[TheUltraFish]

You were an idiot over a pretty large issue after already having a history of being an idiot. The big question for admins and community members, is are they willing to go through it again? Not the exact same scenario obviously but what big thing will it be next time? Yes, you were forgiven by the other individual but does forgiveness transfer to the end of punishment(s)?

Best of luck to everyone no matter how this turns out.

If Rand gets unbanned and is a good bean then there was nothing to worry about. However, if he is unbanned and does something again (that's extreme), then he will be rebanned but the upper staff will get a lot of "you should have known better" attitude and discussions.

[Icey]

-1

This ban should be at least a year long. Taking a picture of a staff member and putting them next to a pedophile takes effort. It’s not just some in the moment mistake. This happened about 6 months ago, not way back when. I will be fine with an unban in the future, but for something so fucking pathetic and stupid, 6 months is not enough.

[Salty]

-1

This ban should be at least a year long. Taking a picture of a staff member and putting them next to a pedophile takes effort. It’s not just some in the moment mistake.

If we don't feel that a full unban is the right decision,  what Icey suggested, similarly to with Laced, would be ideal if this was the absolute final chance we are willing to give. Just understand that if you are banned again if your unban is approved/gets reducted, as long as I am a member of this staff team, I would never give you another chance in this community. That's what I was implying with my first post, but I wanted to be COMPLETELY TRANSPARANT with how I feel about this situation.


I feel that everyone who's said things that are not in your favor have presented good arguments that have good validity, and Fish puts it best by saying this:

You were an idiot over a pretty large issue after already having a history of being an idiot. The big question for admins and community members, is are they willing to go through it again? Not the exact same scenario obviously but what big thing will it be next time? Yes, you were forgiven by the other individual but does forgiveness transfer to the end of punishment(s)?

My vote hasn't changed. I'm still a +1 for unban or reduction because I feel that 6 months is enough time personally. If others don't feel the same way, then that's totally fine.

[YourMateMurph]

+1 I think that this should be at the least a reduction if not a total unban at this time. From what I've seen of him talking in discord and in the short bit I've played with him recently he hasn't done anything bad.

No matter what the photo was of, like Rand said, it was a "very very stupid meme" that wasn't received well and I don't think a horribly failed attempt at a joke should result in a perma especially when the party involved has forgiven the perceived ill intent. It has also been 6 months as well.

[Jammin]

While I do think that some folks here are understating the severity of the situation, I do think that time has served, and reconciliations have been made.

I also agree with this being a final chance should you be unbanned, at least with regards to forums and discord.

That being said, he has been a good bean in discord from everything I can tell, and I think forums are, again, and organized stricter approach. Frankly, a more proper way of unbanning someone who was communication blocked would have been to unban from the forums first, then discord. I think that the forums are for the more serious discussions, and are easier to manage in terms of overall review activity.

If he is unbanned with some sort of moderation attached, I will personally volunteer to assist with the moderation. I believe that he should be unbanned, and I'm willing to throw some of my time behind that to ensure his proper reintegration.

[grasse]

if he's been fine in the discord what is the threat of being on the forums, this being much more easily moderated, most people said everything already and i actually agree with jammin. didn't agree w not having laced unbanned on here but that's fine, hope this doesn't go the same way. hope all goes well with it

[jax]

Monumentally retarded to keep him banned on the forums, while having him unbanned on the discord. If you really wanted him punished, you shouldn't have unbanned him from the discord. In this context, the -1 arguments don't really make any sense.

"I don't think you've changed."
"What if you do it again, you have a history."

All these points are moot because if he decides to, he can just troll / shitpost / harass (whatever your fears are) on discord. Remove these, and there isn't really a reason not to unban him. If you wanted him punished, shouldn't have unbanned him from the discord. Plus, if anything, the appropriate 'pipeline' would have been to unban him from the forums first, then the discord, given that the forums are the medium in which "official" server discussion occurs.

Yeah man calling someone a pedo is a real funny meme!

Alexa, Google "comparisons"
-1 for reasons stated above

Alexa, Google "False Equivalency"

But if you guys really want to draw 'comparisons' to crimes like murder (lmfao) Then let's draw a comparison to assault, trespassing, etc where if the "victim" decides not to press charges, then there is no criminal punishment enacted. So to say "When a murderer is on trial a lot of times the family will forgive them in their victim impact statements, and yet the murderer still goes to prison for what they did." doesn't really make sense considering there are many instances of other crimes, where that *is* the case.
(Also not to mention, that in a murder case the "victim" can't forgive the perpetrator because the "victim" is dead/murdered. Where as in assault, trespassing, etc the victim is still alive, hence why they are able to choose to press charges or not.)

Overall, I'm not going to vote because I don't care enough about the situation, but really some of these "arguments" against are ridiculous.

[chibill]

I have no real comments on this unban request, because honestly from my perspective as someone that only joined the community in April, I haven't had any issues with rand when I have interacted with them, but I went looked thru their old threads (and the last 2 unban requests which you should since from them nothing seems to have changed in how they view their ban reason.) and other issues they were involved in, I wouldn't want them back on the forums.

But as I said I am not going to +1 or -1 this since I don't have enough context to make such a decision.

[LemonTiara]

Yeah man calling someone a pedo is a real funny meme!

I mean, we have people making "pedo jokes" / "pedo-like" comments getting their ban lenght reduced as of right now on ttt so why is it that something that happened long ago that he has now (that I am aware of) apologized for keep him from being forum unbanned considering it has been a while? 

I don't think "calling someone a pedo" is forum ban worthy for so long, but he didn't do that (it was up for interpretation ig). Idc what happens with this unban if I am being completely honest but lets put things into perspective here.

Many/most staff dislike rand and/or his actions, the community likes him. If he weren't a regular we wouldn't be having this discussion. Do I think what he did is ok? no. Is it bad enough to keep him banned forever? definitely no.

[poop MANIAC(fecal frenzy!!!!!!!!]

Society. All organisms live in one, from the mircrobes floating in the anarchy of a drop of pond water, to the crows forming kin tribes to claim valuable plots of landfills, to the ants who develop complex, egalitarian sororities from which they can organize the slaughter of ants who have a slightly different head shape. Why, even we humans live in a society, taking briefcases miles across the land to change values in Excel spreadsheets as a means of obtaining the intermediary means to obtain food. In any society there are rules; the big eats the small, the us eats the them, the car stays on the road, etc. In any society, the violation of these rules results in retaliation from the society at large. In human society, that retaliation is an almost exclusively punitive affair, an effort on the system's part; it is meant to safeguard said society from crumbling apart, for a system can only exist in theory if its rules are not followed in practice. Punishment is meant to be a deterrent for prospective deviants, and a correctional affair for active ones.

Humans are a volatile, intelligent animal. Intelligent animals, as a matter of instinct, are driven to push and prod at the rules under which they find themselves, to look for shortcuts and ways to circumnavigate their limitations, even if (sometimes especially if) pushing those boundaries doesn't have any distinct or meaningful benefit. Humanity, as a whole, has obtained its place of preeminence, because this drive to defeat the system, this underlying instinct to overcome restriction and chase its own agenda, is such a powerful force inside of each and every individual among us. It is our universal quality that allows us to adapt, to create and to innovate.

Humans also possess the ability to contextualize; we may take stimuli and compare them to a previous body of experience, a great bubbling cauldron of biopsychosociological variables which can make sense from nonsense, and just as much vice versa. What may seem like a harmless, absurd image edit of a public persona on a social media may be in reality a malicious, hateful attack of targeted harassment to another. It takes a great deal of empathy to realize that not everyone comes from the same emotional and sociocultural background, and even moreso to overcome that knowledge and view actions from another person's point of view. Empathy is a powerful tool of the social animal, something which allows them to assimilate and accommodate information with a high level of consideration for context. In more intelligent social animals, that context can go further than the obvious to consider the individual experience of the kin creature before it.

What we have here is a crisis of conscience. Shall we decide to punish our brother randy here further for simply being too human, for prodding the structure in which he lived out of that innate sense of primate curiosity? Or shall we satiate society's need for revenge, safeguard its mechanisms and health, protecting it from the humanity of its constituents which is the system's biggest threat? What is more important, that one man has learned from his self-destructive sense of curiosity, or that the monolith of the system remain untouched, sacred, and intact?

I know what I, as an individual, think. I think a +1 to unban randy. What does our society think?