log he mentions between him and Mystic. You can't claim you never tried to pull developers away while also swearing up and down that "SRB2 is dead" and "you guys need to move onto commercial projects now". Give me a break.
  • You can question the motives of admins being able to read other member's PMs, but on a site like this that's just an accepted part of using the PM system. Please don't expect total privacy here. Furthermore, that access has exposed plenty of problematic users in the community before, so I don't see it as such a bad thing?
I can attest to the legitimacy of the googlebombing threats, at least. Might have some logs of Prime talking about that somewhere.
 
On Jeck Jims's models thread, I wanted to say, "I really like these, thank you for making them!" But, in such a large thread, with so many other comments, a single positive comment feels like unnecessary noise. I don't like creating extra distractions for other users, and each new post requiring more attention.

Personally, I always check on new replies to my content. Even if it's a simple "hey, this was cool!" I appreciate it immensely, and I imagine that others do too. If they don't, then no harm done, but if they do, you can't imagine what a simple encouragement at the right time can do for someone.

I don't like posting unless I can be insightful (like now); and I find that negative, critical, or disagreeing comments seem more insightful to me. "Yes, I agree with that" feels like noise to me; but "I disagree, here's why" doesn't feel like noise.

Why not "I agree, and here's why"? :P

Especially when it comes to commenting on content, I think it's equally important to explore why you liked something as it is to explore why you disliked it. Sure, people don't often know what they did wrong, but sometimes (and probably more often than we might think) they also didn't know what they did right. It's important to encourage them to keep moving along the axis where they managed to succeed.
 
I also want to point out that a lot of the stuff with JTE actually was during Spazzo's time in the community, it was just happening under everyone's noses. Some accounts are from well over a decade ago during the 1.09.4 days. Just because it took for-freaking-ever for JTE to be called out, doesn't mean this was a recent thing.
 
While there's some good information in here, I also see a lot of shady, or downright false, info in here.

You might have heard that I tried breaking up the dev team, I stole some developers from the project or convinced them to leave, or anything else along those lines. Well, like most teenagers, I did make mistakes - some big ones, in fact! - but none of these claims are actually true.

This is a matter of perspective, I think -- you were encouraging people to move on from SRB2. This is not wrong of you to do, but I don't think you can just claim it's completely false, either. I can see why they'd be mad at you if you were the one encouraging people to leave and then they actually end up doing that.

That said, Mystic turned it into a full-out blood-feud. He vilified me to the extent that SRB2 users who I’ve never even spoken to are foaming at the mouth at the mention of my name. It was paranoia and fear-mongering dialed up to 11.

Goes far deeper than you imply, you've made LOTS of people mad, not just administration. If anything, I always found their explanations so vague that I didn't take anything they said about you too seriously.

You might even be talking about me, because I've ranted about you before. I'll let you know that you squandered that entirely by yourself, no one but you had any impact on my opinion of you -- you came out from no where immediately on Kart release in the Kart Krew discord (when a large volume of new users would obviously be coming in), immediately ask to put your music in the game, and then flirt with my boyfriend in voice chat while they're absent, and then months later try to excuse it with you being drunk... you'd be insane to expect that I don't think of you as nothing but an idiot trouble maker from now on. :P

With regards to Prime: I’ll be honest here...he always creeped me out. I found out through colleagues that he was trying to dox not just me, but one of my parents.

While I dislike Prime for my interactions with him on judging rules, and his attitude about the Mystic situation in the announcements channel on the Discord made me leave... I can't believe this accusation without much proof, it's far too vague. Is there any proof of them scoping out your information AND wanting to make this information public so that people can go after you? Mainly the second bit -- they might've tried to look for your information, but doxxing is putting said information out there to be widely available for anyone who wants to stalk or harass. I don't doubt that you likely have good reason to find him creepy, but "dox" is a pretty strong accusation.

This mentality got to the point where any time I spoke, suspicion was drawn over my actions. Nobody could ever say a word about “Spazzo”, as the mention of my name was enough to cause “drama” to Mystic. Of course, all this “drama” consisted of was mere conversation, but even that wasn’t kosher. This resulted in this stigma of being a rabble-rouser, a guy who would entrust new users and then send them off to do my deeds for them.

While they might've corroborated it, this is also an image you created yourself. Again, taking from solely my experience and not what anyone else has told me: the only time you've ever shown up is when there's an opportunity to reach a bunch of people. I cannot believe that going into Kart Krew discord, and also asking to put in your music within 15 minutes of joining, is anything but fishing for a new audience to get your hands around.



I was once credited as the “Official Mascot” right in the SRB2 Credits - this was more than a symbolic nod to my ego. The mascot is the individual who keeps everyone else happy and productive while working on a project, and I had the personality to fit that description.

soooo it's only a nod to your ego, got it lol
 
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...this shit's craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy like what the hell? i can believe it, but i also can't be sure which parts of his posts are exaggerated, and there's no proof to accompany a lot of his accusations, here. can anyone confirm if this plugin is still installed on the boards?...


I'm not sure if it's here still, but I've read it somewhere and I was like "Okay, they wanna keep an eye on the users conversations to make sure nothing weird happens".
 
  • It might not be "convincing developers to leave", but Spazzo definitely tried to pull dev members off into RPP modding when they prepared the PC port of that. I can probably find some logs of his IRC messages to me if I dig into my old laptop.

You know, this always strikes a sore spot for me -- I was personally *very* unhappy with Spazzo's behavior during the RPP:PC release. I'm not sure what he said to everyone, but I'd be very much against him exclusively pulling people away from SRB2 to work on something that was effectively just an OC fangame.

As for JEV3 and Nev3r helping out, I spoke with them, not via Spazzo, and there was nothing about 'leaving SRB2' in any query or agreement... it was only about using already-produced material.

Spazzo was also only involved with RPP after he left dev, IIRC. He originally started out as a composer before getting involved with other aspects. While I appreciated his contributions to the development process, I always felt it unfortunate that his involvement tainted the view of the game itself, which is something that I largely created.

This is a matter of perspective, I think -- you were encouraging people to move on from SRB2. This is not wrong of you to do, but I don't think you can just claim it's completely false, either. I can see why they'd be mad at you if you were the one encouraging people to leave and then they actually end up doing that.

I'll concede a bit of ground here to Spazzo on this one -- as it has been revealed earlier in this thread from many of the people that left during 'The Spazzo Troubles', a lot of people left for other reasons, such as Mystic's behavior. But since these were concurrent events, it was easy for it to look like Spazzo was the one that made them leave. I actually thought the same thing back then, too -- until so many devs came out and admitted they left for separate reasons.

For anyone that knows Spazzo well, I think this post shows a lot of humility, considering. There's things he has matured on, while other aspects have remained constant - I think this is due to various personal issues he has that have a grave impact on his behavior. So in a way, I feel for him in that regard.

Disclaimer: My recounting of these events are only my observations as an external observer at the time, and I don't have a sharp memory of it because it just wasn't memorable for me. Over everything else, I remember the exhaustion.

I'm not sure if it's here still, but I've read it somewhere and I was like "Okay, they wanna keep an eye on the users conversations to make sure nothing weird happens".

I actually think this plugin is a good thing, because you can handle any problems that arise between users that need some kind of intervention. You just have to be sure that those who have the power, don't abuse it.
 
I don't doubt that you likely have good reason to find him creepy, but "dox" is a pretty strong accusation.

fwiw, prime did this kind of "doxing" with me too, but again, i dont have logs from that era so do take this with a grain of salt. i can believe it happening to spazzo as well as others, and even if it's not "im posting your info on the mb" levels of bad, it's still awful conduct for a mod/admin, gotta admit

I'm not sure if it's here still, but I've read it somewhere and I was like "Okay, they wanna keep an eye on the users conversations to make sure nothing weird happens".

i guess that makes sense... it's just kinda weird thinkin about someone crawling through my DMs all sneaky-like &#55357;&#56852;

with the "old guard" i can see this being abused tbh, which is why i immediately went "woah yikes"
 
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jesus christ okay this whole thread is a lot to take in and my adhd is not helping but holy crap, i never talked to mystic but i already hate that guy


i cant say much because i started playing srb2 when i was like 6 years old (2.0 had just released maybe????) so i joined the community super late and im ALSO not a native english speaker, but from what i could understand from the plethora of messages written in this thread i can tell that everyone is wrong, but some people are more wrong than others, and some wrongs are more recent than others.


like theres people here who were wrong, but they were wrong like 10 years ago and are no longer the person they were 10 years ago. meanwhile we got mystic, who someway somehow still tried to say some deep 'slurs are rude because theyre rude' bull and yet didnt even bother to censor said slurs (also the loli stuff, how many times do we gotta tell anime fans that loli is pedo??). it kind of bothers me because the people in charge shouldve definetly caught onto this earlier, but in a way i can understand that things were tense back then and honestly, calling out mystic at an earlier time wouldve probably destroyed srb2.


i have no idea if im making sense???? sorry if this sounds rude i have no idea what im doing half of the time. what im trying to say is this is a good time for people to reflect on their actions, because they ALWAYS speak louder than words and intentions, and despite what your parents told you, being like 30 or 40 is NOT an excuse to refuse to change just because youre old or whatever. though there are also some things that cant be excused (coughmysticBLARGH) and NEED to be called out. im sorry to all the people whove been hurt all these years and through this whole ordeal, i know i cant help because ive been in this place for like 6 months maybe, but as someone whos also gone through some stuff (remember kids, joining the internet when youre 6 years old is not good) my heart goes out to all of you.


my hearts turning into marshmallows writing this..... this is tense no joke
 
i guess that makes sense... it's just kinda weird thinkin about someone crawling through my DMs all sneaky-like ��

with the "old guard" i can see this being abused tbh, which is why i immediately went "woah yikes"

I sort of agree that there's an ethical quandary there, because on the one hand you absolutely want to ensure that a user has full control over which conversations they choose to keep private, but you also want to make sure that the messaging system isn't being used as a gateway for predators to exploit. More transparency might be in order here, i.e. it's made clearer to users up front that private messages can be viewed by board staff.
 
I sort of agree that there's an ethical quandary there, because on the one hand you absolutely want to ensure that a user has full control over which conversations they choose to keep private, but you also want to make sure that the messaging system isn't being used as a gateway for predators to exploit. More transparency might be in order here, i.e. it's made clearer to users up front that private messages can be viewed by board staff.

yeah after talking about it with some people i can totally see why this would be useful. i wasnt around for a lot of the *other* situation so it wasn't the first thing to come to mind

just being transparent about it would be enough, i think
 
More transparency might be in order here, i.e. it's made clearer to users up front that private messages can be viewed by board staff.
I think a disclaimer that the administration can see your private messages if deemed necessary should be sufficient. Given both the amount of minors on this forum and the grooming incidents in the past, it's important that moderators have power to investigate shady conduct.
 
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I sort of agree that there's an ethical quandary there, because on the one hand you absolutely want to ensure that a user has full control over which conversations they choose to keep private, but you also want to make sure that the messaging system isn't being used as a gateway for predators to exploit. More transparency might be in order here, i.e. it's made clearer to users up front that private messages can be viewed by board staff.
Probably a good idea to put something like "NOTE: Forum staff are able to view your private messages" in big bold text when messaging someone on the forums, to make it loud and clear.
 
Being transparent about that kind of stuff is absolutely necessary. I've heard such an excuse as "it's common sense" for private messages to not actually be private, but it's not really.
 
You know, this always strikes a sore spot for me -- I was personally *very* unhappy with Spazzo's behavior during the RPP:PC release. I'm not sure what he said to everyone, but I'd be very much against him exclusively pulling people away from SRB2 to work on something that was effectively just an OC fangame.

As for JEV3 and Nev3r helping out, I spoke with them, not via Spazzo, and there was nothing about 'leaving SRB2' in any query or agreement... it was only about using already-produced material.

Spazzo was also only involved with RPP after he left dev, IIRC. He originally started out as a composer before getting involved with other aspects. While I appreciated his contributions to the development process, I always felt it unfortunate that his involvement tainted the view of the game itself, which is something that I largely created.
Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to imply anything about their contributions. Sorry for the ambiguity. I did also dig out the logs I was referring to, and they weren't quite the clear-cut pulling-away that I had remembered them as. More of a buttering-up, I guess?


The rest of my post still stands, though.
 
A bit late to the party, but reading through this has been... eye opening.
I never heard about the grooming before, and as a fan of SRB2JTE, with the city hangout and the Supervirus being one of my biggest memories.. It's painful.

I only come around the forums every so often, so I don't have many memories of Mystic, but just seeing what has been posted on here, he should've been removed a long time ago. It's good to see this community grow and evolve like it has.
I have faith that this next era will be one of the brightest SRB2 has seen.
 
Being transparent about that kind of stuff is absolutely necessary. I've heard such an excuse as "it's common sense" for private messages to not actually be private, but it's not really.


I think it was a bit more "transparent" beforehand, because as I said
I'm not sure if it's here still, but I've read it somewhere and I was like "Okay, they wanna keep an eye on the users conversations to make sure nothing weird happens".
Although I expect somethign like that, right before you open a chat with someone or below the chat-box as a warning.


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Neither it's common sense, I agree. I didn't assume it - I saw it somewhere in 2019 when I was exploring the forums uneditable by non-admin user's sections.
*Sorry if my wording is a bit confusing.
 
I also want to point out that a lot of the stuff with JTE actually was during Spazzo's time in the community, it was just happening under everyone's noses. Some accounts are from well over a decade ago during the 1.09.4 days. Just because it took for-freaking-ever for JTE to be called out, doesn't mean this was a recent thing.
Seconding this from personal experience. That shit started a long, long time ago.
 

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