[Yoritomo]

Alright, I've been meaning to post this up for awhile, but I've been rather busy the past few days. As you know numerous staff left the site after two staff were demoted. Before they left, four of these staff (Jiro, Blarg, Alona and Ephany) took it upon themselves to delete all the content made by those were were leaving. While Proboards ToS permits them to remove their personal content/posts, issues arose when these four deleted content which had been left to the site under their care (Examples: Lost's fox contract [although they did not delete it themselves, they told Sega that it was their app and he did not realize it'd been left to the site] and Konoha's bijuu seal which were left to the site under the OOC management of members. They were to answer questions and decide who would get them, but this does not mean they can claim those apps as their own.) as well as content that was made specifically for the site which Proboards staff have stated here (although they've started a second thread, seemingly in hopes of getting a different answer) that IP could not be claimed "if you assisted in the construction of a forum and are demanding that any non-copyrighted structural foundation you've built exclusively for that forum be removed that's not something that we'll act upon as you voluntarily created and provided that content for the administrator's use." according to Brian Ordonez, an admin of Proboards.

Such information such as SA descriptions, write up for the sage tools, SSS swords and so on as well as multiple staff threads that were being used to debate planned systems and such, as well as lore that was written up for the site's wikia (which were deleted or modified by these four) would fall under this. The staff have no interest in keeping their applications, and even went so far as to delete one of the applications they missed per their wishes.

However, the issue many of the group who left have is that we refused their demand that certain characters be retconned, lore retconned and certain characters left in the lore. This is what rule 13. of the characters rules was meant for. So that if a member decides to leave the site, dozens of people will not have to rewrite/register their applications to remove mentions of a character solely because the owner doesn't want them to exist anymore. If we were to do that the entire memberbase of the site might have to rewrite every single character anytime someone decided they wanted to drop a character.

I would further point out that none of these individuals had any issue with this rule when it was used to retcon or dictate the fate of any other member's character who has left the site or who have been banned. Additionally, one of these individuals banned at least myself if not all of the remaining staff from the proboards vault site before any ban was issued to them. Now, while Ephany did hold the head admin account there I can't say it was her specifically, whoever did it this goes to show that these individuals don't care about IP since many members and staff applications, threads and so on were backed up there in the event anything ever happened to FB. If they did they would not have attempted to lock individuals out from backups of their content. If they cared about IP they wouldn't have demanded to be allowed the use of certain systems that I developed by myself for this site. It is for these sorts of reasons that I banned these four individuals and why I have adopted the opinion that these four only are calling for these removals and revisions to try and ruin the site for as many individuals; once again the very thing that character rule thirteen was meant to prevent.

Now, moving on to Ghost and Cen's removal from staff which is what sparked this entire incident. I know that many of the individuals I mentioned are claiming that I removed them for absolutely no reason. They are welcome to think and even say as much; as that is their right. However, in my mind there was more than enough reason to remove them. Ghost has many times through out the history of the site been aggressive towards members and while he has said he's never been warned, the prospect of his being punished for it was brought up way back in February's staff meeting on Skype. Upon this being brought up Jiro and Ghost's other friends that he knew in person jumped to defend his calling a member an "asshole" outright in the chat. This issue was dropped because the majority of the staff saw no issue with it, because the majority of the staff were all his friends. I would note that in that time he stated that (and this is a rough paraphrase) "If we're gonna punish people for making mistakes then I don't want to be part of this staff."

Later on Ghost was slated to be removed from staff a second time. Once again for being aggressive towards members, but also for disrespecting other staff members (Harukei and myself). Upon Harukei and I speaking with Cen on this matter, she demanded that Ghost be allowed to speak for himself (even though other instances of staff being removed were done solely by the admins), with Harukei and I agreeing to speak with him. In the end our minds were unchanged and Ghost was removed. After this happened Cen, Ephany and Jiro were not seen on the site until a third party intervened and hashed out a deal that would allow Ghost to rejoin the staff. The terms of the deal were immediately argued against and warped save for his being allowed to return by the majority of the staff [to be read "by his friends"].

After that the staff became an overly hostile place for quite some time, to the point where I decided to leave the staff as I could not even comment on something without being attacked and insulted by Cen or Ghost. The only reason I returned was due to the numerous requests by some staff members and numerous members.

Upon my return I posted up the thread Blarg kindly showed you all where I outlined my issues with the two and asked they do in turn so that we could acknowledge our issues with one another and hopefully work past them. This, like my thread in the staff board which explained my true reason for leaving went ignored. Now, Blarg and I believe some others said I should have written out plainly that if they did not try to talk things out that they would be removed. While I could have done that, I would argue that such an effort would have been pointless. As forcing someone to make amends is not the same as seeing if someone will step up to make amends. So when it became apparent that they had no intention of posting (with me giving it nearly a week longer wait than I had originally intended to wait for a reply) I spoke with the other admins (Harukei & Aika) and we removed Cen and Ghost from the staff for their overall combative actions over the past few months.

After removing them I was messaged by Blarg who voiced most of the concerns he voiced in his message (although he largely repeated that he was only doing so because he was worried about the site, yet proceeded to help gut the site hours later.) and after talking to him for some time I agreed to talk with Cen in the staff chat where I had planned to explain the situation. Now, some people will say that I banned Cen at this point, but that is not true. I even sent her a pm stating that I hoped she would understand and would continue on the site as a regular member.

To sum everything up, I removed Cen and Ghost due to varying issues the primary of which being their combative nature with the decision being made alongside other admins. Jiro, Ephany, Blarg and Alona were not destaffed and banned until after their deletion campaign, which included applications and information that was not theirs to delete on top of their banning staff from the FB vault site effectively cutting off staff from being able to ensure that member's applications were not being taken from that site. While FB is maintaining our ability to reference their apps/characters/etc we have no intention of giving their applications to others to use nor using them as full fledged characters. The most we would do is decide what happened to their characters so as not to derail the plots of others or the lore of the site as has been done numerous times in the past and that these individuals agreed to upon joining and using the site. The site will be continuing on without them and while their actions were quite frankly, petty; I still wish them the best of luck wherever they end up.

I hope this answers the questions of various members and helps to explain the madness we've had the last few weeks.