User blog:StoryGirl83/Recent Situation in the Discussion Area

Hi, everyone. We've had a pretty tempestuous few days here. Someone has been trying to cause trouble for this wikia and unlike other times when someone has done this, they have been sneakier about it. If you've been here long enough you will likely remember a user that started making a bunch of changes to the wikia more than a year ago. This user made a lot of us uncomfortable and I know I was ready to quit editing entirely. I wasn't going to leave the wikia, but I was going to stick entirely to the comment sections and leave the editing to others. This user just wanted to make things so different from what we were doing. He asked on multiple occasions to be made an admin, all the while subtly trying to undermine the authority of Wolf and Fearless Diva, especially Fearless Diva since despite her position as an admin, she wasn't a bureaucrat at the time and he must have seen that as a weakness. He refused to acknowledge her position as an admin and ignored anything she said as far as I could see.

Fearless Diva put up with way more of this than I would have. She talked to other members of the community who were uncomfortable with the situation and then, she acted. In order to make sure I was remembering correctly, I looked up this user's block log and found something surprising. Apparently Wolf gave this user a one day block in 2017 and at that time this user was on Staff and unblocked himself. I'm not sure if this was an accident, because these things happened within the same minute.

When Fearless Diva acted, she gave this user a one month block. This is important to note, because if you look at the full block list, you won't see that, because six hours later, she changed it to an infinite block because of what happened next.

I was at my sister's house at the time this happened and I know Fearless Diva was in classes, so she couldn't do much. A few hours after the block, not sure exactly when, a new user appeared and posted porn. Guess what, normal users can't delete images and there are kids that come on this wikia. In addition to this he renamed pages to have names involving porn. He erased the content of pages or replaced the images on them with the porn pics he had added. There were maybe half a dozen users on the wikia at the time and we got to work dealing with him and it took all of us to keep up with him. Since I was at my sister's I was on an iPad, which is not great for dealing with any of this. I mostly stuck to just replacing the images he posted with the logo. I must have uploaded that logo image a couple dozen times to keep the three images he kept adding from being visible. Other users dealt with everything else he was doing.

Remember I mentioned Fearless Diva was in class? Because of that, there was only so much she could do, so she would block the users as fast as we would report them to her. And you want to know who was on, take a look at the block list, because this user tried to impersonate some of us. There were other users on, but this user went through eight accounts in additional to his original one in that one day and then I think another one the next day. Finally we got the user IP blocked by Wikia Staff and thankfully that seemed to stop him, but not before he posted a message for me on another wikia saying that I'd better not sleep or the same thing would happen to my wikias. This is why I don't have my other most used wikias listed. I am glad to say that never happened, but it still crept me out that he went to the trouble of seeking me out and posting on another wikia just to threaten me for trying to protect the wikia.

That was last year. If this user had just left things along and waited out his ban, he would have been allowed back the next month and if he was willing to work with the other users, things would have been fine.

So now, we come to this year. A couple months ago we had another person wreak havoc on the wikia. This person we mostly spewing hate at Fearless Diva. This user was not behaving well with other users and was given a two week block. When he got back, and he did get back, he continued this behavior and was blocked infinitely. A few days later he came back changing the content of pages to be all about hate for Fearless Diva. Again, this user created multiple accounts one after the other in order to keep this up for a while. If you are new and wondered why new users can't edit pages, after the first user I mentioned we had something put on temporarily to protect us from trolls creating accounts to cause trouble, but this time, we've manually protected every single page, except most user pages. If you would like your user page protected from new user trolls, let us know. So far they haven't targeted those, but if you are concerned, we can protect your page. This attack last a couple days and Fearless Diva deputized a few of us to give us the ability to help clean up and protect things. That's when she had the blog asking for people volunteering to be staff.

In the last couple days we have been under another attack. It's much more subtle, most of it, but it's still an attack. A user who got in trouble and had a block. Instead of accepting it, this user decided to try and undermine Fearless Diva and when the rest of the newly minted staff stepped in to help, we were thrown under the bus with her. Unlike previous attacks which took place on the main site, this one took place in discussion and accounts which were newly made and no post history would question Fearless Diva's competency and then they would answer each other. They would post questions about how she was running things and claim that she was blocking people just because she wanted to.

I looked into the situations which were used as examples and in some of them I knew more about them already and others I could tell by looking into their posts and block logs that there was more to the story than was being posted.

She doesn't like blocking people. I don't either. Until yesterday, not counting anonymous users that vandalized pages, I'd only blocked one person ever (and it was a one week block on a completely different wikia years ago). I'm kind of annoyed at this user for that, too. As for Fearless Diva, if you pay attention, for the most part she gives people multiple warnings before she ever blocks them and when she does block them, it's usually a short block to start with. She cares for this wikia and the users on it. She wants us to get along and thrive in this community. Being staff or in charge anywhere is stressful and people like this troll are just making it harder, but they are the reason there is staff at all, to protect the wikia from people who would try and destroy it or destroy someone on it.

Real users were pulled into the discussion and communicating with the troll, presumably believing they were talking to multiple individuals rather than only one.

In each of these cases Wikia/Fandom Staff was contacted and working with this wikia's staff to try and deal with the situation. They are aware of what is going on here and have confirmed that the same IP was used for many of these accounts. Presumably they used a VPN to get around it after the IP was blocked. They are looking into additional accounts that have popped up today with the same pattern.

The user turned troll who was making these accounts made some accounts with names that themselves were spewing hate at Fearless Diva and posted messages, some here and some on another wikia where Fearless Diva is a member suggesting that people come together to cause her trouble until she killed herself. This user also posted disgusting images of open wounds and faces that are considered pretty bad and said things like they would rather look at the open wounds than Fearless Diva and that the faces were pictures of her.

This troll was more subtle, most of the time, but no less brutal. I don't like seeing someone attacking someone like that and I'm sure you don't either.