A few days ago, I posted here regarding behaviour on the part of user Cerastes. The current body of knowledge regarding his case is spread across multiple disparate posts by several users, over the course of several days, without a coherent singular point of collection.
Initially I presented it with a focus on an accusation of authorial theft and plagiarism of an idea of another user’s work, ‘sniping’ a climactic story element intended as the capstone element in a multi-year canon. However, the actual problem and point of contention was Cerastes’ attitude toward the situation, and his neglecting to show the courtesy to talk to the user whose work he was drawing from until directly approached by said user. For this I apologize to staff at large, as if I were more focused in the original thread it would have been a far more focused conversation.
The following event, however, is the core issue from where this conversation should have been focused on from the beginning. The next several paragraphs detail the new information regarding the incident that we will be discussing.
I will acknowledge here that this breach should have been included much more prominently in the opening thread. I will say that I (as head of Disc) was not aware of the event until partway through initial conversation, nor were several other Disciplinary Team members aware; I attempted to remedy this as edits were made to the original thread, but that wasn’t enough as the damage of the initial position and approach was already done. For that I apologize.
Recently, due to a technical bug, Cerastes’ brother was able to access SSSC without the knowledge of most other members of Staff. Details of this happening can be found through taylor_itkin does not match any existing user name, but the point is that his presence was not discovered for several hours, until the random new person was noticed and subsequently booted by present Staff left on their own. I have been informed that nobody noticed that the user had joined, hung around, and left until after the user had left. Without trying to sound overly dramatic, this is basically an unreported security breach, where the private discussions of a number of staff members were in full access of a total stranger for several hours without their knowledge or consent.
The problem here is that Cerastes did not volunteer this information on his own, but explained what happened only after being pressed by other users. He knew very early on, and simply left his brother in the private staffchat for several hours. As this is a bug with the architecture, he very well could have alerted any person with permissions that was present and simply said “my brother showed up somehow, remove him”. He was not at fault for actually letting this user in; however, he had the ability to inform others of the happening and have it repaired. Instead, he did not. He only explained what happened after being personally approached by another user.
This event was not made public at the time. A majority of those present saw it as ‘dealt with’, and thought that if action was pushed for, it would be seen as excessively divisive, so people were told to let it be. Several present individuals were fully ready to immediately demote Cerastes on the spot for obfuscating what happened through not coming forward immediately. A majority of relevant individuals (myself included) were not made aware of the event until recently, when a discussion regarding Cerastes’ attitude came up. As that conversation was spurred by his approach regarding using certain story elements originating from Magnus’ canon, I focused hard on that in my approach to that other thread. That was a big mistake on my part, especially considering what I now know about this first event.
The failure of Cerastes to report that a non-staff person was let into a staff-only chat for several hours, and the fact that after the fact the event needed to be investigated by another user rather than volunteered at the time, is a very big issue. If, somehow, the same event happened but the non-staff user was malicious, they could have downloaded private/sensitive logs either manually or through using various 3rd party programs to do so. There are a lot of good reasons why SSSC exists and is private to non-Staff users.
Access to any staffchat is a privilege and a signal of trust in a user not to breach that. Cerastes’ attitude towards this breach - even if it’s his brother - was really really bad.
Hopefully this thread better reflects the approach and perspective that Disc has come to in the past few days. Cerastes’ behaviour regarding letting his brother linger in SSSC is concerning for many staff members, and ideally a better, more even discussion can be had regarding that and what action can, or should, be taken regarding it.
Logs and screenshots are available in SSSC at user requests, simply because it would be heavily cluttered with discord screengrabs which do not translate cleanly to Wikidot threads.
The previous thread concerned another incident involving Cerastes that brought his judgement into question. Below I will provide a link (and collapsible version) of a short timeline that Soulless produced of the event in the previous thread, and then provide my explanation of its inclusion here. The following is a retread of old information as discussed in the previous thread.
http://05command.wikidot.com/forum/t-13868187/disciplinary-cerastes#post-4823807
The long and short of it is this:
Cerastes approached writing a 001 article featuring story elements drawn from the Alchemy Division canon. These elements were intended to be used in a capstone article, a 001 that would serve as a climax to the canon as written by DrMagnus.
Normally this is not a disciplinary issue at this level. However, multiple users, while reviewing Cerastes’ drafts, directly told him that he was using Magnus’ story elements, as described above. Cerastes was told this by several users over the course of the construction of the 001 article; he sent a PM via Helenbot on IRC to touch base with Magnus, which consisted of the following -
8:56 PM <Secretary_Helen> DrMagnus: cerastes said at 11/06/2020 15:47:04: hey, whenever you're available, could you send me a ping? writing something that involves the origin of the alchemical great seal, malyce recommended i get your input as you had some stuff in mind for its origin
With no further active communication attempts made. Magnus only found out incidentally, after being pinged while another user was discussing the story elements in question. The two discussed the perceived use of the story elements; a few days later, some aspects of the 001 were changed. It has since been taken down.
Below is the summary of events above.
After much reflection over the course of the past several days, I have come to a better understanding of exactly what my issues are with this, and why.
Cerastes showed an unwillingness to take into account the previous efforts of another user when adapting a part of their canon into his work. There is no obligation to completely get the entire okay from another user if using their work as inspiration; however, the fact that multiple other authors informed Cerastes that Magnus was working on X idea, and Cerastes did not make a stronger effort to touch base is concerning. Simple courtesy is the simplest crux of this argument, and negligence displayed by Cerastes regarding his handling of a story element introduced and built upon by Magnus is concerning on the part of a staff member.
These two incidents aren’t entirely 1:1 reflections of one another, but together they show a tendency for Cerastes to neglect to share information, only volunteering it to the appropriate parties once pressed directly. The SSSC incident is far more severe in nature, and the secondary incident is intended here as circumstantial support for the existence of a concerning display of attitude.
This thread is open to OS and above. As this is a Disciplinary thread, Disc team will have the final say, and is expected to approach as evenly and fairly as possible.
For full disclosure: The Disciplinary team is open to consideration of full demotion from staff of Cerastes, with the first (security) incident being the primary driving factor of our approach. That event is extremely concerning in my eyes, and the eyes of multiple other Disc members.
(account deleted)