I see a lot of misconceptions in this thread! Here we go.
Please note I literally haven't had time to do more than skim these threads. I'm trying to help this process along because I know it's important. Please call out my errors. This goes triple for admins reading this.
Disc Team Powers
Here is something very important to understand about the Disciplinary Team, which is a point that has been somewhat lost to time. And then I'll explain why it doesn't matter.
The Disciplinary Team cannot ever grant itself power.
This is actually true for all teams, but it's most extreme for Disciplinary. To understand this, let's look at how Staff Teams gain power: http://05command.wikidot.com/staff-structure
Capabilities and permissions will be added or removed if:
- The team requests a new permission or ability,
- The team is determined to have abused a permission, or
- A situation arises that requires attention, and administration determines that this team is best suited for dealing with the situation.
Who can do this? When Troy and I wrote that page, "everybody knew" that it was the following:
1. The administrators who already possess the power to be granted or removed. This is a use of administrative power.
2. The will of all site staff, as laid out in the Charter. This is a use of staff power.
There are no other options.
With that in mind…
- The Charter grants all non-Reserve administrators the power to vote to ban (except , and all members of the Disciplinary Team the power to vote to ban in place of an administrator if no administrator is present.
- Since the power to ban rests with all non-Reserve administrators, then non-Reserve admins must grant any new uses of the power to ban, and must be accountable to staff for it.
Here are a couple of the powers granted to Disciplinary, since its inception.
1. Due to a recurring lack of administrators, administrators as a group long ago informally granted members of the Disciplinary Team the power to vote to ban even when sufficient administrators are present.
* Accountability: This was requested by staff consensus in IRC staff chat. To my recollection, the decision at the time was perceived as "the only possible right move" by every staff member at the time.
2. Disc was also given the power to hide information key to resolving a ban vote. Information must be made available to OS+ upon request, and must be kept private amongst OS+ staff unless determined by Disc or Admins. Admins & Disc must still take staff feedback into account for bans.
* Accountability: This was requested by staff consensus in IRC staff chat. To my recollection, this decision was at best mildly controversial because it meant removing information from O5.
Alright. So all that's done. Now… here's why all of the above doesn't matter, regarding censure.
To the very best of my knowledge, and to the best of Dex's and Mann's knowledge (the people who would know best), as well as other admins I consulted with:
- Admins, as a group, do not have the power to give themselves or the Disciplinary Team power to enact Demotion or Censure. Admins, and Disc, must follow the procedure in the Charter. BOTH admins and Disc must determine the discipline of an admin.
- Further, admins, as a group, did not try to give anyone this power.
- Only the will of all staff, as voted on per the Charter, can grant anyone additional power to enact Demotion or Censure.
Summary: Disc can't censure anybody on its own under any circumstance unless it's an admin, and even then, they have to allow all other non-Reserve admins to vote on it too (and must follow the Charter procedure to do so).
Why the Delay?
It was the intent of administration to post this, but I think it may have gotten lost. Due to staff request, I'm going to explain. Ordinarily I would not have the power to do this, but it is understood that admins need to be accountable to the community, and therefore I hope my fellow admins will forgive me for this. I will try to rectify any errors that may occur.
Admins granted three extensions to Disc (& themselves) to make a censure decision.
1: Formal extension granted due to the Harmony situation. Staff generally seem to agree this was merited.
2: Formal extension granted until more admins can be promoted & trained. I beleive this was also announced.
3: Informal extension granted because admins were overloaded, and Disc Team felt they had lost the confidence of staff members to do anything except censure Dex and maybe Mann. At that point, Dex (as far as I understand) felt like he'd be running away and shirking his responsibilities if he didn't try to fix this rather severe issue as Disc Captain. (Dex may clarify this point.)
(And Mann was asked by admins to hold off on grounds of "it's unclear we can ethically even put you up for censure even though we probably will if anyone can bring a clear charge.)
If Disc delays censuring, that meant admins had to either pick up the process ourselves, or wait. Admins elected to wait (informally granting Extension 3 here), and begin to investigate the situation due to intense confusion around it. Full disclosure: I helped with this process.
I'm foggier on whether Extension 3 was made clear to staff. Admins will need to clarify how/if they approached telling staff in general.
The sheer amount of time we took was very specifically because of the amount of confusion and limited time, with only admins to drive the investigation. (I've addressed admin overload being a huge problem, and it contributed here. I am preparing proposed solutions.)
Admins received or read many reports on Dex, but most of them were purely personal attacks, false statements about occurences, claims of malice with no evidence, or false statements about how policy and/or Disc work.
Additionally, initial investigation results pointed towards "Dex did not do anything that would be unacceptable from any other staff member." Many people were led to believe that Cerastes engaged in plagiarism. Many people also were extremely concerned about the "brother" incident, even though it was hard to assess.
Admins were provided no evidence of Disc intentionally trying to get rid of Cerastes, including in this thread (unless I missed it by skimming, in which case I apologize!).
Additionally, the amount of abusive behavior directed at Dex had gotten fairly shocking. This raised a red flag: "We're missing something, and we need to wait to figure out what that is."
Another theme was holding Dex responsible for the censure delays. Dex bears equal responsibility for the third extension only (not 1 or 2), which might be grounds enough for censure itself.
This is grounds for a Disc thread with a charge of power abuse, even unintentional. However, admins knew the reasoning, though we didn't tell staff (and maybe should have! I think that was a fuck-up), and… well.. if admins weren't ready to "bring charges" because the situation was so strange, would it be Right to order Disc do it?
(This is why I feel in the future, as I said, admins should ask staff for permission for extensions, or some other mechanism be created.)
Then the investigation, after months, finally bore fruit. Admins discovered the following:
- Admins discovered the policy error that Dex made, and the apparent severe consequences of it: people appear to believe that Disc can and will do literally anything. Hell, people in this thread are claiming Disc has this power! I don't know if this was caused by the Cerastes thread or not, but… well, see next point.
- Reports have been unanimous: the Cerastes thread is used as evidence across the community to demonstrate that Disc can and will do literally anything. The reasons why seemed… strange, at best, and malicious at worse. But suddenly many of the reports became starkly clear once we read the thread and compared it to the Charter and questioned all our assumptions as carefully as possible. We were trying to figure out how things could have gone horribly wrong and… we did.
- Other factors which will be discussed later, but the above two on their own were more than enough, and resulted (alone) in the end of the extensions permanently.
This all established grounds for admins to know without a doubt that this situation was more serious than we had ever identified or been informed.
On personal note, here: "Unfair charges of plagiarism" may sound just as bad as "claiming Disc has the power to unilaterally censure or demote." But the fact is, we cannot avoid unfair charges of plagiarism. We absolutely cannot. I learned this the hard way. Writers seem to have their brains absolutely fucking fall out here. If you disagree, you are either too inexperienced in these communities or selling something. (I will only fault you for the latter.)
I still think that alone could be grounds for censure, and definitely community damage! However, admins have still received zero evidence of a hit job on Cerastes, just demanding that a specific interpretation of Disc's actions be made.
…But, "claiming Disc has the power to unilaterally censure or demote"… well, the reason Disc DOESN'T have that power is because Troy and I and other staff at the time denied this power to Disc repeatedly, and then enshrined it in the Charter.
Most visibly, we did this Eskobar was Disc Captain and requested inquisitorial power using those words, because at the time Disc was popular and people wanted to use Disc as a club to get rid of people they were mad at. (Sound familiar? It should.)
We specifically feared that it would essentially make Disc "an Inquistion" and make people have to live in fear of Disc. Which appears to be exactly what has happened! In combination with other things, as well, but as I said, this by itself would be enough.
With this knowledge, admins ended the extension effective immediately and created an internal timeline to address this.
We now consider it an emergency situation and it has been our top priority since the Akimoto situation was addressed, and was second priority before then. I can vouch that every day since then, admins have spent many hours working on all parts of this situation.
I wish to apologize again that this hadn't been explained, and to clarify that it would have been explained ASAP in the next few days if I hadn't done so. More information is also forthcoming ASAP.
EDIT: To be clear, I think it was a mistake for admins to take as long as we did without specifically asking permission from staff. Notably, extension 3 at least should've been granted permission by staff, and was a mistake in handling by admins, including myself. And extensions 1 and 2 probably would've been approved, so, um… I feel admins should just ask in the future, period. So many issues could have been solved this way, meaning it's the responsibility of admins to do better here.