Throughout his tenure on staff, Administrators have been made aware of issues caused or worsened by PsychicProgrammer’s decisions that have hindered SCP Wiki staff and required correction by captains and admins. Throughout these incidents, Psy has demonstrated hasty judgement, poor communication skills, as well as a disregard for staff members, staff teams, and staff policy. Over the past several months, these incidents have increased, despite Psy being spoken to on multiple occasions regarding the underlying issues.
By consensus of active administrators, we have elected to begin demotion proceedings per the site Charter. We are recommending demotion to Junior Staff. (See the conclusion for more information.)
This thread is open to all opstaff and higher. Per procedure, resignation while these Disciplinary proceedings are ongoing will be recorded as leaving staff in poor standing.
Overview
- 2024-02-20 through 2024-02-2023 — erroneously told a user they could revert over a staff-enacted author post edit (for automating SCP-8000 slot allocation by the Contest Team), mishandled the initial report, accused/undermined Rounderhouse needlessly, poorly communicated case to both staff and the user
- 2024-02-27 through 2024-02-29 — messaged authors of the Third Law hub prematurely regarding canon compliance, despite not having consulted the rest of staff first, and effectively being one of the Third Law plaintiffs for complaints regarding required changes and staff enforcement of rules. Staff requested recusal; later an admin had to directly message to formally request Psy recuse himself.
- 2024-06-04 — repeated interruptions of private discord crit channels despite requests by Discord Crit for the Discord Team not to interact with those channels unless requested
- 2024-07-29 — pinged members of staff and unilaterally assigned them to respond to specific town hall questions, over 6 out of the 9 responses were assigned incorrectly (staff members were unavailable, would be inappropriate to answer these queries due to bypassing captaincy, or not on the relevant teams)
- 2024-08-06, 2024-08-15 — announced he would create an O5 discussion thread for removal or unlisting of all Bright’s works, which Curations would be responsible for handling, despite Psy neither being on Curations, nor having consulted with Curations prior. Uncle Nicolini told Psy not to start the Bright works deletion discussion, two months later Psy publicly discussed continuing to work on the Bright deletion proposal, and discussed joining a user-led initiative to do so, Nico messaged again.
- 2024-09-17 (continuation of 2024-07-29) — again attempted to assign an unsuitable staff member to respond to a town hall question
- 2024-10-05 — editorialized and submitted town hall response from Critique team, rather than submitting it as provided or verifying that the Crit team found the edits acceptable (answer given involved description of recap team and staff culture, answer eventually posted boiled down to "spoke with question asker, the staff they were asking about are now gone").
- 2024-10-30 — offered someone a position on the Seminars sub-team of the Community Outreach, despite not being the section head of Seminars or part of the Community Outreach team. Directly told by section head that they cannot do this.
- 2024-11-17 — Asked DrBleep for approval on a Disc team policy, redirected to Disc team captain, unilaterally wrote the proposal and presented it fully complete, rather than in any way collaborating with Disc. Concern noted that Psy would have moved forward with the policy after a single sign-off.
- 2025-01-21 — publicly released information from a sensitive disciplinary channel on a non-staff Discord regarding the ban of a user present in said non-staff Discord at the time; user had recently submitted an appeal to lift a mainsite permanent ban. Psy was not a member of Disc and did not seek permission to share this information.
- 2025-02-01 — pinged admins and later Queerious in a private staff channel about a reported licensing concern, continued discussion seemingly as if passing information from the sensitive channel to the users, while also sending the opinions of the users back in real time. When addressed about the concerns about Queerious were being phrased as a personal attack, Psy indicated that the words were his own, not that of the user he was speaking for. (Note: Staff members felt the need to preface messages with "don't port this from private staff chat", the default position, due to Psy's tendency to immediately share information which staff should be discussing, not immediately publishing)
- 2025-02-24 — made public a (seemingly fixed) bug that was still considered sensitive by Tech. He did this without consulting Tech. Later made a channel permission change to the Official Discord without consulting Discord captaincy or any other moderator. Discord Team captain told Psy this was inappropriate, and a continuation of behavior they had discussed prior. Then proceeded to unexpectedly have Queerious stand in as interim section head of Data Analysis for the next month, despite Queer only having agreed to making charts for the yearly survey
Accumulated Evidence
Link: PDF
Conclusion
Overall, it’s apparent that Psy has engaged in the same detrimental behaviour for over a year now. Despite being told by many people what the issue with this behavior was, in several instances he has then gone on to repeat this behavior, or similar. While it is not abnormal for staff members to periodically need corrections, with the large number present here, as well as the severity of some of the cases, we believe something needs to change.
However, Psy's actions have been taken with a desire to help staff, or were missteps that he presumed were acceptable. He has overall been a useful part of the staff body, but has a tendency to take unilateral action.
Given that a number of warnings, informal and formal, have been given to Psy about his behavior without change, administration does not feel that a censure period would be effective. Instead, we are moving for a demotion to Junior Staff. This way, Psy remains on staff, but is in a position of officially needing to coordinate more with other parts of staff and his captains before taking actions. Additionally, given that one of the common patterns present in this thread is Psy sharing sensitive information from private staff channels in inappropriate places, being Junior Staff is a way to keep him on staff but restrict his access to many of those channels.
With this, promotion back to opstaff would also serve as an official, staff-wide recognition that Psy's problem behaviors documented here have been corrected.
psychicprogrammer has the right to respond to this thread and any posts within it.
This thread is open to all Operational Staff and above per section B.3 of the charter:
Once a post has been made on O5, it may be responded to by both the peers of the user and all members of the disciplinary team.
Please keep responses on-topic and limited to this particular case. This discussion will remain open for one week.