User blog comment:Bantha117/Staff Update: Staff Changes and Season 6 Preparation/@comment-31278711-20190218041111/@comment-5482968-20190219062301

Like I said in the comment above, I lost the original version of this reply, and so there’s the possibility it is less clear what I was saying as I’m writing from memory. I’ll do my best to clarify anything if necessary.

Back when you first replied, I went back and checked to see whether or not we actually had deleted anything that commented on this situation before this week’s avalanche of posts about it. I went through the deleted contributions of your account(s) as well as all other users’ deleted edits by way of the Deletions Log page on the wiki, which from what I understand is viewable by all users, so anyone can double check me on this with the small caveat that only users with the power to restore deleted posts can see them beyond just a preview. That should be enough for the vast majority of what’s been deleted over the past 2 years, but for anything else keep reading.

I looked through the most recent 5 pages, each containing 500 deleted contributions, totaling 2500 different deleted items and dating as far back as 2 years ago on February 19th, 2017. This includes anything and everything on ERB wiki that was deleted during this time, whether by me or Barry, retired staff like Wonder, or even Community Staff.

Searching through all of this, I found 3 types of deleted content that related to this issue:


 * 1) Comments made by sockpuppets, which were deleted for their trollish nature.
 * 2) A blog post made by Meat, which regardless of your opinion on him or his actions on the Wiki, was only a screenshot of the deleted “confession” from the “NightFlacon” sockpuppet account, and was deleted by Community Central (more specifically Kirkburn, which I thought might amuse you).
 * 3) Two comments, one by you and one by Mortal.

Those two comments are the only really relevant bits to this discussion, so I was going to explain them in a bit more detail.

Your comment is from December 3rd, 2017, and appears to have somehow been part of a political discussion, as it involved you responding to (presumably) Night’s criticism of Trump by saying “I won't take this criticism seriously from a guy who relentlessly stalked an underage girl as a 19 year old”.

Mortal’s comment is from July 21st, 2018, and is a bit harder to glean context from. In any case, it said "I'd have to say Night when he sees those underages."

Unfortunately, as I was not the one who deleted either of these, I cannot provide an explanation for why they were removed.* Whatever the case, they stand as the only comments regarding the issue that were deleted, and therefore don’t seem to suggest any concerted effort on the part of staff to cover something up. If more comments relating to the situation exist, then they were not removed, and show we weren’t actively hiding something, and if others don’t exist, then that shows there was no real movement from users to do something about it until recently, in which case the relevant point is again that staff did nothing to hide or hinder this.

I was going to defend however I had used "We will no longer speak of this", but looking back that was not something I said. What I did say in the blog was that “This was a unanimous decision that will not be discussed any further.” If this was unclear, what I meant by this was that staff, having reached a unanimous decision and taken action against Night (demoting him and blocking him permanently), would no longer debate the issue, having resolved it in a way that appears to have satisfied both staff and the userbase. Any further action is beyond the wiki, and those that we took were considered both necessary by staff and the users who asked for it, so there’s no further discussion required. This was finality for the topic.

Speaking of which, I hope this puts to bed the idea that Staff was involved in any sort of protection, cover-up, or conspiracy surrounding the actions of Night.

*While I can only speculate, given the lack of evidence provided at the time of the comments they may have been deleted for appearing to be irrelevant, distracting from the topic, or poor taste jokes/harassment. As we now know, this was not the case, and once again I am prepared to apologize on behalf of staff if it is considered necessary.