Just wanted to express my gratitude for the team of volunteers who have spent their time, energy, and i’m sure a great deal of mental and emotional bandwidth to do their best to keep this forum a safe, informative, and open place for everyone, especially during this past week.
Without your work this space for these conversations would not exist and I’m grateful for how thoughtful and responsive y’all are.
There is also something to be said here about the entire community handling brigading/trolls/bad faith actors/etc.
For the most part CD mods (and users) have done an excellent job of either not taking the bait or sucking the joy out of trolling. It’s not all that fun to post nonsensical posts when the whole community is like “hey, this sucks, but if you are serious, here’s why you’re wrong.”
VEXForums, which doesn’t have as robust a mod team and whose user base skews far younger has a much larger issue with it.
So shoutout the mods for handling the ugly work of keeping things on the straight and narrow, and shoutout to the many users who know better than to feed obvious bad faith attempts at knocking a thread off kilter. It takes a village and all that.
They have been working with a level of deftness and moral clarity solely needed. Hopefully they will also get to processing my application to be a moderator soon.
As stated in your screen shot: The post was hidden due to flags from the community, so please consider how you might revise your post to reflect their feedback.
On behalf of the mod team, thank you for the OP thread. It has been a daunting few days but as I have publicly stated in other mediums: This was really tough, important and not nearly as difficult as those who have gone through the stories told.
I moderate a Facebook group with about 12,000 members, and most of the time it’s an easy gig, but when things blow up it can be an incredibly difficult and time-consuming “job”.
Which is to say that I have some idea of how hard the mod team is working here, and I’m very grateful.
Jokes aside, thank you all… I’m an internet dictator but I’m an internet dictator with feelings!
Please remember though that no matter how difficult this job / hobby / addiction is… those coming forward still had the more difficult task, and I’m eternally grateful for both their courage, and their confidence in us as mods, and as a community.
I hope that this sets a tone institutionally for accountability, some form of closure for those hurt in any way they can receive it, and steps to protect all of the students and mentors involved in the FIRST programs from anything of the like.