Clarification towards Nyanotrasen, our handling to the situation, and changes from here on

[PJB]

On Wednesday 2023/04/05, we removed Nyanotrasen from the official game server hub. Our reason for this was harassment and other inappropriate behavior of many official staff members of their server. While we still believe the core reasoning is valid, we absolutely messed up in sentencing, communication, and pretty much everything else related to the incident.

This announcement is intended to clarify how we got here, provide updates, and announce changes we're making on our side to avoid this kind of mess in the future.

Original announcement

We removed Nyanotrasen from the server hub ("dehubbed") on Wednesday 2023/04/05. This was announced in #announcements on Discord, and with it two PDF files were attached with "receipts" (Discord messages etc) justifying our decision. I've attached these PDF files to this post. Rane (staff member at Nyanotrasen) was contacted privately by our staff and notified of the dehubbing via direct message on Discord. Rane had questions about the hub rules, protocol, etc... These were not answered.

It should also be noted that a couple days before Nyanotrasen was removed, Daemon (their server host) stepped down from Nyanotrasen for unrelated reasons.

The problems

There are many issues with the way we handled this.

For starters, there was no ahead-of-time communication on the matter towards Nyanotrasen, or any chance for them to fix things before we flicked the switch. Nyanotrasen has removed at least one of the individuals called out in the PDFs of their own volition, despite being removed from the hub. These are issues that could have been resolved more gracefully without a need to make a mess out of it.

The hub removal came with no clear basis in the hub rules. The hub rules were updated less than a month before we pulled the plug on Nyanotrasen, and the new strike system was not followed at all. Questions about this matter were outright ignored.

The two PDF files were only posted in the public #announcements channel on Discord. I do not believe we ever sent them directly to Rane. This is relevant, because Rane had already been banned from our Discord for a long while. There was no official way for Rane to even view the notice himself. (It's not like PDF files are hard to pass across Discord, but that shouldn't have been necessary in the first place.)

To make matters worse, an internal communication error on our end means some worrying and confusing communication made its way to Nyanotrasen a couple weeks before we pulled the plug. This understandably put everybody on edge and made them start worrying about hub rules. All for it not to matter due to the reasons mentioned above.

How did this happen?

The core of the whole fiasco starts with Rane, a core founding staff member at Nyanotrasen. To put it quite bluntly: Rane has been a source of bad behavior in the community for a long time now. We have been keeping track and filing many incidents for at least as far back as 6 months ago (and possibly more than that). Rane was banned from the SS14 Discord in September of 2022, and that should have been the end of it. It should be noted he was not blocked from contributing on GitHub.

But it was not the end of it. After his ban, more instances of harassment and other malicious behavior towards core staff members have kept being perpetuated by Nyanotrasen and related places. While Rane is not an exclusive perpetrator here, he is most certainly a large catalyst. This got to the point where core staff members were being pushed away from the project and stressed out due to the harassment sent their way.

Now, for some background. We have a pretty bad track record with dealing with problems like this. A notable example is Swept, who took way too long to be removed from the project despite their actions negatively influencing many members. Rane too should have at least been banned from the Discord much earlier from some of their infractions.

We are really bad at organizing ourselves and properly pushing through these administrative decisions. Very little people have any strong motivation to work on these kinds of issues because they are absolutely soul-draining to work on. We're poorly organized, having a clue what is going on can be quite hard, things tend to get pushed out a lot, and so on. Thing to take away: Discord channels are really bad for reviewing things retroactively.

We wanted to avoid this decision taking too long to push through, and regrettably the pendulum swung too far to the other side and ended up rushing things. That's not to say it was made in a week though, we were still working on this for more than a month and a half.

Discussions about what actions to take regarding Nyanotrasen have been ongoing since before the hub rule strike system was written, which was part of the reason the new strike system was not properly considered.

Originally, we were planning on having the following verdict on the removal of Nyanotrasen: Rane must step down, or Nyanotrasen gets removed. While we were gathering evidence however we came across much more problematic behavior from other staff members at Nyanotrasen, and we changed our mind relatively late in the process towards removing Nyanotrasen unconditionally.

While we believe we could have reasonably justified a removal of solely Rane under the hub rules given the right communication and early notice, the upgrade to unconditional dehub is a gross overreach that should not have been allowed to happen. It was a rash decision, clouded by a rush to get things done quickly, poor communication, and some strong emotions held towards some of the more colorful messages uncovered.

What we intend to do going forward

We understand that this mistake has rubbed a lot of server operators the wrong way, and broken a lot of trust in us as arbiters of the hub.

For starters, we will be more transparent with all administrative hub decisions going forward. Discord is not the best place to do this kind of stuff, so we've created a new subforum for these. We'll also be enabling replies in this forum to answer questions, but it will be heavily moderated to avoid peanutposting and other off-topic behavior. We also intend to use the top announcements forum more: at this point in the project, we shouldn't be putting all communication on a Discord announcements channel. This also means no more PDFs, as the forum gives us far more space. It also means the ability to live-update posts with new development or to correct information.

To be clear on what will be posted in this new subforum: all administrative deicisions that involve actual action against a server (strike or outright dehub). We will not be logging any communications that were easily resolved internally through communication with the relevant server staff, to protect the innocent.

We're trying to re-organize ourselves internally to make it easier to track what's going on on the administrative side. Currently we use messily organized Discord threads to track everything, and discussions often get derailed with off-topic discussions. We're looking at alternatives, that might make things easier to manage.

And finally, we have made the decision that alternative server hubs will be supported by the official launcher (when somebody gets around to coding it). If people are still wary about our ownership of the hub, we hope this should quell any concerns you have for the future of SS14.
It would be possible for any third-party to set up their own server hub and for players to add it to their launcher with a link or IP.

Updated verdict

We are pulling back the scope of the our decision to what we originally decided on internally:

Nyanotrasen will be allowed back on the server hub if Rane steps down from any staff involvement in the project. We will not press the issue on other individuals at Nyanotrasen further based on what we have for now.

Further clarifications

What's the hub? What does removal entail?

The terminology used can be a little confusing and inconsistently applied. To make sure everybody is on the same page, I'm just going to clarify it here.

"The hub" is kind of an old term that stems from BYOND, where it used to refer to the official BYOND website and server browser. Many SS13 servers aren't "on the hub", because they aren't on the public server browser. Instead, you connect via the direct IP address (in the form of a byond:// link). While they aren't on the server browser, you still need a BYOND account and so on.

In SS14, we, the "Space Wizards Federation", run the central accounts and server browser infrastructure that BYOND did in SS13. For SS14 we've been kind of trying to be consistent and use "the hub" only for "the server browser", but I can't guarantee we've been 100% consistent in that. In general I've tried to always prefix it with something like "the game server hub" or something for clarity. Either way, for the purposes of everything here, "the hub" = the built-in game server browser in the launcher.

When we speak of "dehubbing", we mean blocking a server's ability to show up on the launcher's server list. This only blocks said server(s) from showing up on the built-in "servers" tab in the launcher, we do not restrict anything else:

• It is still possible to connect to the server manually via the "direct connect" button in the launcher.
• It is still possible to add the server as a favorite and see it on your launcher's home screen.
• We do not restrict any other services we are responsible for, like accounts and session services.

The only scenario in which we ever feel like we would need to go as far as messing with the points above would probably involve outright illegal activity, and I hope that never comes up.

Who enforces the hub rules?

This is a minor incident that didn't really make things much worse in the grand scheme of things, so I'm putting it down here:

One point that added some extra confusion to the whole scenario is the fact that word of a maintainer was taken as clarification of the hub rules, a bit before the dehubbing took place. This maintainer contributed to the revised hub rules, so it's understandable their word might have been taken as authorative on the matter.

To be completely clear: the hub rules are not enforced by codebase maintainers (purple name on Discord/Forum), only project managers/wizards (red and green name on Discord/Forum, respectively). If you have any questions, project managers or wizards are the people to ask.

What this means for Rane and others

We've already had one server host come forward asking us what this all were to mean if a community member like Rane were to contribute to another codebase after leaving Nyanotrasen. To this, we have the following answer:

We see Rane/Daemon/Swept as large liabilities, and they have been given second chances already for their behavior. We recommend other servers to not make them actual staff members (e.g. maintainer, admin) due to the behavior outlined before, though accepting contributions from them and such is fine. If you do make them a staff member, know that we will scrutinize their behavior heavily.

nyano_dehub_1.pdf nyano_dehub_2_fixed.pdf

Edited April 18, 2023 by PJB
Daemon shouldn't be put in the same category as Swept/Rane

[Rane]

ok

[Rane]

To update everyone on Nyano as of this morning: I should be able to remove myself within a few days.

I'm currently seeking clarifications because the conflation of codebase and server here are a bit messy. Nyanotrasen (the codebase) has a lot of downstreams, and Nyanotrasen (the codebase) has servers that run its unmodified code. Nyanotrasen (the community) can do without me, but the Nyanotrasen (the codebase) would be worse off and affect much more than Nyanotrasen (the community). It would also negatively effect Parkstation, Dryad, whatever the Brazilian nyano is called, etc.

Once that is resolved I should be able to divest. Thanks to everyone who showed support through this.

Edited April 16, 2023 by Rane

[PJB]

Update: removing Daemon from the Swept/Rane pile since they don't deserve that. Minor holdover from the original announced policy still.

[ashdemai]

You know what, this announcement post actually got me a little excited since you have made the decision to allow alternative hubs. Good for you guys!

EDIT: I'd like to add that Discord is is the worst public communication software. Using it for official stuff is a surefire way to get these things to happen again. Again: good thing you guys are moving away from that as well.

Edited April 18, 2023 by ashdemai

[PJB]

Since we posted our original announcement, a lot of things have happened on Nyanotrasen. As you may know, the server has been split and a lot of drama has occurred. I’m posting an update from our side that will provide a summary of what happened, a direct response to accusations made towards us, general thoughts and opinions on the matter, and a final verdict.

This post will be extremely long and rambly. There will be a lot of evidence listed, key among which is a 2 hour recording of Nyanotrasen voice chat during the coup. In the description is a list of timestamps for highlights that I think are of particular interest. If you have the time, I encourage you to skim over it.

I had originally hoped to keep this brief, however things have kept developing until the point where we now feel we are required to provide a far longer post to sufficiently address this.

Summary of events

(All times in UTC)

April 16

Our verdict in the last announcement was clear: Rane must step down from any staff involvement in Nyanotrasen for the server to be allowed back on the server hub. Shortly after posting this, Rane said he would do it.

At around the same time as announcing that he would comply, Rane was also asking me some questions in private regarding possible server/codebase separation. I said I would get back to him on that after discussing with the other PMs.

Daemon approaches me in private to ask whether the previous verdict still held for them, due to some admittedly confusing wording on our part in the update announcement. I didn’t reply to them until tomorrow on this matter.

Less than two hours after Rane announced he would step down, Nyanotrasen announced a new host, Almond. Almond is Rane’s girlfriend. Rane would later clarify that Almond would only be a temporary host while a proper independent host is appointed, but this fact was not communicated to the community at the time.

Daemon, the previous host who stepped down shortly before the dehubbing, decided to come back upon hearing the news about Rane’s-girlfriend-as-host, citing obvious concerns that this would not be satisfactory. Daemon was convinced that, due to the lowering in scope of the previous verdict, they would still be clear to host the server.

Internal discussions at Nyanotrasen from the above caused me, Daemon, Rane, ODJ (Old Dance Jacket) and Faye to get added to a group DM to discuss this matter. For me it was already past midnight and I would not read them until next evening. Daemon asserts that Almond is obviously a plant by Rane, Nyano needs to clean house of the issues that lead to the dehub in the first place, and they are willing to enforce that coming back as host. The other Nyano staff members assert that Daemon is blacklisted too so it doesn’t matter, and also that they do not want to work with Daemon anymore.

April 17

I read the earlier mentioned group chat. I’m surprised at the development and say we’re discussing it internally.

I respond to Daemon and say we’re discussing the exact state of the verdict on them internally. We talk about some other things related to Nyano I will mention later. It is here I learn that Almond is Rane’s girlfriend.

April 18

I tell Daemon early in the day that they’re clear for hosting the server, and posted that small update in this announcement post. I also informed the other Nyano staff, and told them that Rane’s girlfriend would obviously not be an acceptable host.

Daemon threatens to take over Nyanotrasen themselves, based on the fact that there is no path forward with the existing Nyano head staff.

Daemon takes over the Nyanotrasen Discord and starts purging access of staff like Rane, ODJ and Faye. Some people start getting banned. It should be noted that Daemon still had control of all Nyanotrasen infra except the nyanotrasen.moe domain name. Detail on this below.

From here on I will refer to Daemon-ran Nyanotrasen as “Daemonyano” and Rane/ODJ/Faye-ran as “Ranyano”.

We explicitly switched the hub ban for Nyanotrasen from an IP ban against the previous IP address to a domain ban against nyanotrasen.moe.

A new Discord is made for Ranyano and people pour in from the previous server in the grand mess. A new game server gets set up by Ranyano on the old domain nyanotrasen.moe. This server is not on the hub.

The game server for Daemonyano goes back up again on a new domain, nyanotrasen.com. This server is on the hub.

The coup is not going favorably for Daemon due to general confusion and poor communication, and the Daemonyano game server gets shut down again due to lacking staff.

A long discussion is held in voice chat on the Ranyano Discord, involving many staff members and what is going on. I recorded about 2 hours of it and posted it on YouTube. Concurrent to this, Chandler, an outside party from the Trusted Seas Barotrauma community, is trying to mediate the situation and fix it. I quote: “negotiations are failing”.

Daemon transfers the Daemonyano Discord to Chandler to let them fix things.

April 19

Chandler transfers the Discord back to Daemon due to personal issues.

Lies and hearsay are spread around and nothing in public is clear.

More internal discussions are underway between us, Ranyano, Daemonyano, and Chandler

April 20

Chandler comes back.

More of the same: hearsay spread around, internal discussions.
I call Rane out on spreading a misinterpretation of some of Daemon’s messages. He makes another group DM to straighten out miscommunication issues and get our story straight.

Chandler leaves again due to assorted reasons including personal ones.

April 21

Daemon announces they’ll be stepping down and promoting another neutral third-party to take over Daemonyano.

Minor internal discussions.

April 22

Daemon hands ownership of the Daemonyano Discord to Based Pugilist, intending to step down for good.

Direct response to Ranyano

I would first like to address an announcement post from the Ranyano Discord server that makes many serious claims towards us. Some of these can be optimistically explained as a genuine misunderstanding, while others I cannot describe as anything other than outright malicious in nature.

I should point out that Rane has already apologized to me for this “schizopost” (his words, not mine). Ranyano has not, however, made any public announcement to retract this in their announcements channel, and the accusations are so severe I cannot leave it unaddressed.

Quote

Rane had had his GF as a temp host while interviewing potential new hosts. This was never a permanent arrangement, and it was no secret to anyone that she was his GF. PJB had spent a significant amount of time in Rane’s discord and so obviously this would not be secret. Daemon had still quit at the time Rane discussed this with others. PJB exploited this.

For starters, there was never an announcement that Almond (Rane’s girlfriend) was only temporary. This is the exact announcement post:

Daemon addressed this themselves on two occasions, both of which Rane failed to address. The first was immediately after the announcement that Almond would be host, internally:

Rane states he misinterpreted Daemon, and the “deal” he was referring to was with me, to step down from Nyanotrasen. It should be noted I would never classify it as a “deal” by any means, at that point. Like I said earlier, Rane told me he’d be stepping down, asked me some practical questions about it like codebase/server separation matters, and I didn’t give him an answer yet (and never would, due to the drama afterwards derailing things).

Furthermore, Daemon outright told Rane that they thought Almond was an “obvious plant”. This is how Rane responded:

I would also later reaffirm this, receiving a similar non-response:

Rane would later go on in voice to say this was “misrepresented”, somebody (not Rane) even blaming Daemon in part for this:

Quote

voice recording starting at 01:45:10
Rane:
“Having your IRL GF be the host when you’re not supposed to have any control over that kinda stu-”
du-you-f *sigh*
This keeps getting totally misrepresented, Almond was the host temporarily while we were electing a neutral third party host like Jick.
Charcoal Gungan:
Yeah he [sic] was a temp host, Daemon is a schizo
Rane:
We were going to- this has been totally misrepresented
Charcoal Gungan:
This is why I don’t want anything to do with him [sic], because he [sic] keeps giving these stupid excuses, [...]

This is the first time Rane mentioned Almond being a temp host anywhere, not even Daemon knew. In fact, Rane even admitted to me it was never communicated anywhere until it was too late:

And one more, early in the voice chat this was said about Almond’s position. No mention of being temporary:

Quote

voice recording starting at 00:37:50
Rane:
Ah hey it’s Almond, get Almond in the voice chat
ODJ:
Shees- Yes Almond can go into the voice chat as soon as she wants
Rane:
Our disgraced former host
[…]
Rane:
Almond, your tenure as host has lasted longer than some Roman emperors.

It doesn’t make any sense to me that the split would mean Almond isn’t necessary as a temp anymore, they did immediately get a game server set up after all?

Anyways, back to the announcement image:

Quote

This was never a permanent arrangement, and it was no secret to anyone that she was his GF. PJB had spent a significant amount of time in Rane’s discord and so obviously this would not be secret.

It is true I was in Rane Ranch (the Discord in question) for a long time, but I basically never interacted with the place except when pinged. I probably joined it on a whim (invite links don’t cost anything to click) and probably have less than 10 messages posted in it. Rane Ranch is not a small private Discord, last I checked it had more than 100 members and Rane occasionally posts the link in places like the Unitystation Discord.

I cannot describe this claim, that inactive presence in it is evidence I must have known who Almond was, as anything other than outright disingenuous.

I did not know that Almond is Rane’s girlfriend until Daemon told me in private. (it was mentioned in the original group DM, but I skimmed over the messages in question so missed that part until Daemon repeated it to me later)

I pressed Rane on this, and he responded that implying I was some sort of regular was wrong, but that he figured other staff on our side probably did know because they looked through Rane Ranch to find evidence for the original dehubbing act.

But either way, this doesn’t change anything. I’ve already gone over how Rane never communicated Almond was a temp to anybody, and me knowing this from the start wouldn’t have changed the ensuing events in any predictable way.

Rane would also state that he thought it was obvious, because I knew who Almond was, that she was a temp host and it would be dealt with later.

Anyways, back to the announcement image:

Quote

Daemon had still quit at the time Rane discussed this with others. PJB exploited this.

This is blatantly untrue. The only contact I had with Daemon around this time frame was them asking me for clarification on what the verdict on them is, which I said I’d ask internally. Daemon would then go on to call it out on the Nyanotrasen side, which led to the group DM being made and me properly being more involved. I would not read this until the next evening, because I had work.

If you want any indication whether I manipulated Daemon into starting the line of thought that they should be host again to fix things, this was my first response after skimming over ~140 messages in that group DM:

I will address further accusations of manipulation in a moment.

Quote

Daemon had agreed to transfer all power to others even before the delisting, with certain transfers being promised back to 2022. These transfer processes were incomplete, leaving room for a coup.

This isn’t really aimed at us, but I’ll just quickly explain what the deal here is:

Daemon was originally in control of all Nyanotrasen infrastructure except the nyanotrasen.moe domain name. This means the hardware, Patreon, GitHub and Discord. A lot of this was grandfathered in because the Discord for Nyanotrasen was originally for Daemon’s Arcadia Station server.

I do not know what actual arrangements have been “promised back to 2022” in this message, and I don’t think it has any relevance long-term.

One particularly contentious point was control over the Discord, which was “owned” by a special holder account. An arrangement was made where, to transfer ownership, Daemon would zip the 2FA recovery codes in a passworded zip (chosen by Rane) and send them to Faye. Daemon still had login credentials (it was also tied to their email address) but they were not able to log in due to discarding the 2FA key.

Daemon stepped down from Nyanotrasen on April 2nd, a couple days before the original dehubbing, I’ll talk more about the reasons behind this later. The day before, April 1st, Daemon asked Faye for these 2FA recovery codes, and Faye provided them with no questions asked. Daemon then silently changed the 2FA credentials, which is how they had full control over the Discord. Daemon stated they felt justified to do this, since they figured what was coming with Nyanotrasen and felt that Rane, Faye and ODJ were not suited to keep running the place long-term.

Rane has put a lot of focus on this particular point and we cannot endorse violation of whatever agreements were made. This was revealed around April 20th, so nobody knew about this except Daemon while the “coup” was taking place. I asked Daemon personally what the exact stipulations were for the Discord transfer, but they said they weren’t sure anymore. There is also this line by Faye during voice:

Quote

voice recording starting at 02:07:45
E.G.G.:
How did fucking Daemon have the power in the first place, didn’t he [sic] step down?
[...]
Faye:
He [sic] never gave up Discord ownership

Anyways, back to the announcement image:

Quote

Daemon was very distressed by the coup, because it immediately was clear it would fail, but giving up would mean delisting in their mind. Again, this was not part of the ruling and was emotional manipulation of a vulnerable person. Daemon was doing what they thought was right, which is admirable but damaging.

PJB banned Daemon from the SS14 discord and forums, and her community published a doc full of messages with various degrees of relevance that misgendered Daemon to 18,000 people.

PJB is attempting to coerce Daemon into performing a 'coup' in Nyano for unknown motives. This coup was not successful. There was nothing in the ruling that said Daemon had to be the new host, and PJB, who was Daemon's former boss, obviously knows they are not a stable choice for that role.

PJB is exploiting Daemon's emotional instability to try and destabilize Nyano by forcing through a host she knows will not work, and a host she can easily dehub again at any time by pointing to past behavior
This has been recognized universally by all Nyano staff, which is why the coup was so unsuccessful.

Finding an agreeable third party to host Nyano is what everyone wants for a stable outcome. Obviously this unethical attempt to exploit a vulnerable person and destabilize a community shows that not everyone wants a stable outcome. No one deserves this.

These claims are far more aggressive towards us and kind of entangled, so I’ll be addressing them in a moment. The easiest to address immediately is the one about misgendering. I want to go on a bit of a tangent here, so…

Yes, when we published the original Nyanotrasen dehub notice, the second PDF file misgendered Daemon. Daemon was upset by this (along with some of the other claims in the documents) and I apologized to them for the mistake in the Unitystation Discord. I’ll repeat the reason the error happened: Daemon only came out relatively recently at the time we were drafting those PDFs, and some PMs just didn’t know yet.

We couldn’t really update the existing copies of the PDFs that were going about, and Daemon was somewhat understanding. When I published the update announcement on this thread, I made sure to correct the PDF in question. One of the realizations we had internally about the use of PDFs was exactly that we could not update them with corrections like we could with a forum post, so this is one of the reasons we decided to change format for announcements.

Now, this accusation of misgendering is coming from fucking Ranyano. This is where the tangent starts, I’m just gonna dump a bunch of evidence about Ranyano here, this doesn’t really change the rest of the post much.

Spoiler

Ranyano is calling us out for a single instance of misgendering that we apologized for and corrected. Do you want to know what Ranyano’s track record on the topic of misgendering is? Buckle up, here it comes!

Consistent misgendering of Daemon at any possible moment and actively lying about this when called out.

I will address this specific point later, but Faye, ODJ and Rane pretty much all hate Daemon at this point, and did so even before April 16th. They have absolutely no respect for Daemon, which means absolutely nothing stopped them from misgendering Daemon consistently for the 2 hours and 15 minutes I have recorded of their voice chat. Or all the text chat messages you can readily scroll through on the Discord.

Everybody was misgendering Daemon for the entire ride. Faye, ODJ, Rane, game admins, other people that weren’t even staff. In fact I struggle to remember a single instance where Daemon was consistently gendered correctly. That’s what all the [sic]s in the voice recordings are for, and I promise you there will be more.

Now, I wouldn’t call this out if it weren’t for the fact that Ranyano specifically accused us of this when they were doing it a million times worse.

To drill this in even more, ODJ actively lies when called out about misgendering Daemon. This is no surprise considering some of the vitriol ODJ has thrown at Daemon (later…). Rane corrects ODJ for misgendering me, somebody posts Daemon’s pronouns in text chat. ODJ tries to pretend he has been saying gender-neutral “ ‘em ” all along. I’ll let you scrub through the rest of the chat to judge that yourself.

Quote

voice recording starting at 01:01:40
Rane:
PJB is a womaloid now, you should say ‘she’.
ODJ:
What- I- no no no, listen listen, I’m not saying
<picture of Daemon’s Discord bio gets posted by somebody in text chat, highlighting they/them pronouns>
no but I’m not saying ‘him’, I say ‘them’, I apologize, listen.
It’s like that’s how I talk, I go-
I’ve had this same kind of scuffle with Faye, where I’m like “yeah that’s how they go about ‘em”, and I say ‘em’, like I do the dash[sic] em, that’s like that
<ODJ posts “ ‘em “ in text chat below Daemon’s bio picture>
I don’t-
Rane:
Oh so it’s dash[sic] em, so it’s gender neutral
ODJ:
Yeah, that’s how I talk, and I apologize I don’t mean to be doing that to anyone.
Trust me, I appreciate, and I try to accommodate everyone. Like when I first came in I did the whole “guys gals and other pals”
[...]
Yeah, I try not to discriminate to anyone on that way
I DO, fucking say [slur] though, because it’s so fucking [slur]
[...]
 

ODJ has been misgendering Daemon in live voice for over an hour by this point. Don’t think he changed his behavior later. In fact:

Quote

voice recording starting at 01:13:30
Rane:
Daemon is a nyan-binary [sic] cat-they now, by the way
ODJ:
They, they, I apologize
here, I’ll correct
[...]
is because he [sic] went by ‘he’ for quite a while, so I’m not used to calling him [sic, or em?] that yet.
Rane:
Yeah even the upstream chuds misgendered them
ODJ:
Which was going to happen, but it’s fine as you correct yourself.

Final cherry on top from this (context was I posted that the video recording link has timestamps now. I did not mention misgendering at all):

My brother in Christ, you misgendered them in the exact sentence you were apologizing for misgendering them, after an hour and many text messages of clear-cut misgendering.

I’ll leave you, the reader, to be the judge.

Oh and if you’re wondering, Rane and ODJ called us and Daemon a “chud”. ODJ actually wondered in voice chat what chud means, but decided not to Google it:

Quote

voice recording starting at 01:00:05
ODJ:
What’s a good kind of word to describe someone like that?
Oh, Rane, gotta thank you: A chud
[laugher by other members]
goldenthenerd:
What the fuck does that even mean?
ODJ:
I don’t know what it really means, and I think I’ve always used it wrong.
[...]
I always forget, but I’m just gonna keep doing it.

 

Anyways, onto the accusations of manipulation of Daemon. Rane provided me these messages when I asked for a source:

These messages only support the claims of manipulation with an extremely pessimistic reading from the perspective of Rane & co. To be 100% sure I asked Daemon to confirm, and the following interpretation is actually correct:

Daemon feels “forced” to execute the coup, because they are convinced a proper culling of Rane from Nyanotrasen is the only way forward for the server to be rehubbed. They already saw Rane try to pull shit by trying to install his girlfriend as host. Daemon agreed with our verdict of harassment and such by Rane, and was convinced that them taking charge and putting their foot down was the only way to avoid Faye and ODJ secretly protecting Rane, which would cause Nyano to be dehubbed forever if found out.

Daemon proposed this to me first. We never forced Daemon to do this, and the only greenlight we gave is that we would rehub a Daemon coup if it got rid of Rane.

Outside of these specific screenshots, Rane had far more context from private chats. For this accusation to make any sense, Rane would have had to believe that I intentionally acted out a fake surprise at this development, while controlling it from the shadows.

Furthermore, Rane eventually desisted from these accusations of manipulation after I… told him to just ask Daemon directly. Guess that’s all it took.

Daemon started the discussion that they believed they’d be allowed on the hub again of their own initiative in the old Nyanotrasen discord. They did not have a definitive verdict from us on that yet, and it would take a day and a half for one to be made. I already explained how we did not exploit Daemon during these uncertain hours earlier.

The reason I wrote we wouldn’t rehub Nyano without this coup is quite simple: we agreed with Daemon’s conclusion that Rane & co. would keep trying to pull shit. I’ll speak more about this later in the opinion section. We wanted Rane to be blacklisted from the community as much as reasonably possible due to their harassment against our staff members, nothing more. Daemon was of the opinion they could provide that.

I should back up a bit, and address the banning of Daemon and their stepping down in the first place.

Daemon was banned from our Discord and forum leading up to the dehubbing of Nyanotrasen. A very large factor in this was Daemon’s lack of action to deal with Rane at Nyanotrasen in the first place. Daemon became somewhat of an unfortunate middleman in a lot of this: unable to act due to the other staff at Nyanotrasen being unwilling to listen and already having a bad relationship, but still receiving pressure from us due to Nyanotrasen. This all added onto existing mental health issues which Daemon has been struggling with.

The original update to the situation on April 16th did not properly address Daemon’s situation. It was primarily aimed at the current Nyanotrasen and Rane, something which would logically exclude Daemon since they stepped down. The original wording in the update threw Daemon in the same pile as Swept and Rane, which was absolutely not justified. When Daemon came to ask for clarification we came to the conclusion that we probably went too hard on them as well, and made it clear that we’re reverting our decision on that.

The decision for what to do with Daemon’s verdict took some discussion on our end. We did know they were going to try this coup if we gave them a greenlight. We also had concerns about their mental health surrounding this, and made sure to ask them about it.

We agreed to greenlight Daemon based on the fact that we didn’t feel it was our place to stop them ourselves. We were also very clear that they should make sure to take care of themselves, for whatever happens. In hindsight it can be argued that the coup attempt could violate some form of hub rules, and we should have told them “no” based on that, but this was not really considered at the time.

ODJ also made the accusation that Daemon saw this greenlighting as a justification of past behavior. This quote comes after people were describing some of Daemon’s poor past behavior.

Quote

voice recording starting at 00:59:10
ODJ:
[...] and despite, you know, Daemon being previously on the no-fly-list, and only recently that is a pulled-back statement. It’s like ah no ok you’re fine, you can be involved in other stuff. He [sic] would take and see that as a greenlight for all his [sic] past behavior, and his current behavior.

ODJ then went on a rant about how we are not involved enough in the community to make these kinds of decisions. Daemon is not an individual without history (we did collect it in far more detail than we maybe should’ve, after all) but after speaking with Daemon I came to the conclusion that they understand their mistakes and actually aim to do better, which is not something I can say about other individuals involved in this drama.

Obviously it’s not our desire to kill Nyanotrasen, that would ultimately just harm players and the community more than anything. We want the harassment of our staff to stop, and dehubbing is the only stick we are able to swing. When we greenlit Daemon, we did not believe Rane was ever interested in working with us in good faith. We saw Daemon as risky, but the best way forward.

These suspicions of bad-faith behavior turned out to be proven true many times in the ensuing chaos and fallout from the coup. One of the most damning pieces of evidence we have is just ODJ outright stating it:

Quote

voice recording starting at 01:00:05
ODJ:
There is a little bit of a discussionary point on the fact that we are to be rehubbed.
What has gone through is the fact that [Rane is] not supposed to have a head position.
Which is really just a title, you still are going to be doing the same stuff you did anyways, which is code. It’s just that you won’t be a head position.
Rane:
I’m a codercel now.
ODJ:
Yeah, this is literally all you did before, except you would publicly speak up and make wojack announcements
[laughter]
[...]
ODJ:
You don’t do your soyjacks and wojacks in announcements, that’s the only thing that changes from all of this. That’s all that was meant to change, is that you no longer do those things. That was all that was supposed to happen.
So Daemon doing all of this nonsense is really aggravating because he [sic] went through and [...]

Rane was a key staff member doing all kinds of internal negotiations and discussions surrounding this. To say that his stepping would just ban him from posting wojack memes is absurd.

We also know that Nyano staff did not take our demand seriously:

Quote

voice recording starting at 00:39:50
MapleNut:
Is what Rane did, like actually- that justified the dehubbing in the first place?
ODJ:
No

Quote

voice recording starting at 00:43:25
ODJ:
[...] because they were actually in the wrong, they made the statement like “hey we kinda fucked this up”, they then made a followup statement that “okay, actually, yeah, we’re in the wrong”. However, it can never be a full back step, so, as consolation, they’re like “we will rehub you if you remove the worthless title of head maintainer from Rane”. Which does nothing by the way, removing that title does nothing. It just flexes the ego that Rane cannot hold a title as a head, because he cannot be trusted, because he posts wojack and he is cringe and he argues with us.
That is the entirety of it. All that needed to happen was that he no longer has head maintainer, and he is not in like a head position, so people don’t think he should be listened to, and instead he just codes.

Quote

voice recording starting at 01:33:30
ODJ:
[unintelligible] of us being rehubbed? It doesn’t matter, it’s all just arbitrary anyways. At the end of the day, as I described, the whole reason we got dehubbed is just because they don’t like Rane. That’s what it is. [unintelligible] that’s really what it boils down to.

I apparently have to repeat myself: Nyanotrasen was dehubbed due to vile and persistent harassment sent our way by core members like Rane. Also refer back to my previous statement about Rane’s position clearly being far more than ODJ is implying here.

Faye also acknowledged that they had a plan when getting into this. We take this as ruling out internal confusion as an excuse for the earlier voice logs:

Quote

voice recording starting at 01:17:15
Faye:
[unintelligible]
“You shouldn’t step down, your plan is fucking [slur] and bad”, and then you did and all of this happens it’s your fault.
Rane:
Yeah I guess there’s not any point in me stepping down anymore.

If you’re a believer in freudian slips, I might even be able to sell you on this one:

Quote

voice recording starting at 02:10:40
Rane:
I’m a psycho I’m extremely calculating
Faye:
No you’re a schizo as well, you’re a schizo as well Rane
Your decision making to leave was extremely schizo
Rane:
To leave what?

We take these recordings, and the tomfoolery around the “temporary” host as definitive evidence that Ranyano was never intent on complying with our demands. We see Faye and ODJ as complicit in the matter.

Anyways, my truck full of evidence against Ranyano directly is empty. If you’ll indulge me, I have another car trunk full of some deets. We don’t really make an administrative decision on this matter, I just think you should see it.

I am going to repeat that we did not make a big deal out of Rane for no reason, and nothing has changed on that front (that you haven’t already seen before in the evidence here).

Other core Nyanotrasen staff absolutely hated Daemon even before the whole coup thing. I know Daemon wasn’t an angel by any means, so I do believe there is some truth in some of the stories posted by staff members like ODJ. That said, none of that could possibly justify this behavior towards them (content warning for the spoiler):

Spoiler

The voice recording is filled with many instances of ODJ and other staff members throwing slurs and other vitriol towards Daemon. ODJ also gets on a soapbox multiple times to defend their usage of these slurs, and goes full ableist at times. I won’t even bother to list all these incidents here, but most of them are clearly called out with the time stamps attached to the voice chat recording.

I’ve already shown their handling of misgendering.

My thoughts and opinions

This is the part where I drop my cold and calculating PR facade and just write what I actually think of this whole situation and the people involved. Maybe it is a wiser move, publicly, to not write this section. I don’t care, I’m fucking tired and have a bone to pick. This rant will probably be completely incoherent.

I was not originally in charge of the situation. Other PMs, those more personally affected by the harassment, were among the ones spearheading the problem. I already explained how we ended up rushing things in the end to finally be able to get this done. This was all done to rid our friends of this pain. From petty shitting on people that “caused” bugs, to outright baseless accusations of pedophilia with an agenda. I was not affected or involved, but I was still vaguely watching it go by from the sidelines.

There is nobody in the world that wants to deal with this drama. Nobody. We want to work on this game to create things. Dealing with drama like this is having to put in weeks of soul draining effort to stop people destroying things. It’s a completely thankless job.

I’m still very possessive about the project and very perfectionist. Yet still I admitted to myself a bit before the dehub went down that “wow, maybe I could really just let other people handle this”.
After the original dehub was announced, several PMs burned out internally. We knew shit was fucked. Barely any progress gets made on outside communication. I finally broke and on April 10th I took charge and worked to start fixing things. Everything from there on was under my control. Of course, more than enough votes were held internally to discuss things, but I was watching over everything.

I don’t like to boast, but I think that everything since then has been handled great. That is, about as well as you can deal with a collective group of lying fucking shitters. Yes. I wrote that. This is the anti-PR department.

You can make a wholly self-consistent model of the actual actions of Rane, Faye and ODJ that makes the events of the past couple days have transpired with them being fully honest. Such a model would, however, be reliant on many assumptions of them being blithering idiots. ODJ wouldn’t know what the word “staff” means. They're all too stupid to ever drop the word “temporary” when announcing Almond as host. The list goes on.

But that’s not what happened. Every piece of evidence we have added to the pile of things that can be more adequately explained by some degree of malice rather than complete incompetence. Realistically the answer is obviously somewhere in the middle. I would rather say Rane is more on the calculating and manipulative side, and ODJ and Faye are more on the incompetent side of the bell curve. Hey, Rane even said he’s an extremely calculating psycho. If Rane wants to eliminate the possibility of all these inconsistencies being an accident, that suits me!

I mean, they’re all shitty people either way. They wouldn’t be telling Daemon to kill themselves and sending pedophilia accusations to our staff if they weren’t. The only thing that matters is that they made enough slip-up that allows us to justifiably remove them.

I mean, like I said, we always knew. I knew Rane was a serial liar going into this. This wasn’t our first rodeo with him by a long shot. Rane sends me completely reasonable questions on the matter of protocol. I have to answer with a completely reasonable response, which involves ages of internal deliberation and a calculated response for what we can get away with. It’s all playing a stupid game. Rane wants to keep as much power as he can, we have to figure out how much power we can reasonably demand him to give up without him spinning it into something.

Rane wants to know if a separation between server/codebase can be argued for. It’s a clear attempt to keep all effective privileges without publicly being server staff. But I can’t just shoot that down can I? Then I look like the unreasonable one!

I have witnessed an impressive amount of gear switching and backpedaling coming from Rane over these past couple days. “You must have known Almond was my GF”. “obviously nothing was finalized, we still had to discuss me stepping down”. Modshopping other PMs with the manipulation accusation. “It was a miscommunication on all sides”. “You’re really clever for answering a yes/no question”. And finally, telling me that I shouldn’t write this response. Like I can do that after accusations of manipulating vulnerable people.

Literally all Rane would have had to fucking do was to stop fucking harassing us. We don’t give a rat’s fucking ass what Rane does if none of it makes it our way and we don’t hear about it. We say “no staff position” because then we can shift the responsibility to server owners, because dehubbing is the only possible stick we have. If Rane fucks off somewhere and turns a new leaf and we never see anything bad from him again that’s great! The world works! Or make an alt and return to Nyano never incriminating again, I DON’T CARE!

But deep down we know he can’t fucking do that, because he’s fucking obsessed. Or we live rent free in his head. Or whatever fucking word you want to use. You want to know where the baseless pedophilia accusations came from? Because we had the gall to demand Nyanotrasen to remove an administrator that had pedophilic content on their online profiles. Cut the shit you fucking weebs, it’s not “lolicon”, it’s pedophilia. Rane has been trying to find something against us ever since. He has not succeeded.

But no, I guess our demand to have Rane fuck off in the only way we can is just “flexing our ego” or whatever was said. A great take by somebody that supports the harasser, and does not fall far from the tree themselves. We’ve already had people come out of the woodwork to say “just block them bro”, or we’re overreacting, or all kinds of shit that is extremely easy to say if you’re not the victim of this. Let alone the aggressor.

I have wasted weeks of my time on this. Weeks of my time I could have spent to improve the game in a meaningful way. I believe it to be necessary to support the people in this community that I consider my friends, but at the end of it I’m very hollow typing this at 2 AM.

I want to say I’m just going to post this rant to the forum, block all communications with Ranyano and let it explode or simmer out from there. I know I can’t fucking do that. This shit isn’t going to be over. It’s not going to end. Hell this text is probably not going to make it to the forum unedited because it truly is the anti-PR department.

By the way, ODJ, you wrote that extremely vile hate mail to Daemon, in which you were too stupid to see you’re contradicting yourself. “You’ll never be able to forget the year of your life you wasted” because you want to rub salt in. Then “grow up and move on” like it’s some mature thing to put at the end of your petty rant.

Final verdict

Rane, Faye and ODJ are blacklisted from any staff involvement in any hubbed server ever again. You don’t get any stupid workarounds, no codebase/server separation like Rane asked for. Just get out of my sight.

If you want to come back, then make a new online identity and grow up so I never figure out it’s you again. If I catch you in voice in 5 years and you’ve actually managed it, I’ll be nothing but impressed. The last person we have this opinion on has not even attempted it.

Daemon has given control of Daemonyano over to an independent third party, and whatever that server turns into will be allowed on the hub (as long as Rane/Faye/ODJ don’t come back). If any hub rules were truly violated in the coup, we do not believe these should transfer to the new ownership of the server.

 

Update: Old Dance Jacket has been banned from the forum for posting off-topic content, and continuing to spread the same harassment here after getting warned.

Edited April 23, 2023 by PJB
Ban for ODJ

[PJB]

The opinions section made its way through with only minor additions, by the way.

[ashdemai]

That's what you get for still using Discord tbqh fam. Drama.