Board Thread:Community Voting/@comment-24718406-20160929032831/@comment-3978541-20160929183812

B for reasons upon reasons upon more reasons. In addition to many of the points above about private conversations and trust that matters will stay private, I offer the below reasons.

First of all, few and probably literally none of you have been around here as long as I, and none have served as admin as long as I have. As a result, you may not remember that we used to have the admin chat on the site circa 4-5 years ago. We didn't need an admin chat until the wiki started to grow and it caught the attention of pure trolls like Cheatcodes7334 and others and chat was not yet a feature. We created a semi-hidden talk page to discuss how to deal with such things. Terrible idea. It ended up being sabotaged by people who would edit our responses, delete them, or say things in our names and was generally far too messy. We then moved it off to an abandoned wiki but it was found and again sabotaged. We were forced to then move it to a secondary fake wikia with a totally unrelated name that Drew created. That one was, of course, discovered and consequently sabotaged.

After that, we were forced to move it offsite. Since then, there have been attempt after attempt to sabotage the sites we have used and we probably have created upwards of 10 sites trying to stay ahead of the no-life saboteurs. In order to stay ahead of them, we, of course, couldn't (and still can't, some of the same ones are still to this day trying to break it down) allow the forums to be public or they would (and will) see our tactics and movements and have a chance to counter them.

Secondly, we moved it off site to keep this place as clean as possible. Many of the situations we deal with are with users who violate policies. As a result, the discussions of things done are rather detailed and sometimes explicit. Since this site is intended for the community of the message boards, we cannot have that public.

Thirdly, it reduces the enraged comments and flame wars that crop up when discussing bans. We experienced issues with users either defending purely spiteful users or simply feeding the blaze and ending up banned themselves for things said. Case in point? The fiasco that was the return of Meiko a year or two ago.

We do not have it offsite as some sort of way of hiding evil doings, or as a way of keeping the people uninformed or to conspire against anyone. This is a website, it's not a political entity who needs constant transparency to be kept in line. The admin team is not some dictating force but rather a group of dedicated individuals doing our best to act as shepherds, peacekeepers, cleanup crew, janitors, and protect the safety and already tainted reputation of this wiki and we need a private place to discuss matters pertaining to our jobs without fear of being compromised.

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