I very much agree with you that beating around the bush is useless. So I'm going to put it on the line. Think of this as an intervention, where I'm all worried-faced and pleading and not all angry faced and yelling. I would post a picture of my face but that would not be helpful at this time.
You know, I really wanted to avoid coming back here again because staff discussion is one of the only things that actually, legitimately upset me, but I'm going to put this here because I have to get this off my chest.
then apparently had another huge argument while the accused wasn't there to offer any defense.
We're not going to go onto the main wiki and have an administrative conversation about the behavior of personnel. We do that here and in staffchat, both place you have free access to. The kind of official warnings you get only come after conversations in one or both of those places. I have trouble believing you didn't at least wonder if your name was coming up in one or both of those places. We can't drag you anywhere to stand trial, Aelanna; you have to make yourself available to defend yourself, as you have here.
Another point more specifically and generally:
because staff discussion is one of the only things that actually, legitimately upset me
I'm an education graduate student. In education classes, we are told that in order to communicate our expectations to students, it is necessary to speak in a positive manner and avoid statements that focus on mistakes, focusing instead on the manner in which those mistakes may be corrected in the future.
For example, a negative statement would be "you need, need, to get over this fear you have of being criticized or called out on the Internet, because it is just the Internet and nobody can hurt you, and you had got to have known that people would be talking about you in staffchat because we always talk about people in staffchat, and most of us were literally there saying "I wish Aelanna was here so we could talk to her because her behavior is getting troubling" but you weren't there because you're scared of something that I don't fully understand, but it's the kind of thing where the only way for you to be successful is to swallow whatever that fear is and make yourself available and just take whatever is said in stride, even if people are vitriolic towards you, because people are going to say whatever they want and your personal worth as a human being is not dependent on whether some other human being seeing a thumbnail avatar on a computer screen thousands of miles away thinks absolutely terrible things about you, because you have a real life where people love and care about you and this is just a hobby."
While a positive statement would be phrased in the first person, such as "I feel, and I think a lot of other people feel, that you have shown signs of literally mental instability over the last several months, beginning with a post on 05 where you conflated the behavior of half a dozen people, accused them all of "driving the last nail into the coffin filled with your shattered dreams, broken hopes, and bottled up regrets", when I don't think you understand that, in a very practical sense, none of the people you listed actually know you or even think about you to any significant degree within the limited context with which they interact with you on the Internet, that none of them are literally evil human beings that seek to drive people to mental distress, and that your post was humiliating, degrading, and hurtful on a level several orders of magnitude greater than a line in a mostly private chatroom late at night"
Have you reread that thread you made? Have you tried to see what that looks like to, say, me? Not even the sentiment; literally the words that you wrote? "You can joyfully claim to have made me drive to work crying, having turned a fun, just-for-kicks project that was the only bright thing in the last week of my miserable existence into something that I actually felt ashamed of"? Do you understand that nobody else on the wiki, down to the newest of noobs, thinks that a critique of their writing is a critique of their worth as a human being?
More importantly: do you realize that you ended that post with "To all of you: you've won", accusing every single person on 05 of wanting to see you have a mental breakdown, and that thread was then filled with dozens of people wishing you well? Does that not maybe give some indication that there are people who seriously care about you and want to see you feel better? Do you think anyone posted in that thread who wasn't wondering if you'd be found dead within the week? Do you, right now, while you are "perfectly calm and in control", think that would make anyone happy?
There are two Aelannas, and there always have been. There's the unbelievably talented author and critic who was helping the Foundation become something huge and beautiful, and there's…whatever the fuck that post was. I'm willing to take both if you're willing to expose yourself to people who can give you advise on which one's better. I don't want you to go. I want you to change, and I want it to stick. I want you to learn that sarcasm rarely translates effectively on the internet, that it takes a lot of goodwill and tact to make it work, and that you literally need to stop using it until you have the ability to do so in a way that isn't hurtful. I do want you to apologize to Djoric, Silber, Roget, Vezaz, and Nusquam, some of whom liked you, some of whom didn't, none of whom deliberately meant to hurt you, all of whom you hurt. Okay, it has been explained to me that it is not exactly appropriate for me to demand apologizes on behalf of others. Let me rephrase to what I meant: You behaved in a manner I believe is inappropriate given that their disagreements with you were private and your response was especially public. As Moose pointed out in chat, I don't have an encyclopedic memory of what these guys said to you specifically that provoked all of this. Regardless, my point is that someone has to stop the vitriol instead of returning it, and you responded by opening floodgates and drowning plenty of innocent bystanders too. I feel this is an action deserving of an apology of some sort for its own sake, rather than to avoid a ban or something. I think that's more what I meant.
Staying on topic and shifting from the heart-rending: I do agree with you that beating around the bush is useless, as I said. I prefer direct confrontation outside of chat; a conversation where all parties involved are able to take their time, back away, and think about their responses before blasting off. I like this as a precedent for handling future issues like this.
