Since the other proposal does have that aspect I support Remove & Counter with Near-total Removal as a second option.

I can see the rationale behind heavy annotation of SCP-963 specifically, but I am very wary about the general idea of reimaginings tied to this whole process, doubly so for SCP-963. I'm worried that focusing on that will drag all of this out even more.

Prepare and eventually post statements on social media about the removal of Bright's works and the reasoning for doing so;

I believe any statement released on social media has the capacity to cause significantly more harm than good. If we do go down this path, we'll need to be incredibly careful with whatever statement we end up putting out.

Mirroring points already made by BAD_DATA and radian628 in this thread, (and ubergoober on the 04 mirror thread) presenting 963 - and possibly 1004 - with added context and annotations of how aspects of the article are harmful and their full impact on the victims of Bright may not only help prevent the spread of misinformation regarding Brights incredibly harmful actions amongst uneducated users, but also puts the wishes of Brights victims first, seeing as it was created with their wishes in mind. As I’ve mentioned in a previous thread, the wishes and opinions of the victims are more important than anything else — including those opinions of site staff and community members. This solution also seems to prevent future harm and lessen the likelihood of victims experiencing harassment from uninformed or malicious users, which is also incredibly important.

I support the wishes of the victims, which is why I find myself in support of Remove and Counter, with Near-total Removal as a second option.

From a gut feeling I can completely understand why people think Near Total Removal is the best option, we want to immediately remove the works of a particularly disgusting user from a site that we all care about, right? I can completely understand that, I certainly don't want the works on the site. However, we must consider users who would wish to immediately seek out Bright works elsewhere. While many places that would host this (e.g. the wayback machine) would be perfectly fine, there is the chance that a new user would instead seek out the pages in a harmful place where they would be exposed to misinformation at best and direct contact with harmful people at worst. It may be hard to recognise as members of the on-site community, but many off-site fans are severely misinformed about the extent of Bright's harm, severely downplaying their actions based on either ignorance or denial so that they can continue to enjoy the character. Some people will never be convinced, but we must remember that most people are reasonable, you can see this from the amount of users who come into the official discord, clueless about Bright, who immediately change their mind upon hearing about what happened.

While Near Total Removal does get rid of the pieces and removes works that nobody truly wants on the wiki, the catch to this is that it washes our hands of the issue where we should attempt to mitigate harm as much as possible. Remove and Counter, on the other hand, works differently: only the most prominent works by Bright will be selected to kept in a collapsible on mainsite (most likely 963, but perhaps a few others), but most works by Bright are not prominent and would be deleted/unlisted. I think of Remove and Counter as a way to remove as many works as possible from the site while mitigating as much harm as possible, and only differs slightly from Near Total Removal

We should remember that this isn't the end of dealing with Bright once this is finished. The old SCP-166 was completely overhauled to something new that has become beloved by the community so much that next to no one talks about the old version. While not a direct 1:1, the same could be said for Bright, and perhaps eventually one day Bright will be completely irrelevant.We will continue to, in some way, counter Bright's influence and remove any harm from the wiki, and perhaps one day with enough work and harm mitigation in place everything will be gone. In the interim, which I and many others will ensure will move as quickly as possible, this is the best way to mitigate at much harm as possible while removing as much as possible.

That is why, as it stands now, I support the proposal Remove and Counter.

I believe Remove & Counter is our best solution.

also, voicing support for Remove and Counter.

edit- so long on this damn website and i still cant do syntax right.

grumble.

First of all, we have to consider which users we should actually be informing about Bright in order to reduce harm to the maximum extent possible. Anyone with a casual interest in the SCP Wiki who is aware of Bright could be a target; as such, it is primarily these people we need to educate using disclaimers on highly prominent works that feature overtly harmful elements, most notably SCP-963.

However, a non-insignificant portion of Bright's works, despite being written by Bright, do not contain any meaningful literal content that relates to Bright the author, Dr. Bright the character, or the normalization of Bright's predatory behavior; furthermore, most of these works are not particularly prominent and have received comparatively little attention to ones like 963 offsite. Essentially, as far as the average casual user who is not aware of the works' creator is concerned, each work in this subset of Bright's works is effectively indistinguishable from a non-Bright work.

Consequently, if all of these obscure, unrelated works were given a disclaimer instead of being outright deleted, rather than serving to educate casual users who are aware of Bright and are thus at risk of entering their orbit, they will more likely end up attracting unwanted attention from people not aware of Bright or these works' relation to Bright. This may backfire, as this may encourage these users to ask victims unwanted questions, or continually bring up Bright in spaces where victims are present. Consider all the inevitable questions of "Why's there this thing on SCP-050? It seems innocent enough to me. Let people enjoy things!" from offsiters who don't understand the gravity of the situation several years down the line.

Compare this to if we just replaced 050 with entirely unrelated content. 050 — whch is among the more popular of these works, I might add — is, imo, forgettable enough among casual readers that very few will feel it necessary to ask "What happened to the old 050?" if it's replaced outright, versus if we draw attention to it with a disclaimer. Effectively, deleting 050 et al and recycling the slots for others to use will essentially erase Bright's presence from the slot entirely.

Ultimately, many victims do not want to have to think about Bright anymore and want this process dealt with as quietly and as promptly as possible. Having so many seemingly arbitrary and unrelated slots turn into what are effectively permanent reminders of Bright is not conducive to this.

Remove and Counter provides a much more well-thought-out rationale in terms of what works it is disclaimering, versus the vast majority, which will be outright deleted and recycled for use by other site users, for the reasons described above.

Think about it from the POV of someone peripherally involved with the community who's already upset with staff's inaction. Does "we want to keep people from reading the works on other sites and open a discussion about the harm caused by the works" sound believable, or does it sound like a flimsy excuse to avoid deleting popular works?

(I'm aware that the above concerns are discussed in the proposal, which I appreciate. I think that the benefits are overstated and the drawbacks are underestimated, though.)

I think Near-Total Removal is the best option.

Anyways, I'm in favor of the Single Source of Truth proposal, as I feel it works best in countering future harm and ensuring that those who do attempt to seek out Bright's works are fully aware of the author's actions.

R&C is basically all the good parts of Near Total Removal, but with significantly more thought into dealing with the most harmful cases like 963, such that victims' wishes are respected.

Edit 2/8: I recommend that if R&C is picked and response pieces are allowed for certain works, that they be vetted by staff proactively to stop trolls and people who don't read the instructions. Trolls aside, I suspect there'll be at least a few people who'll absentmindedly see the page, not read the instructions¹ and end up writing & adding a tonedeaf response piece that treats the Dr. Bright character flippantly, without accounting for the harm caused by the author. While we could argue that staff might be able to deal with such pieces promptly to negate any damage caused, having someone on staff regularly check the response piece hubs for new contributions will be somewhat of a maintenance headache long-term — imagine if the designated staffer(s) forget or retire and something slips through, or if the responsibilities aren't clearly demarcated from the beginning leading to a bystander effect. I think it'd be better to have one or more designated points of contact on staff who volunteer to receive ideas and drafts for response pieces; these people would then either review the ideas/drafts themselves or relay them to others who can more effectively do so. Once a decision is made, the draft can be added to the hub, or will alternatively be denied if it is found to perpetuate harm.

I think having their big articles left up with information will be the best way to get that information out to offsite folks in a controlled, official manner — especially to those who may be interested in the character, Bright, while being entirely unaware of what the author has done. Removing those will provide more ground for rumor (people will be playing games of telephone about why they were removed, while most likely linking bootleg versions of the article with no warning or explanation of why this occurred). If the pages are empty, those intrigued by the character who may fall victim in the future will have far less of a reason to visit the page and read the warning.

I think that having every Bright slot that had harmful content (even those that are more or less forgotten to time) go unrecycled (as in Near-Total Removal) would reify Bright's continued presence in the site's collective consciousness, even if it's just as blank, locked pages where their worst stuff used to be. In addition to that more philosophical/moral argument, I will also argue that having the pages of articles seldom remembered by anyone left blank looks bad optically.

What is this?

This is a discussion thread serving as the culmination of the Bright Works Project. The aim of this thread is to finalize staff's approach in handling Bright's remaining works. Several proposals are presented.

The process of creating each of these proposals has been very thorough, with the goal of providing an exact model for handling comparable situations in the future. As a result, the proposals cover a wide range of options, not all of which are ideal solutions. This was done to show for future reference that staff thoroughly considered all relevant options, and allowing these proposals to be applied to any similar issues without the need to repeat discussion

Why is this an issue?

In short, a former administrator and long-time author on the SCP Wiki (who will be referred to as "Bright" throughout) received an AHT ban in 2022 for the following:

For further details, please see the Bright List Deletion Message.

Bright's conduct was enabled by their position as a high-ranking member of staff and the relative popularity of their works. Since their AHT ban, many of Bright's works — all of which are harmful — have remained on the site. The Bright Works Project was started to provide a final, permanent resolution to this issue with a primary goal of harm reduction. This has been long-delayed — to an unacceptable degree — but it is now ready to be finished so that we can put this matter to rest once and for all.

Solution(s):

Now that the proposals have been fully prepared, they are ready for discussion and then voting. To begin, there will be a week of discussion on 05command for staff and a mainsite mirror open for discussion by SCP Wiki site members. On the final day of discussion, we will post a comment asking staff to reply if they feel that a second week of discussion is necessary; if there is sufficient consensus for additional discussion, then we will hold another week of discussion. This process will continue until no further discussion is needed.¹

Additionally, simultaneous with this discussion being launched, there is a 3-day vote on provisional content blanking. This permits staff to authorize certain Bright articles for being blanked / hidden from public view until the discussion and voting on these proposals has been finalized.

Once discussions have finished, we will move on to ranked choice voting between the 5 proposals. This will be a semi-standard O5 vote (meaning that only staff cast votes), to determine which of the five proposals we are choosing. However, due to the nature of the topic, voting is opened to all staff, including Junior Staff. After a week, if a vote passes with a majority, then that plan is chosen. If there is a lack of consensus on the specifics of the chosen proposal, a secondary vote — also running for a week — will be held to decide the contested specifics of the proposal.

Once the voting period is finished, the chosen proposal will be implemented in accordance with the timelines outlined in the proposals themselves.

By the end of the timeline, we will have handled the current phase of the Bright Works project, and dealt with the most important issue (works authored by Bright). After this, the Bright Works project will continue to address the remaining harm and impact left by Bright, next addressing Bright's contributions and edits to other pages on the SCP Wiki, where the goal will be removal. Following that, we will be contacting individual authors and series runners, asking them to adjust their content, if needed.

We will continue to do everything that we can to address the failings of the past, and to prioritize the reduction of harm as much as possible — our hope is that we will finally be able to resolve this long-standing problem as soon as possible.

The Proposals:

Remove and Counter Bright's Influence

• This proposal recommends the deletion of the vast majority of Bright's works, while paying special attention to the handful of remaining works which need particular handling due to the potential for future harm caused by their prominence. This proposal focuses on allowing the community to recontextualize Bright's narrative on the SCP Wiki, counteracting and replacing Bright's influence.
• » Draft here «

Near-Total Removal

• This proposal focuses on the removal of almost every aspect of the works Bright created on the wiki. Specifically, this proposal would remove all of their pages, with the most overtly harmful works being left empty, instead redirecting to an updated version of the Bright List deletion note.
• » Draft here «

Single Source of Truth

• This proposal focuses on the reduction of future harm by having a disclaimer added to each work by Bright on the SCP Wiki, explaining the circumstances of their AHT ban to the extent that such is possible, and warning users against pursuing interaction with the author. This disclaimer would be applied to all pages, and their content hidden behind a collapsible.
• » Draft here «

Adapted Deletions Threshold

• This proposal would place all power into the hands of the community at-large to cast their votes on each individual Bright piece by creating new rating modules to set aside the existing upvote totals on Bright works. Pieces that reach the adapted deletion threshold will be removed at the end of a set voting period.
• » Draft here «

Minimal Staff Intervention

• This proposal would remove only the most overtly harmful works from the wiki.
• » Draft here «

This discussion will run for one week, after which voting will begin.

Edited to add a link to AHT, with permission from Queerious.