Ack! You lost the trust of the userbase!
I believe the original intent of this
prank was, given the
bad press editors and Gods have had lately, to show what would happen if the site was invaded by
trolls and they weren't able to help. Make us
appreciate them as it were.
Well, that worked a fucking charm, didn't it?
The joke was, in
hindsight, quite a good one. But it got out of control, people got genuinely
panicked, and the plug probably should have been pulled. It certainly shouldn't have gone on for
fourteen hours. Asides from everything else, by that point it was just a pain -
E2 was moving like
treacle, the
catbox and new nodes were full of
shit, and any nodes you wanted to read tended to appear in
l33t.
Impersonation. One excuse an editor gave me was that "no active
noders were impersonated without their permission". Yes, but we all know who
DMan and
Jay Stile are, even if they aren't currently active on the dbase. If someone created a
dem_bones@slashdot.org user on some discussion board and used it to slag people off, it wouldn't be
justifiable just because bones doesn't frequent that board. I can't comment on the DMan/
Saige comments as I didn't see them, but it sounds like whoever did it should have known better.
Satirical Licence. The troll impersonations were excellent. I never would have dreampt that some of the Gods/Eds were capable of writing anything that offensive, even in the name of
satire. I'm rather dissapointed to discover that they could.
Aftermath.
April Trolls Day goes up, all the Eds/Gods have a good laugh about the chaos they've caused, some users join in. One user raises a valid
complaint, gets
insta-nuked. Users who complain are given the "
my way or the highway" line, or told to just
take a joke. Easy thing to say when you're the joker, not the jokee.
I acknowledge it was a joke. I acknowledge you needed to let off some steam. Now could
you acknowledge that, for
whatever reason, some people didn't find it funny, and
apologise. The display of arrogance has pissed me off tremendously. Is it really easier to repeatedly
nuke nodes, /msg users and eventually drive people off the
dbase than it is to admit that you made an
error of judgement?
I've lost a lot of respect for most Gods/Editors over the handling of this, and gained
respect for a few. I'll cherish the memories of
XP Whores repeatedly using
Punch Thyself to 'gain' 10XP, and lament the loss of
Magenta.
Now please, let
no more be said.