This is a summary of the events collectively known as the Events of November 2020, (formerly the Cerastes Incident) a miscarriage of Disc team’s investigative powers in late 2020. This is intended to try and provide as accurate a summary as possible for readers, so as to best clear up a wide assortment of misconceptions that have risen up, and hopefully help clarify inconsistencies in the general perception of events staff-side. My personal perspective is that I am especially at fault for this incident, as the one responsible for how posting and discussion was handled.
Initially, DrMagnus approached Disc with a concern that Cerastes' at-the-time new 001 article had taken a major part of the finale of a long-running storyline in its own narrative.
I was unfamiliar with any of the relevant work, and was unsure if this counted as plagiarism in a manner coherent with our plagiarism policy. I, and other members of Disc who were present, agreed that there was possibly something there, but were largely unsure. I decided to take the complaint myself, and try to figure out the best way to investigate.
In the weeks prior to this, we had been working out kinks in a new staff-discussion discord channel, and I was doubting that a coherent conversation could be done there. So I decided to instead put the initial thread up on 05, rather than discuss in staff-discussion. This was a bad move in retrospect, and won’t happen again.
My intention with the initial Cerastes thread was a discussion of whether or not plagiarism had taken place. The thread rapidly devolved, as it was initially set to punish Cerastes for perceived plagiarism - though my intention was just to have a conversation, juggling multiple suggestions on phrasing made the whole thing muddled and further damaged the possibility for discussion. Despite my repeated attempts to clarify with the original post and get the conversation back on rails - and my quickly growing belief that plagiarism had not taken place - conversation became extremely aggressive and got out of my hands. Several members both on and off the Disciplinary team called for demotion. Other staff argued that it came off as a witch-hunt, and discussion turned to very angry shouting past one another on 05 and on Discord for several days following.
This is not meant as blame towards the rest of staff for being rightfully angry at how poorly this was handled, but more to explain the defensive nature of myself and others on Disc during these discussions.
During the various side discussions about the above thread, I was informed that somehow Cerastes had previously been associated with a non-Staff member being in the Discord for about 12 hours several months before. I personally was frustrated that somehow I had never heard of this, even though no damage had been done; due to my scattered perception of the then-current situation, I decided to make a second thread about this incident.
What had happened was, due to a quirk in how Discord handles log-ins, sometimes somebody who uses a computer and Discord client previously used by somebody else (this instance a brother using the same computer with a different Discord log-in) might slip into the last-seen server the previous person was in. So, Cerastes’s brother was accidentally deposited into the staff discord, wasn't discovered for 12 hours, and left quietly. He did not possess correct permissions, iirc, and no harm was done.
The fact that I never knew about this ticked me off personally, but beyond that I wanted to see if the lack of public acknowledgement was a problem. It was decided that no, it was not, though it would have probably been best if it was mentioned in various servers so it was a known bug rather than coming up later. I acknowledge now that my annoyance was misplaced and I’ve since dropped it entirely.
Throughout the above, Magnus maintained that some level of plagiarism had taken place. He was undergoing severe stress in real life at the time; this is an explanation and not an excuse for his behaviour during this incident. While he didn’t directly comment or advise on what to do during the Disc-ord discussions, at the time his position as an administrator passively exerted influence on those around him and affected the disciplinary conversation, whether he intended it to or not.
In short, Cerastes is recognized to have never committed plagiarism in any capacity, and that it was not on him that the nothing-tier incident with his brother slipped past the notice of other staff.
After it was agreed upon that Cerastes had not committed plagiarism, discussion continued for a long while due to well-placed anger in how Disciplinary handled the situation. Moderator taylor_itkin does not match any existing user name approached DrMann privately with a suggestion for a censure vote for Magnus, which was then extrapolated by DrMann to also include himself and me.
DrMann agreed, and in Disc-ord came to us and proposed that he, DrMagnus, and myself would create a public apology and each undergo public censure, probably in turns, so as to publicly acknowledge our parts in the fiasco. While I had generally spearheaded this abortion of a discussion, Mann looked over and okayed it, and Magnus instigated the accusations - which carried significant weight due to his position as an admin and as a long-time member of staff. Most members of Disc who were present did not raise especially big objections to the investigation, but also did not push especially hard for the initial thread to be put up, and so held minimal responsibility for how this went down.
I immediately accepted Mann's proposal for censure. Before further discussion could take place, Magnus left the server. He resigned from staff, and within about 10 minutes his various responsibilities were redistributed to other staff. He had decided that his real-life responsibilities took complete priority over those of SCP; while he continued to support Tech in some capacity, he has not been a member of staff since his leaving.
Due to the sudden retirement of an administrator, neither myself nor Mann went through with censure, in order to try and arrange new promotions. This is explained more immediately below.
Within a few weeks, before we could comfortably recruit enough more administrators to help handle things if administrators and Disc decided that myself and Mann should be censured, Harmony happened. This further hamstrung administration, forcing multiple into extended leaves through the sheer mental and emotional devastation that came from the event (from which multiple still have not returned). For much of that time, if we had even one fewer available admin, we wouldn't be able to reliably deal with emergency bans, much less other administrative work. Burnout from Harmony’s saga still rings out today, and now is coupled with general Wikidot instability. Discussion regarding censure was tabled temporarily, and while I have brought it up several times due to my responsibility for the incident, the administrator and Disc teams have not had the capacity to have the discussion due to repeated crises.
One last thing I want to do is apologize to the members of the Disciplinary team who were not responsible for this fiasco. Multiple times many of them faced hostility and aggression from various users, and Mann and I apologize for putting them in that position.
This is the long and short of the Cerastes incident from the perspective of Dexanote, with discussion involving DrMann and other members of Disc who were present at that time of the above events.