For the sake of clarity on a few points:
How and why chinup left staff is her business, and nobody else's. If she chooses to share that with folks, again that's her business not anyone else's. The only reason staff might have to step in and address statements about it is if there are misrepresentations, intentional or by a lack of information, which need to be addressed. I'm not seeing that, and appreciate that folks aren't re-hashing her situation - it's her business.
- In her departure, she initially did request to be jabberwockied*. But several of us, myself among them, were very reluctant to do so. Largely in part because she made tremendous contributions over the years for which she ought retain credit. And, in part because at the time many of us hoped her real life could get sorted and we could get our chinup back. That was the hope, and so we did not act on that initial request, and she came to agree the request was made rashly and ought not be followed through on.
- As time progressed, it became clear she was doing better, happier and healthier away from all the drama here. Something everyone wished for her, whether it be with us or moving on from us.
- Recently we had an issue where actions were taken by an individual that was not in alignment with the rest of senior staff. One such action was to act on that early request for jabberwocky despite the admin and chinup having agreed not to. I have reached out to chinup as this is NOT how we operate and I have apologized on behalf of staff for this mistake. I've offered to make amends as best I can.
- Of the actions to be cleaned up, the jabberwockey'ing of an account is perhaps the most difficult. I'll explain that below.
I'll pause for a moment to re-iterate - this was not what chinup wanted, and not what the admin had agreed to with her. However, as she chooses to share any anger or outrage over it (understandable) with friends, that is her choice. At the time, neither she, nor anyone else she relays things to, would be fully aware of what happened, or what we are trying to undo. You're operating with partial information. Justified anger, but partial information. Likewise, not everything the admin discuss with a member, nor the actions we take or why, is always shared with all of staff. Sometimes we'll see mods and smods trying to address a situation as best they can, but they too may not have all the information. I see a lot of deleted remarks in this thread - from both members and staff. I'm not going to dig through and try to evaluate un-deleting anything, my priority is addressing chinup as best we can. I will simply ask that ALL parties recognize this was a mistake, one we are trying to remedy.
I'll close the main point here with an apology to the staff who have tried to address this issue in public discourse. It is my fault for going direct with chinup on the matter and not seeing the public flare up needing to be addressed. It is also my failure in not informing staff (below admin) of what actions I am taking to remedy this, so you were not fully informed - that is on me. But I thank you for your efforts to stay honest with the best information you had, and to try and address member concerns.
= = = ==
For those unaware on Jabberwockey. It exists for a purpose, as a means to retain public posts when someone needs to have their account disappeared for whatever reason. We don't advertise this, because given our drug fueled membership people often get too high and freak out or find themselves in a bad mental state and makin bad decisions about their account. Before we eer consider merging them into Jabberwockey, we always have a few days of cool down to ensure it is based on rational thinking and a real need. But once done, we cannot un-merge. It is a very simple few button clicks to merge an account into Jabber, thereby letting this generic account own all the public posts and vanishing the original account. However, this also moves ALL existing PM discussions from the original account into Jabber. There is no way to un-merge the account back out. It no longer exists and as in this case with chinup, I'd have to make a NEW account for her. There is no way to split the posts back out from jabber from within the software, nor to return to PMs to that new account. I have to go into the database and see if I can extract the PMs and provide them to her external to Bluelight. The posts would have to be addressed one at a time, manually doing some edits within the forums to move ownership across, this involves a lot of copying-editing and general black magic on my part to make it happen. Luckily, chinup has only listed four threads for me to return to her at this point. More important to her, and myself, is that she get her PMs going back years, which I believe I can do as an export, just not within the site or back to any new account. Jabbering is a serious action, one we do not take lightly and in principle it cannot be undone...but I will do what I can for her.