I've taken a step back from all of this in the last day, and in retrospect, I think that I'm really to blame for starting all of this. The rest of this post is mainly just my intepretation of some of the events that took place.
In the original thread, people had been reporting that servers were being rampantly crashed, at first by Sonny and then quickly server admins and other players started seeing that the servers were being crashed by many players, not just Sonny.
I made
a post in response to having seen the command pop up in a couple public IRC channels. I hold no authority in this community beyond sharing administrative responsabilities on the #eR33t-Gaming servers. Our server is really the least of the entire community's concern in all of this. I had already notified every server admin I could think of with a workaround to the problem and this couldn't have been done without the help of people like Viciouz, sk89q and krewzer who had been logging, testing and determining the root cause of the problem on their and other servers. I had stepped in and threatened bans because I knew that I wasn't going to be patching the problem on my servers and because I knew that jitspoe wasn't going to have the problem fixed for my server anytime soon.
KnacK then quoted my post and elaborated on it
in his. This is where I think KnacK used the wrong words, came across the wrong way, or maybe even crossed the line. KnacK is a member of the Global Moderators team on these forums, and also happens to be a committee member. I don't think that him or the other Global Moderators can be making statements like this on these forums since it does not pertain to the administration or maintenance of these forums. As a committee member, he does not represent the committee as a whole. I think everyone failed to realize that this post was nothing more than his own personal oppinion. He is one member of a ten member team of community members that were "elected" to vote on various aspects when it comes to unique situations that may or may not result in a ban. It might be fair to warn that there may be action taken against anyone that was reported crashing a server, which may have effect for people on all servers, but not that there were no excuses. Of course there are excuses, and there have to be exceptions. If not, then the committee wouldn't even exist.
This entire argument, including the numerous locked threads, flaming, forum bans and everything else was simply because it was stated by a Global Moderator and Committee Member that there would be action taken against players reported using this exploit. Whether or not these actions would result in a ban or not should be decided by the committee as a whole, and jitspoe will make the official post in the Cheater Reports and Bans forum.
KnacK, y00tz and jitspoe deleting posts, locking threads and banning people from the forums as part of diffusing the situation is part of their responsabilities. People got way too caught up in defending other's actions, and voicing their concerns with the action that the committee should take. Some of the people who replied in these threads are members of the committee, but everyone has to remember that one, or a couple members do not speak on behalf of the entire committee and its actions. These members may individually speak with players and server admins through PMs on the forums or IRC, and possibly on Ventrilo/TS2 with these people as part of an investigation that the committee is conducting, but their posts on the forums or what they say on IRC is never to be taken as something said on behalf of the entire committee.
Please leave all Global Bans for all activities except detected cheater related issues up to the committee since that is their responsability. Please leave all local bans up to the server admins so that they can manage their own server as they see fit. Please do not think that retroactively treating this issue with parity in all bans is the best solution. If I have to see someone like sk89q or Y2J walk away from this community for something that has been blown way out of proportion then I'll be pretty disapppointed.