i was disappointed and not a little annoyed to have to have closed the gibberings thread yesterday. there were a number of mean-spirited and inflammatory posts disrupting the thread and in the absence of any eadd staff online at the time, i closed the thread to try to deescalate things.
let me address the facts surrounding the incident that precipiated yesterday's derailing of the gibberings thread.
the blua makes it abundantly clear that use of bl as a channel for the sourcing or supply of drugs is strictly forbidden. unfortunately, we're largely powerless when it comes to private communication on the site as nobody in the bl staff hierarchy has access to bluelighter pms so the only cases where we've been able to take action based on definitive proof of sourcing or supply have been cases where users have reported the transactional pms in question, often in cases where the perpetrators have accidentally reported themselves.
yesterday's allegation was that evey used bl as the medium for the supply of drugs to another bluelighter. while we now know that drugs did change hands, the transaction and the associated communication - to the best of our knowledge- took place off-site. regardless of how much animosity some of you feel for the individual(s) in question, we can not, have never and should not be policing acts which take place off of bluelight. to suggest otherwise is impractical and imappropriate.
there were further allegations that the user in question is receiving lenient treatment because of donations to the site and that she is receiving special treatment because of favouritism on the part of eadd staff. i'll address these points separately:
lenient/special treatment and fair/consistent treatment are not the same thing but they are being conflated by a vocal lynch-mob of bluelighters who simply do not like evey and have made it clear that they're trying through various means to remove or force her from bluelight. there have been two cases in the recent past where evey was banned from bluelight 'permanently' only to be reinstated after the circumstances of her bans were reviewed. i'll remind everybody that both the bans and the subsequent reinstatements were by members of the bl admin. team and, while like any staff they were free to give an opinion, the eadd staff were not involved in the final decision. we took the decision to reverse those bans because they circumvented the regular bluelight discipline procedure and we felt that was inappropriate. if you want to be annoyed at somebody for overturning evey's permanent ban twice, be annoyed with me.
in terms of quid pro quo for donations, that's simply a case of erroneous assumption. donations are anonymous - nobody in the bl staff hierarchy has access to donation names, emails or amounts. only the bl owners (s_g and tlb) know who's donated to the site and how much. if those of you who believe that there is a quid pro quo arrangement in place for donations, then you're essentially calling the site owners and myself liars. i believe i can live with the disappointment.
i've been a bluelighter for over 13 years and a staffer for much of that time. i've seen - and personally been on the receiving end of - some of the most vitriolic, hateful bile imaginable on the site. some of the comments i saw yesterday were up there in terms of mean-spirited abuse. singling out individuals for abuse on bluelight, cowardly posting abusive comments from the safety of the anon forum and crudely mimicking bluelighters on other sites (e.g. reddit) in an attempt to smear them here are unacceptable. they waste staff time and distract everybody from the core mission of the site.
if you have an issue with a user on this site and you believe they are posting content which is problematic, report their posts and let the forum staff do their jobs. if you're not satisfied with the actions a forum staffer has (or has not) taken, escalate your concerns to the senior moderators who oversee the forum. if you're still not satisfied, escalate again to a member of the admin team. at any point in the process, if you'd like to have the conversation publicly, start a thread in support.
if you have an issue with a user on the site that you simply can not get past, put that user on ignore and move on. when you choose to engage in the public forum, and when you do it using insults and abuse, you are simply no better than the person you're criticising.
i'm happy to answer questions (here or in a pm) but i'm not going to dissect what happened yesterday minutely. i've spent (wasted?) too much time on this already and i'm confident in my finding that bl was not used as a channel here.
if you disagree with that finding, i'll agree to disagree. if you're disappointed by my actions here, i'll find a way to live with your disappointment.
i see comments that eadd has 'gone to shit'. well, if you feel this to be true ask yourself what you're doing to make it better? and if the answer to that is the clusterfuck that erupted in eadd yesterday, then i'm sorry but you're not helping. you're making things worse. if you think that the quality of posts in eadd has dropped, post more quality posts. in short, be the change you wish to see in the forum. if you're unable or unwilling to do that, but content to sit on the sidelines and hurl abuse, i'd advise a look in the mirror because you are, in my humble opinion, part of the problem.
alasdair