I get that the admins want to take their time here, but I just want to speak to them all openly real quick:
As has been made plainly clear here, currently a large portion of the community is hurting because a very well respected member was torn away from them by you, the administrators, and you have still not responded adequately after multiple days, with the last official word we heard from you on the topic being yet another faceless staff post from a moderator, not an admin, which was meant to speak for everyone on the team while also attempting to shut down any discussions about it moving forward. I blame none of the individual mods for this decision as it does not appear that many of them had much of a say in the original ban decision or in whatever this investigation was that took place after the fact. I 100% blame you, the administrators who decided to ban Ketkat, for your hasty decision to ban her, the lack of transparency, and the refusal to openly talk to us about your decision and your decision making process. That is why I think we need to hear from you the most to answer some questions and explain to us why/how this all happened and what you are going to do to remedy it moving forward.
If you want to be transparent and be held accountable for your actions, then you are going to need to start being more comfortable with talking about these things in the open on the forum because keeping it in private discussions does not benefit the community as a whole. Staff posts that are meant to speak for everyone on the team do not count. I want to actually hear from admins, your own personal thoughts, not workshopped thoughts that are put together by a team of people in a discord chat. I am talking about coming in to a thread and making a post just like everyone else does, it shouldn't be that hard. Why hide away and discuss things privately when there are people here, right now, trying to talk to you and get answers? Why does everything need to be presented in the form of an official staff post? I just don't get it.
I don't mind waiting for you all to be ready to discuss it, but just know this: If your next response about all of this is another official staff post that is meant to speak for everyone, you best be ready to individually answer questions in regards to it, because I guarantee there is no way in hell that you can continue getting away with your "no more questions, move along" attitude, not this time.
A secondary point I want to make is how the staff team is a real clique around here, it's just true. Of course you spend a lot of time together in your chat and talk about a lot of things, that's fine, I have close friends online too that I talk to every day and I love them. But when it comes to moderating the site, I don't see what benefit there is to treating everyone else as the outsiders whose opinions automatically matter less than yours. What good does that do? Why remain so insular and cut off? The people on staff should not be considered to be part of a higher tier of users who know better than everyone else and only talk to each other, and they should not receive any special treatment. If anything, staff members should be held to even higher standards than everyone else, not be let off the hook and protected by their peers if they mess up. If there are community members, especially ones from marginalized sub-communities here, speaking up openly about their thoughts on the people in charge and/or their decisions/actions, they should not be ignored or banned if they are doing so in an honest attempt and have real reasons to be concerned. The trans community here spoke up, and now this is the point we've reached as a result of it? That's ridiculous.
That's probably my final rant on it, but I do look forward to hopefully continuing to discuss how we are going to move forward from this, and hopefully with Ketkat being unbanned and able to join in on those discussions too.
