I'm not here to argue the specifics of Sinfulbliss's ban, the ban reason speaks for itself on that one, but what I am not okay with is that a player's attempt to defend themselves from these accusations was hidden away from the community. There is no good reason to hide someone defending themselves from an accusation. It just looks like you're trying to cover up someone criticizing your decisionmaking.
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The accusations here are serious, and thus the user should have the right to defend themselves from said accusations publicly. It is the cornerstone of our community and why we've had over twenty peaceful transfers of power without incident. Other SS13 servers regularly have massive administrative corruption issues, and they run private ban appeals with zero admin accountability. Our public ban appeal system massively improves admin accountability, and failure to uphold it compromises that value of /tg/. Even when a user is blacklisted and their appeal immediately closed, we still allow it to stay visible. This break from the standard is disgusting as a result. Admins, at the time in the peanut thread, argued that all blacklist appeals are hidden by default. This is categorically false.
Jackrip's blacklist appeals are public. Slurge's blacklist appeals are public. Mrty/Lucy/steamport's blacklist appeals are public. There is no good or justifiable reason to hide them as a result, the precedent doesn't exist, and admins claiming such are either lying or being willfully ignorant of this community's history.
If a community member has done something egregious enough to warrant a permanent removal from the community, they have a right to post an appeal, even if blacklisted and immediately denied, and crucially, the community has a right to know what they did and to read their defense of themselves. Anything less is tantamount to allowing bad faith actors on the administration team to get away with potentially silencing people inconvenient to them. The transparency of the ban appeals system prevents administrators from misusing bans, and hiding/deleting ban appeals that aren't literal spam prevents this from occuring.
Our administration team is not immune to having bad faith actors; you need only look at past disgraced headmins such as Ausops, who got caught blackmailing community members and fabricating evidence, and Nervere, who was banning political opponents in the election for posting on digg and trying to smuggle permabanned friends of theirs back in by blocking admins from reviewing their ban appeals, and ChangelingRain, who was actively abusing their administrative powers to cheat in gamemodes.
I've personally been on the receiving end of false accusations of behavior from administrators; my history on this is public knowledge and well known by community veterans. I know first hand what it's like to have head administrators conspiring with colleagues to prevent you from participating in a community because you're inconvenient to their re-election chances or had the gall to disagree with them in public.
I expect someone, probably an admin, to kramer in here to whine about how people who get mad and tell others to get mad should be banned, as they usually do every time this comes up, and I'd like to refer you to our host MSO's opinion on that:
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