[Dildo Shwaggins]

I don't think it's necessarily fair to judge TDawg for this kind of thing or use it as a reason to deny him for admin. When you know who got banned I wanted to pry to know what happened and get the full story but realized that's not very productive or a very positive thing to do. I think that as long as TDawg can recognize that prying in situations like that ruins victim confidentiality (Which I think he does, The guy has one of the strongest heads on his shoulders in the community) then this shouldn't be an issue in the future. Making a mountain out of a molehill for this kind of thing is a little insane but both sides of the arguments have good points. 

A lot of people in this community have ruined the potential to have any kind of cohesive conversation in community matters so I can see how this turned into a full on forums argument. People can express concern on matters they think is relevant and it shouldn't reflect poorly on the person with concerns as long as the reason is valid and within the realm of reason. This isn't like the spider argument at all where people are blowing things out of proportion (Invalid, not within the realm of reason). I trust TDawg even if he's associated with people I don't consider very nice people and I would hope that he gets his shot at admin because I think he's unbiased and he has the knowledge and experience to do smart things and not dumb things.

I would like to expand on the points made in this post, particularly "A lot of people in this community have ruined the potential to have any kind of cohesive conversation in community matters" 

Since April's explosion, even though the more "explosive" discourse for lack of a better term has calmed down, I would like to expand on it and say that in general Dink's has not really felt like too much of a community at all ever since. It's been civil play on server and mostly civil on general gaming things on the forums, but several staff apps including this one and many community-focused things have had anything from small swipes to not-so-subtle insults thrown around, rep patterns, and overall lack of usage of common community spaces (the main discord hasn't had any sort of game night for several months, and forums are mostly staff apps and simple server items. I do commend those that have posted about things the community as a whole has interest in, but still, it's not unnoticed. 

What it feels like right now is a subsection of separate communities utilizing the GMod server to play but otherwise being their own communities where some people have bad blood. This is not to say friend groups are a bad thing, everyone can have friends, nor am I attempting to invalidate anyone's bad experiences they have had with others that leads to valid resentment of someone else, or that there aren't cultural problems in the game-verse. But, there's no hope of this community functioning cohesively with the current state of everything either. Any solution would start at administration, as ownership is overall absent, and as we have seen, mass bans don't necessarily accomplish anything either. But in the end, it's still up to everyone here as well to actually achieve anything that any administration catalyzes. If people aren't willing to do that, it's going to be a rinse and repeat of butting heads on forums. 

Tl;dr it's a community divided, and it's gonna take a lot for any semblance of unity.