I got home from work today and noticed something unusual unfolding on the Discord server, and it was indirectly my fault, and so I did what I could to take care of and keep it from getting worse...

It turned out to be because of a staff member, who I had promoted the day prior, was evidently known for threatening to send people a certain type of illegal material as some sort of means to coerce others into doing things for him. I didn't know about this activity at all, but apparently some users did, but nobody told me anything.

It took me a moment to work out what was going on, because it was also being mixed in with claims the same staff member had also uploaded/shared copyrighted material that falls under DMCA.

Once I figured out what the main accusation was, I banned him immediately.

I shouldn't have promoted him to Discord staff without looking more into him, however he had been a donor for a while, and it was never once brought to my attention any of the things which came out, if they had, I certainly wouldn't have promoted him, let alone let him stay in the server.

After he was banned, I thought maybe the issue was solved, but it turned out that the Discord server itself had been reported for this illegal material, even though said material was never shared on the server in the first place. Even though it had nothing to do with staff beyond apparent threats made by this one new staff member, it was reported as though it was right in the Discord.

When it comes to this illegal material, Discord will actually ban every single person in the server, and there were nearly 14,000 people at risk of having their accounts suspended.

So, I deleted the server.

I didn't want this idiot, short lived staff member that I should have never promoted, be the cause of so many people losing their accounts due to others claiming we had something on the server we did not. Prior to that, I had been considering deleting the server due to the endless drama and other problems going on, and I made it clear prior to that I was sick of being a part of it, but knowing that so many people could lose their accounts, it just had to end before it all got worse.

So going forward, a few long term mods from the Discord will continue to be on the service and also the website helping out. The service will not be shutting down, and will continue going. In the future you should come here for updates and so forth, but they will also be announced on Patreon, Boosty, etc.

Speaking of donations, I have removed the PayPal (the most common donation means) from the page and we will no longer be doing any fundraisers or anything else. We've got enough pre-paid with hosting that it will last a little while, but if people want to contribute going forward, they can, but we won't be actively encouraging or promoting it anymore.

Long term we'll start releasing code and more documentation so that nothing is lost, there are some things we need to fix up and refactor in order to make them open source and useful for people, but we'll get to that.

I'm really sorry it came to this and let's hope we can continue to make some cool stuff together without things getting out of hand, and certainly going forward any sort of moderation/staff process on the service itself will be far more detailed to find any issues like what happened today.

- Tony