I feel like unlisting and splashing the pages is the best option.

Unlist and splash the slots. No rewrites. I already expressed this to Moose but the well has been poisoned when it comes to bright articles and I would hate for victims of bright who are active on the site to have to see their abusers name pop up in lc.

Also as the head of rewrite, I can't recall a single Harmony tale being successfully rewritten. There currently is one ongoing rewrite attempt on A Few More Words From The Administrator, but it has yet to come to fruition.

It is our moral imperative to get rid of the material used in abusing others.

I fully agree that the worst offenders should be made unreadable and splashed, and that the others also be splashed, so that the primary host of these works will also provide important context about their authorship. I do not believe blanking is appropriate for the worst articles, as that leaves the history too readily accessible; those articles should be unlisted and their slots replaced with the notices on iteration 0.

I am very much in agreement that we should under no circumstances open any of these slots for new articles.

I have musings on the concept of rewriting, but not a solid position as of yet.

My primary complaint with rewriting Bright is not that it's traumatic to see their name in the Latest Posts — I did not expect that choice of words to be taken as the literal entire objection, but I could probably have been more direct — but that it artificially drives attention to Bright's work to rewrite it at all. People read new stuff. People definitely read new, controversial stuff. Yes, a new splash drives attention to a page already, but a rewrite actively encourages people to re-read this garbage. It gets enough undeserved and problematic attention as it is. And I am unconvinced that any of these pages are so important and complicated that they need to be rewritten so their concepts can be used by other authors; you couldn't cite any other examples off the top of your head, and neither can I, and I doubt this is a failing of just you and I. This feels like a similar overestimation to what occurred with Harmony's articles.

And does it really matter that the text still be there, solely on the issue of referential integrity? SCP-963 is not a complicated concept. I've never seen it used in a way where the reader would go "huh?" and have to load up the original article to figure out how it works. In my present opinion we should unlist, splash the slot, and leave it at that. Put a summary if we must. It's not like there's a lot of nuance in there which would be lost. And again, if there's a second Bright article that has some sort of loadbearing value, I honestly can't think of it. Does the wiki become conceptually denuded by the absence of the Bright Family? Even the Factory has an alternative readily available, and as a bonus, that alternative doesn't mention child breeding pits.

I do not see an argument for why Bright rewrites would not necessarily result in extra Bright reads; perhaps there is an argument that extra Bright reads will increase the number of people who see the splashes, but I'm not sure that's as obvious a good. Not everyone who goes to these pages of their own volition will notice the splashes, and not everyone who is sent there by knowledge of a rewrite will notice them, either. The difference is that we can't stop these pages passively accruing reads, so at least some of those readers will see the splashes, while we can avoid actively accruing reads which also might not see the splashes. It's a thin distinction maybe, but it's still there.

As for Bright's tales, I would be interested in seeing data from Rewrite about how often tales put up for rewrite are actually rewritten. I suspect we're dealing in single digits, and that's for tales not written by AdminBright. Literally who wants to spend their time doing that?

If rewrites are the way we end up going, though, I would like to get a foot in the door on this:

We may consider removing the notice from certain works if they are rewritten sufficiently

Strongest possible opposition to this. Splashing Bright is like protecting a page. Once done, never undone. These notices are a bulwark against abuse, and no amount of dilution takes the Bright out of works which have been credited to Bright for so many years. This is the one case where homeopathy proves true; these are always Bright articles, even if all of Bright's words are removed. Anyone choosing to rewrite one of these has to be aware that the splash will always be there, and be fine with it. Furthermore, these putative rewrites ought to be anonymized — both to avoid forcing an author to mingle with Bright in their catalogue, and to prevent authors from deciding this is a great way to get a free Series I slot. I can see authors hungry for visibility overcoming their moral objections to the content in order to have such a prominent piece, and furthermore intentionally driving attention to things which are still, essentially, a form of propaganda for Bright. Anonymization nips that nicely in the bud.

As I did not see this before it was posted, and I feel its characterization of my positions is murkily phrased, I feel obligated to stress that I am disinterested in and not motivated by moral satisfaction. My interest in the avoidance of platforming abusers is to not be enabling them to abuse more people. My ideal result here would be that people attempting to read these works see them here, see the additional context, and decide to not proceed further. If there is an argument that the rewrites will get more eyes on that context, I might be swayed, but I'm not sure about that. If people are going to be seeing these pages anyway, it's great to have the splashes, but given how most people can't be bothered to read anything before the word Description I'm not keen on driving people to these pages if they weren't already going there.

I'm in very close agreement with moose about these details, and don't have too much of substance to add beyond a few details that I had already hashed out with moose as wanting to add once their post went up:

Regarding the issue of Bright's attribution, I would suggest that we take two linked steps here, given the fact they renamed their account to something rule violating, and is directly contributing to the harmful issues at hand. To be clear, I am taking issue with the fact that Bright's username designates them as an admin, which is no longer true. I understand arguments to remove any accredition from the site, and don't disagree with them, but this outlines a bare minimum that I think is needed.

• Removing as many mentions of Bright's current username from the site, and changing the accredition we give them to their last username that was rules compliant — that is "TheDuckMan". Any mention of their username, where we have control, should be thusly altered.
• Adding the below CSS to any pages which they authored and to the forum itself (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum:start/norender/true). This will add a simple disclaimer to any username occurrences that we can't edit (such as page history or forum comments) that the username is no longer accurate. The exact text of this disclaimer and how it appears can be reworked, but there's not a ton of room we have here, technically.

a[href*="user:info/adminbright"]::before { content: 'Ex-'; } a[href*="user:info/adminbright"]:nth-child(1)::before { content: unset; }

One note that I had made to moose and also in this thread, but will reiterate that we need to be careful about using rewrites as a solution in this case, and be very careful with how we apply that, as the Harmony situation and its indefinite timer for rewrites. One thing that moose had mentioned to me while reviewing this proposal is that the Bright rewrites would have a timer, where if they didn't get a rewrite by a certain time would be blanked, unlisted or deleted — I would support something on these lines.

I think that the ways forward, as suggested by Moose, strike a balance between social responsibility, and the restraints we have as curators/custodians of the SCP wiki. The disclaimers seem like the right balance to continue removing the harm done.

This museum is actively promoting the art just by having it on display in there.

I'm seconding what sugarush said—there are many different practices within museum curation to portray well-known works in a way that centers understanding of the harms of the work / its creator. It's not as simple as "any appearance is promotion, period".

Especially since in our case, with CC, we have the ability to do reimaginings or other ways to more directly remove harmful aspects without venerating Bright.

Overall, we are also less akin to a museum and more akin to a library. We aren't putting these works on display but including them in an archive. Either way, we're too different from what you're implying museums are like for this comparison to make sense.

These are some very good points. I strongly agree with the idea that, by keeping our site the primary source for these works, it allows us to reframe who Bright is and helps directly mitigate their ability to leverage those works. If every time they mention "I wrote SCP-963," someone goes to a page that points out that they're abusive, that makes it much harder for them to use that to harm others. However, if we delete their works, then the first result someone might find for them could be anywhere, including neutral spaces or even spaces that are favorable to Bright or which they control directly.

I believe that curation with a warning is the best way to go if our goal is to minimize the harm Bright can do. Deleting their work does let us "cast off" the burden of Bright, but it cedes much of our ability to influence how they're able to use their name and former place in the community.

Apologies for the length. I ran out of time to pare this down.

Up-front: I was heavily targeted by Bright in the past. I've been involved with this situation over the years and heavily impacted by this. Please forgive the messiness.

I've been encouraged to provide personal details for context, so I will try.

Ultimately, I helped trigger Bright's initial AHT ban in 2021. I then extensively consulted for and supported Bright's final ban.

What Bright did was awful. We need to address these issues, and addressing Bright's content is part of that.

I also want to caution against any arguments that imply that anyone supporting any action other than immediate deletion is potentially complicit with Bright's actions.

On Bright's victims:

• Soliciting and considering feedback from Bright's victims (without pressure) is vital. We need to know whatever someone is willing to tell us.
  • This means that staff should seek feedback to the extent possible while seeking to avoid imposing or pressuring, and with the knowledge that we won't and can't put responsibility on Bright's victims for the outcome.
  • I know that staff have been discussing with some of Bright's victims already, though I don't know the full extent.
• Directly following any apparent majority consensus of Bright's victims, or attempting to construct such a consensus, would be a huge mistake (separately from inappropriately putting misplaced pressure on them). Why?
  • Any apparent consensus would be an illusion, due to implicit and explicit social pressure to speak up or be silent on currently popular (or even unpopular) opinions, and unusually intense pressure to choose one opinion or another. (This is true for any group addressing a controversial subject.)
  • This will result in some/all of Bright's victims being blamed for any damaging consequence resulting from actions staff take (or don't take). (This also makes it impossible for Bright's victims not to feel pressured to engage with this.)
  • Culturally speaking, people tend to validate victims mostly when they either advocate for total forgiveness or extreme punitive action, so there will always be social pressure for one or the other (and victims who do not do this risk invalidation, like "maybe it wasn't that bad for you" etc).
• We absolutely cannot be pressuring Bright's victims, and also cannot force them to accept the consequence of our (staff's) actions.

Community Referendum

I strongly disagree with the suggestion of moving responsibility from staff to a community referendum.

This is high-visibility, and an issue where people not pushing for the seemingly-harshest outcomes are opening themselves up to being smeared as Bright sympathizers. So there is exceptional pressure on community members to bandwagon.

(This is also true for staff, but at least it's our job to carefully consider all details of the matter.)

On Bright's work

I'm going to respond directly to Harry's post because it serves as a distillation of some positions I take issue with. (Note that Harry is someone I like and trust both personally and as admin. Please read accordingly.)

These pages are actively dangerous. We should not be complicit in raising the profile of someone with credible allegations of abuse against them.

This kind of rhetoric legitimizes mob mentality surrounding this issue, putting anyone who disagrees at risk of smearing as a Bright sympathizer and subsequent harassment from the reputational damage.

This is especially a concern for marginalized groups who are already at heightened risk of being smeared as sexually predatory—but it is a concern for anyone.

Further: Allegations of abuse should never by themselves be grounds for removing fiction from our site, because that is a recipe for targeting vulnerable people. Allegations being credible does not sufficiently protect against this.

Other commenters in this thread have gone in more depth on this, notably OriTiefling here. Staff should not have the power to blanket remove articles from the site.

One can argue that Bright's case is different, since leveraging their works was part of how they enacted abuse. So let's analyze the pages to assess how we should respond to them.

From what I can see, the danger is twofold:

• A few pages may support harassment or predator justification tropes, notably SCP-1004.
• All of the pages allowed (and could still allow) Bright to gain fans and leverage abuse.

Mass deletion would not decrease the danger in the latter case (as a notice would have effectively the same impact in decreasing danger). Deletion would merely appear to wash our hands of the responsibility (or give us the feeling that we have done so). This would have the benefit of feeling morally better for many people, but would not resolve the issue.

If Bright's works are deleted unilaterally from the site, you will get the same thing that happened with Fishmonger at massively increased scale. Initially, and still in niche circles, Fishmongers's works and were and still are sought out by the curious. This never mattered, because we don't care about raising Fishmonger's profile, and more relevantly, Fishmonger's works were excised when he still had very little influence over the fiction.

On the other hand, Bright's works are already extremely popular, and permeate much of SCP fiction, on and off the site. Deletion would do nothing to change this, but does risk elevating their work to the status of legend. Consider that people ill-informed on Bright may seek out this collection of "lost" stories, or spin tales of their mystique. Additionally, bad actors may spin narratives of "censorship", "they're just sweeping it under the rug", "admin abuse", "SJW whitewashing", or other false explanations for why the works were removed despite their popularity throughout the fiction.

Such outcomes will bring more attention to Bright's works, and corrode our reputation as we attempt to limit further harm Bright can do.

Put another way: You can't just curate out Bright's content. The articles are referenced everywhere on this site and across the internet. When the readers follow the breadcrumbs and the articles are found blanked out, then the readers get funneled off site to find Bright content in a way that we don't in any way control. If that is the danger, then why would deletion be the solution? We'd just move the danger somewhere else where we don't have to think about it as much.

However, continuing to host Bright's works without modification (such as a notice) does also continue to boost Bright's profile because of our site's credibility as the main SCP Foundation archive.

To my understanding (which is extensive but imperfect), Bright's abuse relied mostly on an open position of power and respect in the community, which is now gone. Nevertheless, the issue of "passive profile-raising for someone who used their profile to victimize people" is still a relevant consideration.

I'm worried about arguments implying potential complicity in hosting an abusive person's works. This has potential to horrifically backfire. But currently I find it convincing in a case like Bright's.

Therefore, what I suggest is as follows:

• Add a notice (a splash page or header) to some or all of Bright's works which remain on the wiki, as recommended by Harry & others (while remaining conscious of any potential legal issues).
  • I recommend this here (and not in all cases of abusers) because Bright specifically, meaningfully, and extensively leveraged their works in abusing people, and this seems to be the best suggested way to permanently neutralize future abuse (and does not reasonably fall afoul of the potential issues from deleting all of the works).
  • Doing this while keeping Bright's works available for reading on this wiki will maintain our credibility as the repository for reading these works, which should bolster the impact of our notice and undercut dismissal by "this notice (or removal) was just done on moralistic grounds or to avoid embarrassment."
• Reassess Bright's works for whether they should be immediately blanked or prioritized for rewrite.
  • I recognize that the Rewrite team may not be equipped to take on this work given the nature of the situation. I recommend that a temporary task force be created with volunteers (including any volunteers from Rewrite). The actions of these specific members should be publicly anonymous to avoid harassment.
  • I recommend blanking SCP-1004 and associated works (leaving only the notice) in parallel with soliciting a rewrite. If the rewrite never comes, the page should remain permanently blank (with only the notice).
    • • 1004 stands out for the degree to which at face value it supports tropes that Bright leveraged to abuse people, such as "predators can't help it, they're just so kinky" or "it wasn't the predator's fault, the porn made them do it." This, combined with Bright's leveraging of their work in their abuse, passes the threshold that overrides my concerns applying to removing Bright's articles overall. (This possibly could be done purely based on AHT purview—though I'm hesitant.)
      • The "Self-Insert" tale stands out as well for adjacent reasons, potentially much worse. I am not sure a rewrite there is a meaningful option.
  • I also feel 963 should be rewritten but with a different approach. My thoughts on this are more complex and beyond the scope of this post, though I do have some suggested courses of action (and I am & will be available to do or assist in this work).
    • Initially I had considered recommending against rewrite, but informally received reports from victims significantly swayed my POV.
• We figure out a suitable permanent arrangement for Bright's remaining works.
  • This can vary from blanking, to unlisting, to leaving alone with the added notice, to rewrite (or any other appropriate solution.)
  • I suggest an initial time-bound drive of targeted rewrites for "big" articles: identify which articles are most referenced and crosslinked and therefore going to be breadcrumbed, and focus energy on rewriting those.
    • Such rewrites in many cases could be full-on reimaginings and would not necessarily need to align with the original articles, but rather support the "intake" articles that link to the Bright article in general, and secondarily align with (or even just being in conversation with) what readers got out of the original pieces.
      • (This is a general guideline; I'm not sure how this would work with, say, Bright's 001. And 963 itself is a special case for a future post. But this should cover many of Bright's works which could damage fictional coherency to flatly delete, and which readers will naturally be directed to by both onsite and offsite sources.)
    • If a rewrite isn't achieved within the course of this drive, then some other solution is used by default (again, from blanking to unlisting to leaving with the notice, etc).
    • For Bright's other works, in general, if someone has a good rewrite idea, we should be of a posture to accept (if good) and give them a time limit (etc).
    • We may consider removing the notice from certain works if they are rewritten sufficiently (especially if fully reimagined), based on details TBD.
      • This could require that the work be more the rewriter's than Brights, and sufficiently addressing the content to render community concerns less relevant.
• I recognize all of this is much more difficult than flat deletion, but it's significantly better as a curation approach and likely to have better long-term effects.

Additional deletion impacts

Noting general agreement with OriTiefling, Queerious, Pedagon, Rounder, Aster, and others. I strongly agree with OriTiefling's posts here and here, but will add thoughts.

Deleting 963 will likely accomplish very little beyond a Streisand Effect

As Harry & others gestured to, deleting will more easily accomplish moral satisfaction for many in the community, including staff, and highly likely for some but not all of Bright's victims. Additionally, it will require less staffwork in the long run. I feel these are very dangerous factors to prioritize given all the risks I've highlighted above, but they are significant.

Note that allowing the slots to be refilled (if deleted) with unrelated fiction will dramatically increase all negative impacts. I strongly advise against this.

We have had a staff body in the past that would easily abuse a system that allows them to just remove people they don't like wholesale regardless of crimes, and I don't think it's unfair to say that body could exist again in the future.

I agree, but much more so: it's not just about staff. This is a risk immediately if we remove all of Bright's articles, because "get a person's articles deleted" will immediately become a much stronger lever (both perceived and in practice) for a plethora of bad actors.

So mass deleting Bright's works will likely unnecessarily result in significant harassment increase, whether immediately or longer-term, as wider community perception takes in the idea (false or not) that convincing the community that a person is an abuser can result in all their work getting flatly deleted, leading to actually innocent people being targeted. (Whether this succeeds in deletion is incidental.) Refusing mass deletion will undercut this impact.

(I didn't lead with this argument as it's harder to demonstrate to the satisfaction of most people… and historically such arguments have resulted in lashing out and harassment for myself and anyone agreeing with me.)

This concern also applies to a lesser degree to the notice. So originally I did NOT support such a notice. But after long thought, I'm tentatively convinced that the benefit outweighs the risk in this case, at minimum for some Bright articles.

On crediting Bright:

Absolutely positively under no circumstances put this shit up for rewrite. Bright would require continued credit if that was done. Do not put AdminBright in Latest Posts, please and thank you.

This is understandable, but I don't think avoiding the visual of seeing Bright's name in Latest Posts should be a significant factor for consideration. However, this can be addressed via a policy change of how we approach crediting (while keeping the credit available to the minimum required by license).

Others have suggested specific solutions for this problem—I will defer to them to post here.

On keeping Bright's name alive:

To syuzhet and others, respectfully, I strongly disagree that rewrites of Bright's works would keep their name alive. Bright's work permeates site fiction, on and offsite. Bright's characters remain community property. Our best hope of properly addressing the potential for Bright's future harm is to acknowledge and work around their significant cultural impact within our fiction.

On staff assessment of the Bright situation

Thank you to aismallard for extensive, invaluable feedback on this post. Additional thanks to stormbreath, Prismal, Queerious, DrMann, and Fly for their invaluable feedback as well.

Summary

• We cannot relocate the responsibility of the decision on Bright's victims.
• We should not move this decision to a community vote.
• We should not simply delete the Bright articles, as there are too many downsides that could be mitigated through other solutions.
• Our site has credibility as the primary SCP Foundation archive, and we should use this to minimize future victimization by Bright.
• Our site is using Creative Commons, which affords us flexibility other sites lack in terms of allowing us to rework Bright's fiction.
• For directly problematic works (such as SCP-1004), we can place warning notices + unlist them in the short term.
• For articles with wide use across the SCP Foundation (such as SCP-963), we can rewrite them in ways that preserves wider site coherency and builds on concepts used widely across the site and fandom in a way that is both constructive but also refutes or counters harmful effects of the pre-rewrite versions.

Rewrite should not be an option; the points raised by Harry are good. Additionally, having been Rewrite Captain in the immediate aftermath of the Harmony situation, I can say that this is basically tantamount to doing nothing for much beyond the most notable Bright articles. Many Harmony articles have not been rewritten four years later, and I do not believe that they will be rewritten eventually. I think that effort may have been a misguided idea, and think we should avoid doing it again in a far more sensitive case.

Estrella has explained the technical reasons as to why unlisting would be preferable to deletion and I agree with those.

Delete or unlist, put AHT ban information — preferably as a splash — in the original slots, then establish a threshold of AHT behaviour at which action like this becomes necessary, and whack Eskobar and Gabriel Jade etc. as well.

Absolutely positively under no circumstances put this shit up for rewrite. Bright would require continued credit if that was done. Do not put AdminBright in Latest Posts, please and thank you.

The arguments for doing nothing are wholly unconvincing. The fact that taking action won't completely solve the problem is meaningless. The fact that the material will be available elsewhere is meaningless — except that it further absolves us of any duty to archive it for its "historical" value. The fact that there are people offsite who care about Bright's works and their AA is an argument for doing something, to reduce potential future harm. If anyone comes here to look at Bright's work and what they see convinces them they should avoid it, we've done a good thing. An action doesn't have to completely obliterate every possible angle of harm to be a positive one.

I don't know what other measures would be effective, so I won't comment on what to do with Bright's articles. However, I strongly oppose any call for putting his work up for rewrite.

The only reason anyone remembers Harmony's name to this day is because her entire body of work became open for rewrites. It became a matter of practical necessity to tell others, 'I want to rewrite this Harmony article!' or 'Did anyone read that rewrite of Harmony's article?' Because of this, her memory has been kept alive for a little longer and she lives on as an ember in my small world…

If something like this happens with Bright's work, my blood will start to boil. I really don't want to keep walking forward, listening to Bright's name being mentioned over and over again, while we fight over his scraps and apply make-up on his writing. I would prefer we delete all of his articles, but I will be okay with anything else as long as it's not putting them up for rewrite.

Please consider this strongly!!

This (and other arguments similar to this one) lies under the premise that staff is given unilateral power to delete Bright's works. We are not.

It innately opens the precedent of staff unilaterally deleting an author's works, especially when several proposals have long been "just delete them all and be done with it." Likewise several arguments are being made with the intent to futureproof the process so this doesn't get drawn out further. There's an innate issue with that— Bright was staff. Bright was AHT. AHT has made mistakes in the past, AHT is not infallible. While we currently trust that staff is composed of good faith actors now, historically we have examples where it very much has not been. We have had a staff body in the past that would easily abuse a system that allows them to just remove people they don't like wholesale regardless of crimes, and I don't think it's unfair to say that body could exist again in the future.

Every staff decision sets precedent. We need to ensure we are setting precedents that cannot be abused by bad faith actors down the line. We need to ensure that if we are futureproofing, it's being done to ensure staff cannot abuse the powers they have been given.

Regarding what articles should be put to vote: As few as possible. Just those articles that can be shown to be in someway harmful to the community (which needs to be listed in the vote).

Personally I think putting a message similar as we did for the list in place of 963, and open the slot up for any other possible article, but those are options that need to be part of the vote.

Regarding the impact of deleting/unlisting 963: The deletion of the list probably gives us a pretty good idea of the effect that deleting 963 itself would have. I'm not personally that well-versed in what that impact is, but that should be easy to check.

1: Check though all of brights works for backlinks and other key things, as far as I can tell the only two works that will have significant site impacts is 963 and brights proposal.

2: Start an unlisting vote as per the unlisting policy, this will not require anything new.

3: If we unlist brights works we need to decide if we want to put 963 and bright proposal up for rewrite (Rallistons proposal can also act as a rewrite here), the rest of his works do not seem to have much in the way of reference integrity and will not leave holes. Until then we can leave up a page explaining what happened.

4: As an additional note, give that we will be unlisting several S1 slots I would like to request that contests has a hold on the slots so we can use them as contest prizes like we did for goblincon (not 963, the other slots).

That said, we cannot do it unilaterally. Staff is not invested with the power to remove works that are positively rated unless they can prove to AHT there is demonstrable use of those works as a means to propagate harassment and abuse further. You could make the argument that several of Bright's works currently still do this, but we have to be extremely careful in doing so. The site exists on a very delicate balance of trust between the userbase and we, the curatorial staff, that we will not wholesale modify or remove people's works at any time for arbitrary reasons. Any approach in removing Bright's works must, therefore, be nuanced and surgical so as to avoid shattering that trust.

For that reason I am explicitly opposed to several options here, which surprisingly includes giving AHT the power to delete the works of harassment banned users who have committed egregious acts. In theory I appreciate the benevolent position that this proposal comes from, but granting a near unilateral decision point to a single team with absolutely no oversight is a recipe for tremendous abuse and disaster. This isn't to say I think the current AHT roster would ever consider doing so, but in the past there have been people on the team, including Bright themselves who would absolutely abuse it. Bright used their power on the early wiki to bully and run people off, and wanted at times to unilaterally remove works they didn't like. While I would hope AHT continues to be explicitly discerning well into the future on who they add, I can't in good conscience freely give this power away.

So what is my solution?

1. Community vote/referendum as we've done in the past on whether Bright's articles should be removed. This is ultimately an issue of community safety and community review, they, not staff, should make the final choice on whether their works stay.
2. Staff executes the community's will.

It's really as simple as this. Take the choice out of staff's hands and place it in the community's.

However as others have pointed out this may wholesale remove accountability and leave a hole in the memory of what Bright has done. Instead I would say we make a multi-pronged choice in the community vote asking the community what they want us to do with Bright's articles. Presenting the "label"/"warning" options, unlisting, deletion, etc.

Edit: Note I also support reaching out to the victims to see what their stance is and what they would like done so that they can heal

While putting up a warning is something I was originally for in the event we couldn’t remove the pages, Plague swayed me. I do think that having a sign that says “a serial abuser wrote these pages” is not a good look for the institution keeping it up.

I do ultimately think that deletion or unlisting is the best option. Also, in talking about works that are especially egregious of Bright’s, I look at “The Self Insert”. I haven’t seen anyone reference it, so I wish to draw attention to that.

Imagine walking into a museum and you see this piece of art and there’s a plaque next to it and in big bold letters it says “YOU’RE LOOKING AT ART CREATED BY A PEDOPHILE.” This museum is actively promoting the art just by having it on display in there. At that point just take it down and hide it at the minimum, or at best, get rid of it permanently.

None of us can promise that we will be here forever, and none of us can control what others see as a 'egregious' situation.

Precedent is half of how we operate as staff on the wiki, and because of how much we record our discussions, decisions and more means that any choices we make are now options that can be considered in any future situation. By taking a shortcut now, we create a much larger headache later.

There is a right way to do this, but arbitrary deletion is not that.

If we can't toss them out, I second Trout's recommendation from O4 to put a disclaimer on Bright's works (963 and 1004 if I wanted to highlight some, 963 because of how famous it is and 1004 because of its egregious nature). I also support unlisting the author page.

With that out of the way, I do believe this is bigger than the topic at hand, and concern staff's duty and relationship towards the site, its contents and the community at large. I've said before that our duty is threefold: growth, maintenance and curation. We're not like AO3 where the site functions as an all-encompassing container with very little editorial duty — we're more akin to a magazine that partially outsource its quality control and content management to the readers. The question is whether staff, in whole, can unilaterally remove a work from its catalogue independent of those factors, and those listed under ([https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/deletions-guide summary deletions) reasons.

And the answer is probably? diary-573 was unilaterally deleted under the providence of AHT, so I assume that removal of Bright's works, if carried out, would be exist as an extension of AHT's curatorial ability as their duty towards commmunity safety. Whether or not AHT can decide something as such is something I'm not well-versed in.

In any case, I believe the best way forward is to invoke the unlisting process:

• Does the page have a significant presence in any metrics? Consider authorship, votes, revision history, longevity, forum discussion, etc.
• Is the page harmful to the site, the community, or its interest in some way?

• A page moved to unlisted: will have its content replaced with a splash containing the summary of the content and reasoning put forward in the original vote (can be minorly edited for formatting and order.)
• Staff can opt to create a placeholder or redirect page at the original URL, at their discretion.

Emphasis mine.

I think in terms of possible actions taken, there are three: unlist all of Bright's works, unlist some of Bright's works, don't unlist and put disclaimers on them.

I agree with the suggestion to add warnings to Bright’s articles, should we be mindful to take the kind of care Aster has mentioned in doing so. A warning informs the rare Bright fan who visits the site about what he's done and doesn't grant staff a power rife with potential for abuse in the process. I understand and share the desire to see him scrubbed from the site, but the vast majority of Bright fans come from sources off-wiki, so staff deleting his articles would not keep those communities from perpetuating his relevancy any more than adding disclaimers would. Removing the wiki's association with him via deletion is more severe than condemnation via disclaimers, but I do not think that step-up in severity is worth the tradeoff in staff power, especially considering all-out deletion may be read as a lack of accountability (as Grigori noted).

I also believe UncannyClown's suggestion of leaving the matter up to a broader community vote may sidestep the central issue we're taking re: staff overreach, since (as far as I can tell) such a vote has occurred before. This seems similar to Pedagon's suggestion to leave the articles up for rewrite instead. Synth is right in noting Bright as an especially egregious case, and these solutions may remove the articles without significantly increasing staff's potential for abuse.

I'd like to see these options seriously considered, granted that they do not contradict the wishes of Bright's victims.

Edit: Agreeing with Syuzhet about rewrites only leading to more discussion about Bright.

Edit: To be clear, I don't support just putting a disclaimer at the top and leaving the page(s) otherwise untouched. I support unlisting and replacing the original content with a disclaimer similar to Bright's list. I think Lord's proposal is sound if we decide to go the deletion route though I'd like to reiterate once again that I don't think that is our best option, if our goal here is to prevent possible future harm.

In the 90s, Vince McMahon turned himself into an onscreen character. Him, growing up poor, knew the troubles of the people that comprised a majority of his audience — the blue collar guys who wanted to make money and enjoy time with their family. This character was everything you’d hate about a boss, he was retaliatory, he made sexual passes at the women wrestlers, he would rig everything, he would fire people on a whim, he he wrestled his own son, there was an multi-month story where he cheated on his sedated wife with a female wrestler and fought his son at WrestleMania. He was a racist and a sexist. The most famous story was between him and Stone Cold Steve Austin — an all-American, beer-drinking Texan who liked to kick people’s ass.

The Austin/McMahon feud launched the WWE into the stratosphere. To this day, the WWE is still not as popular as it was during that feud.

In 2022, an allegation of sexual assault came out about Vince. And in a series of events I’m not going to get into, he sold the WWE with a deal he’d be made chair of the new board. This was granted. The next night, he came out during a live television show and the crowd cheered for him. He said hi, and went back inside.

In 2024, more, much more graphic accusations of sexual assault came out. Vince was being accused of trafficking a 21 year old woman who worked for him. He and another corporate guy were passing this woman around. It was also found that Vince was using this girl in contract negotiations with wrestlers as well. Vince is no longer with the WWE.

Why do I bring this up? Last night, the WWE aired its first episode on Netflix, and they went through the history of wrestling and the WWE. The reason you’ve ever thought about professional wrestling or a wrestler is because of Vince McMahon. In this segment recounting all of these moments, there was not a single shot that contained Vince McMahon’s face. The guy who ushered in the most impressive performance that any company has ever had and one of the reasons that this show is even on Netflix is just gone. He’s no longer acknowledged, as if he never even existed. To make it even more clear, a big reason why the actual boss Vince McMahon and the character of Mr. McMahon were removed because no one, not even his own family, really knew where one started and the other began.

I think we do the same type of removal by deleting the articles, or giving the users and opportunity to do the same with a vote. We’re proxy-associating with someone who used their internet microcelebrity power to sexually harass minors. I don’t care that the offsite community will continue to idolize this guy, mainly becomes a majority of those people will never contribute anything to this community past giving a fraction of a cent each time they watch some content farm. If they do ever make that transition, it’s basically SCP Wiki 101 that Bright is a pedophile.

I agree that giving staff sweeping power like this is a very poor choice. I think LordXVNV provides the best ruleset for something like this. Bright knew what he was doing and he knew he’d get away with it.

Enough is enough.

Though I did want to add that while I support the consultation of the actual victims of Bright in this case, I do worry that, depending on how this discussion goes, these people may be opened up to harassment by members of the community. We should be sure to ensure that throughout this process, should one occur, that we prioritize the safety and confidentiality of these individuals.

Additionally, in the event something like a disclaimer is added, as people have been suggesting on O4, I think we have to walk a very fine line to protect ourselves from a libel case. I'm a legal expert by no means, and if I'm wrong I invite someone much smarter than me on these topics to correct me if I am in this case. What we have currently with the Bright's List Deletion Message, to my knowledge, has walked this line well. Any sort of disclaimers in the future would need to follow something similar in my opinion.

To me, this is a process issue, and I think we need to approach it as such. Yes, we could tackle this as just being about bright, but it's not. It's about giving staff the unilateral power to delete any work off of the wiki. We have trust with the community because of the fact that we only delete pages under very specific circumstances — even banned members have their works remain on the wiki, because that is what we have said our role is. We are custodians, not curators.

If we really wanted to have a productive conversation, we need to actually look at this in isolation. We need to tackle if we, as staff, should have that power, and negotiate the situations when we would be able to remove a work from the site at will. I think that without having a solid basis like that, any discussion on Bright works gets lost because there are two sides arguing very different things. What feels like 'those who want to delete it vs. those who don't' is really more two sides, arguing for the same thing, but getting caught up in the specifics.

I also echo Ori's points — prioritizing the victims is very important, but those perspectives should guide what we do as staff, rather than dictating our actions. I also do not believe that staff should have the power to delete works unilaterally, even with an internal vote — I think that any vote should be from the entire community, well communicated and announced ahead of time, but only once we, as staff, know how we plan on actually resolving the issue.

One thing however, I'm a little iffy on asking the victims, since I'm scared this would only be reopening old wounds for a thing that is on our end. But I do think their opinions matters the most.

Also, the author page. A page that is specifically about the groomer in question and their work without any mentions of their horrible acts should no longer exist.

Deleting 963 will likely accomplish very little beyond a Streisand Effect, and in the long run the article will live on via archives and YouTube content mill slop. It doesn't address the issue, something that's well out of our control by this point.

We need to look at the precedent that this sets, and it does not set a good one for the future.

All of that being said, the voices that have been frequently shouted over in these discussions have been those from Bright's actual victims. I'm more interested in hearing what they believe we should do at the end of the day, and I'm more willing to follow what they say. Obviously this should only be an "if they are so interested" deal— this can easily reopen old wounds. I wanted to include this note largely because I noticed the victims were spoken over more than once when the List was deleted, and those who are actually impacted directly by these articles deserve to have space to actually be heard over those who aren't directly impacted.

So, to summarize— I do not believe this is a power staff should have, and I do not support it. That said, I would prefer we simply ask the victims what they believe we should do, and use their thoughts to guide our decision making here.

This is not going to be a professionally worded thread. I have just gotten home from a four and a half hour drive, I've been stressed with ERAP nonsense all day, and I'm fucking tired of this discourse.

People keep fucking demanding action. It's no secret that both staff and non-staff users hate him. It's also no secret that there have been extremely loud voices for deleting Bright's articles. People keep shouting back. It's fucking mindbreaking because nothing ever fucking changes and we have the same goddamn circular arguments again and again.

So here's my proposal: we vote on whether we do something or not. Regardless of whether you approve of deleting Bright's articles, even just 1004, or not, it doesn't matter: just do something so people stop claiming that we do nothing.

Am I being cynical here? Absolutely. I hold zero illusions that this will realistically do nothing to stem the migraines to come, because inevitably all options lead to further headaches. But if people want to complain, I want them to complain about something else at this point because it's fucking 2025 and something needs to change. If it passes, it passes. If it fails, it fails.

NOTE: The timer on this discussion thread has run out, and we are currently preparing material from this discussion for the follow-up O5 discussion thread to come. Please bear with us as we work through this effort.

In the mean time, you are free to continue adding your thoughts and comments here.