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A confession and apology

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I told you so. Even back then.

This is what happens when people who are good at what they're supposed to do but can't behave like an adult and shitpost as much as they want, using biased schemes to force users to behave as they want, while they themselves are no better despite a particular talent.

What a joke. This site needs a new reboot already.
i've come to the realization that people really aren't this stupid, and a lot of the demonizing going on is coming from transphobes taking advantage of the situation to attack Nameless. That's the only explanation i can think of for why people that don't care about this kind of site drama otherwise are suddenly coming out to voice their opinions on this grave and serious matter. some of these people arguing have been staff before, they already know there's no sensitive information in the staff logs that could get leaked that would ruin the site.

it's all just malicious bad faith arguing designed to get the site to turn against nameless. the only problem is that their grandiose statements of retribution and justice are about the mario site and it's hard to make that sound like something anybody should care about that passionately.
ask me if i give a f*ck...
This is life, and we all screw up now and then. It sucks, because it's only fair that we pay for it even if it was just a one time slip-up. This is a betrayal situation and from my experience, while an apology can get you forgiven, it is not enough for you to be trusted again.

With all that said, this situation just makes the whole big picture kind of funny when you think about it. See, why should the staff own information that is "harmful" to get out in the first place? Given how people get promoted left and right nowadays, you'd agree with me the staff is far from a group of selected, superior and mature users who can handle the users' darkest secrets, and as such are qualified to have access to them. In fact, no staff information is of the dark secrets type, or at least it shouldn't be. All there is is merely a behavior log and there really is no point in denying someone that sort of information, much less charging for access to it.
(For the record, I would hope sensitive things such as leod's victim names are not freely available in the staff forums and stay as little spread as possible.)

For years the staff has denied user information under that excuse. "Hey, what happened to user x?" "Sorry, that's staff business". And thinking about it now, it is just so pointless to do so. You may argue it's gossip to talk about what users did, but if you refuse to share it publicly, there's still gossip, only it's gossip exclusive to this random selection of privileged users that is the staff instead.

User discussion should only not be talked about publicly as it is happening, as it is important that the staff has a consistent response to ocurrences and the different opinions that get discussed in user threads may be different from the final decision. That is the only reason I can see, though.
It's easily the best thing I've done
So why the empty numb?
I think you're all blowing this out of proportion. So what if Nameless sold Ladida some staff nonsense, it's just a bunch of posts in some Mario fansite. Y'all are holding SMWC to a higher standard than it deserves tbh

She already confessed, apologized and promised to never do this again. Is that not enough? Cut her some goddamn slack.
HackPortsASM"Uploader"

This time it's just some random gossip thread. No big deal, right? Next time it's an IP address, a device fingerprint, or an activity log. People that have proven themselves to be untrustworthy should simply not have access to (personal) data.

That said, OP can continue contributing to the site in other ways. You don't need to be in a position of power to positively contribute to a community. Perhaps a position without access to confidential data, such as that of a section helper, would be better suited for OP.

Originally posted by Pat
(...) love how friendly everyone is until they're eager to demonize someone before they even know the full story. (...)

It is not unreasonable to assume that OP has posted the full story, this being their apology thread for said story. It'd be in poor taste to leave out important details when making a post like this, after all.
Originally posted by Ragey
It is not unreasonable to assume that OP has posted the full story, this being their apology thread for said story. It'd be in poor taste to leave out important details when making a post like this, after all.

you have to be deliberately ignoring what was said in the OP at this point, because any other possibility would be insulting you. nameless clearly said she wouldn't disclose exactly what was leaked and who it was leaked to, both of which were later revealed by idol stepping in and ladida making a confession of his own. with that context, you should very easily realize that there's more to the story - there was no reasonable assumption you could make until more information came out. none of that really matters though, because regardless of everything else you still ultimately posted shit that's uncalled for (and yes i will continue quoting this until it's addressed):

Originally posted by Ragey
I just can't imagine how entitled someone must be to do such a thing and then further bother the community they care so little about with this drawn-out, hollow, and egocentric post 1.5 years later. How embarrassing.

>"hmmm today i will shit on someone for owning up to their mistake, surely this will spark some positive changes around here"
>clueless
I'd like to mention that being paid for viewing a staff thread and then offering people the opportunity to do the same, undermines the current site rules. You're effectively, willingly or not, adding an 'exception' to the rules. Yes, it wasn't that grave in this situation, but the fact that it happened AT ALL should show that something is or was amiss. My problem isn't with the kind of information that was leaked (because it was revelead to be Ladida looking at her own User Discussion thread, even though other users also received similar offers), it was with the fact that this even happened in the first place.

I'd also like to mention that this website, unlike many other similar websites, has a huge off-topic portion to it that COULD include much much more sensitive information, because ultimately, people socialize here, people don't just hack SMW. In fact, the off-topic area of this site acts as almost another adjacent site entirely. In fact, some users have managed to become friends and have gotten to known each other, to the point of adding each other on Steam and even Facebook. There are users here who know each other's full names.

Now, to be fair, I don't think that information is readily available on any corner of the staff forums (even to the admins themselves, considering how long it took them to find this out), but still, the potential to disaster is there. I'm pretty sure someone could get a lot of info just by playing connect the dots long enough.

Originally posted by Adam
If you can't even manage your life enough to make sure you're making ends meet you're definitely not fit to manage a website.

You've been here long enough to know what happens when people get a hold of private information only the staff are privy to and how they can abuse it. Right now the last thing this place needs is another one of those incidents to take place. Sorry if I'm being harsh but you really fucked up.

It's good that you recognize your mistake but it's a pretty fucking big one.

Completely agree. For the past few months, I have severely dropped my online activity due to focus on my life and job and whatnot just to make sure I can keep the lights on. Unfortunately, that meant that many projects I had going on, including a (secret) SMW-hacking project and many other unrelated ones had to halt because of it. If you're on a situation where you were tempted to leak information due to struggles with your finances, you really need to manage your priorities in life.

Your well-being, your health, your existence is much more important than whether or not some ROM Hacking site has enough staff to manage its resources. Yes, this is a hobby website, but that only proves my point further. Your life is important, and you need to take care of your situation first and foremost. I know that that's tough, but that's just how life is.

Originally posted by Hobz
and a lot of the demonizing going on is coming from transphobes taking advantage of the situation to attack Nameless.

Don't you even dare say something like that. This entire situation would've been the same (or worse) had it been any other user in her position.

E: this quote was posted by Hobz, i typed someone else's name on accident

---

I'm pretty sure many other websites would have disclosed this a lot better than this one has with recent events (not just this one), but that's just how the current status quo is.
Originally posted by Koopster
(For the record, I would hope sensitive things such as leod's victim names are not freely available in the staff forums and stay as little spread as possible.)

there are no victim names available in the staff forums - beyond that, there is very little information about the leod situation within the staff forums out of respect of the victims.

the admins are aware of some of the victims who came forward to the admin team and were okay with other admins knowing. past that, there were people who directly contacted me who no one else (not even other admins) know the identities of.

this is a bit past the point and i don't think it warrants much further discussion, but there also hasn't been much discussion on the situation before so i wanted to take this opportunity to make it clear.


for this situation: a resolution on nameless's future with us will soon be reached. i feel in the past we've made some tone-deaf decisions that kinda contrasted the userbase, hence this kinda unorthodox thread. thanks everyone for your input thus far & making your voices heard.

edit: fixed a misspelling.
This is where I'm very tempted to say something like "I forgive you, Nameless" but it doesn't seem like there's really anything to forgive in the first place. As in, I really don't understand why people are so upset.

Okay, here's a serious question: There's obviously more to the story than just what is said in the OP, but am I the only one here who doesn't know what "the rest of the story" is? I'm genuinely at a loss for why the majority of the posts here are "Nameless is a terrible person and did something unforgivable", considering the fact that the given description of the act in question solely amounts to leaking information from a staff-only thread. This hurt absolutely nobody. This was also over a year ago. Additionally, while I admit I can't speak for every non-staff member on the site, I didn't know about this until just now. So where is all this outrage coming from?

Was what Nameless did """wrong"""? Sure, I guess, in a sort of "well hey that breaks a minor rule (or at least, it should be considered a minor one, assuming your priorities are in order), you deserve a slap on the wrist for doing that" sort of way, but it doesn't make her a horrible person. Far from it. In fact, the literal worst-case scenario of what she could have leaked still really isn't a big deal, because at the end of the day this is a mario hacking website that no one uses as anymore than a hobby in their free time. Grow the fuck up guys.


...


Nameless, you've done a lot for this site in the past few years. I specifically remember that there once was a time, years and years ago, when you pretty much exclusively only ever made sarcastic / joke posts that I know annoyed some people (I personally always found it funny but maybe I just have a fucked up sense of humor), but throughout the entire duration of your time as a staff member I've only ever known you to be incredibly helpful, intelligent, kind, and a joy to talk to, considering my experience on the Discord. And that's not to mention all the great music ports as well. Anyone who's ever been in any sort of financial trouble can attest to how horrifying and stressful that can become, so I really don't blame you at all for whatever led you to do what you did. That said, the fact that you decided to go and apologize for it anyway is something that I think is incredibly respectable, and shows some serious devotion to this site and keeping staff actions transparent. I can only speak for myself when I say that this certainly doesn't hurt my image of you in the slightest.


Honestly, the fact that all of this came out over a year later and no one noticed or cared up until this point alone kind of invalidates all of the "let's riot" responses to this.
Twitter
The handomest people in the world are ones who follow my Twitch
Originally posted by Hobz
i've come to the realization that people really aren't this stupid, and a lot of the demonizing going on is coming from transphobes taking advantage of the situation to attack Nameless.

i dont think a single post was driven by transphobia not gonna lie, pretty sure very few people even know/care about nameless being trans


the original post is literally "i sold site information about a specific user" and nothing else, and that sounds a lot worse than it actually is until you append "...to that specific user" to it; at that point it just becomes hilarious. everyone outraged by it knowing the story are only mad for the sake of being mad which is a sign that they probably don't have a lot going on otherwise


here's my recommendation:
a warning system akin to the classic invisionfree one; shows a gauge that shows a users warning level and is only visible to them and staff; a reason and associated post (if eligible) is linked. if the user is banned for it, the ban reason shows there as well.
now people don't have to resort to buying their own data when their historical record on the site should already be visible to them.

again: posting as a shitbaby that rarely posts and rarely cares so i'll probably forget i posted here as i do



Originally posted by Sonikku
here's my recommendation:
a warning system akin to the classic invisionfree one; shows a gauge that shows a users warning level and is only visible to them and staff; a reason and associated post (if eligible) is linked. if the user is banned for it, the ban reason shows there as well.
now people don't have to resort to buying their own data when their historical record on the site should already be visible to them.


Honestly an SA-style rap sheet, but only the warned/banned user and staff can see it, seems like a really good idea to me. One of those things that seems really obvious in hindsight but you just didn't think of.
So why can't users see their own """discussion""" thread exactly? This has always bothered me tbh, for someone like me, an often belligerent tourette's syndrome affectie something like this would help WAAAY more than occasional warnings, esp since it would be possible to actually look back over it holistically.

The only real concern I can fathom, and of course correct me if I'm mistaken, is that the staff on a super mario hacking website aren't quite as clean and professional as they (esp currently) try to appear on the surface. Given this site's background, a more than healthy portion of thinly veiled favoritism and other biases would be an unsurprising sight to behold, even if exclusively concentrated in older threads.

Originally posted by Teyla
Honestly an SA-style rap sheet, but only the warned/banned user and staff can see it, seems like a really good idea to me. One of those things that seems really obvious in hindsight but you just didn't think of.

Not a bad idea either imo. Definitely bypasses my proposed PR issue of old threads not exactly reflecting the site's current form of staff conduct, but would obviously pose to be quite a challenge to implement if you intended any carry over for previous offenses.
shirt status: not on
My view was posted before sold site details was revealed as site details about the person requesting them.

In which case... I still stand by some of the things I said.

Yes, it's a less-than-ethical thing to do. Yes, I still think they should be held accountable for their actions. But how this is handled is entirely up to the staff. I can see a good ol' slap on the wrist happening. Maybe a temp demotion is understandable. But certainly not the whole 9 yards.

-----------

STELLA!
Originally posted by Nameless
Hey.

After a lot of reflection, I feel it's time to publicly admit that I've been a less than exemplary staff member for the site and community. Because of a lapse of judgment, I performed an act that is nothing but detrimental to the site's security as a whole and brought down my trust within the community.

On September 4th, 2018, I was paid to leak a specific thread from the staff forums. The incident occurred while I was only a section manager/music moderator, and has never happened before or since. I won't disclose who asked for this, though they are free to reveal themselves. Though I can't say the leak was anything dangerous or top-secret, I do understand that the issue is the implication that a staff member, much less an admin, can be potentially bought off. All I can do to (try to) explain my actions is to discuss the context on why I was desperate enough financially to make the decision to comply, but I feel that all that would boil down to is me making excuses.

Currently, the admins are deliberating what exactly to do and how it should be handled, but in the meantime I feel it's best I should come forward to the community. I'm honestly deserving of whatever comes my way, both in whatever the admins deem suitable as punishment and whatever the community has to say about me. All I can say is that an incident like this involving me has never happened before then, and has never happened since - as an admin, there is a lot more dangerous stuff I could potentially leak, but the thought of doing it has never crossed my mind, nor will it ever again.

It hurts to admit that I did something bad, and it's certainly not relieving when I still have to face said consequences. But, for what it's worth, I'm sorry. I compromised security on the site, and likely lost a lot of face to my fellow staff and to the community. Whatever happens will happen, and I will accept the consequences that come with it. My actions most certainly do not reflect on the other admin team members - I don't know what they would do if put in the situation, but judging by the fact they've told me how wrong I was for saying yes in a myriad of different ways, I'm certain they would have held a bit stronger than I did. I'm sure our regular staff members would likely feel the same way.

If you're down here now, though, thanks for reading this wall of text. I admit I've caused my share of problems within the community as a user, especially in my younger days, and the fact I'm continuing to make some form of headache for the staff to deal with is all I need to feel the guilt and weight of my actions. I like to think that I've made up for my past actions by striving to be a better person, and if Mosts results have anything to say about it people would seem to agree. However, the fact I'm causing trouble in a much different way, even if it was an isolated incident, shows I've still got a ways to go, and I'd like to see it as another chance to admit my wrongs and try to make up for them. And please, if you're ever staff anywhere, don't leak stuff, seriously.

Thanks again for reading. Carry on with your day, now.


This puzzles me so much and I am genuinely indifferent because of it. I have a few concerns here that have been bugging me since this situation was announced. It's almost 6 AM and I'm tired so I barely spell-checked or read many of the other posts. Here goes:

First off, why exactly was this brought into relevance? Or well, what was the goal. This entire post invites a hell of a lot of speculation since it's so vague and doesn't provide much info that can actually lead users to trust you as an admin. I would imagine that staff would know by now after Impetus that posts like this only drives users/other staff to form their own random, one-sided and problematic versions of what happened. If you aren't going to give information that can make users feel like they are at ease and don't have to worry about potentially having their own personal information leaked all over this site, then it is pointless to admit this publicly.

Next, if this was in 2018, then this is before you became an admin. Meaning anyone in the staff team to this day could be leaking personal information (for free) just the same and are being let loose due to not coming forward like you did. I have argued on this once before with the idea that groups of staff shouldn't have access to other parts of sub-staff groups that they aren't involved in. For example, Forum Mods not having access to Music Mod places/Graphics Mods not being involved with Discord Mod stuff. For the Discord mod portion, it was refuted before due to us (staff) "never knowing if any emergencies will happen where outsider staff members are needed" which is already foolish to me. By that logic, it's implying that there is a chance that an entire sub-group of Discord mods and admins are inactive to the point where it's actually necessary to have every single staff member be on top of specific users. At that point it falls on the fault of the leadership if a serious situation like that ever happens (which it never has with the current setup). My point in bringing this up is to make it very known that no one's information is actually 100% safe on this website. I don't want to cause some sort of loose paranoia with saying this but just keep in mind that Nameless isn't the only person on staff who has leaked things. Being paid for it is a completely different low but that's a entirely different issue.

What bugs me more is that this is turning into users vs Nameless for something that happened over a year ago. I can 100% understand why people feel on edge since this is all so sudden, but just keep in mind that your information realistically isn't safe with any staff member like I said. You all have to remember that this is a fan-base community led by people who don't have much professional experience with this sort of thing, if any at all.

Now back to you, Hazel, I guess my biggest questions here are why this was brought to life days ago but you haven't visibly said anything since. I don't want to make it look like I'm belittling you as a current administrator, but your first priority should be comforting people that are now worried because of what you've said and done. Regardless if it was a year, a day, a week or a century ago, your absolute #1 stance in this should be giving clarity and proving that you are ready to face your mistakes head on and show that you can be trusted as an administrator instead of just giving the "people say I'm better so I'm better" type of response for something they didn't know about. With the way this is going now, it seems more like you're hiding from these responses, whether constructive or unnecessary responses. With my knowledge as ex-staff, I can understand not wanting to release classified information, but honestly how classified is it to give depth to an already tense situation? Like I mentioned before, the vagueness of your post will only invite more speculation and discourse among most users that read it.

To conclude (for anyone reading this), I personally believe that nothing will actually be done about this situation past this announcement post. People getting unnecessarily temp banned for going off topic with it should have been an obvious outcome for the people banning them as there isn't much to go off of with what Nameless is saying. While it is reasonable for Nameless to face something like demotion from admin because of this situation, it doesn't seem like it will make much of a difference in the way this place is set up. There's still going to be a lot wrong in this community. One less person on the admin/staff team isn't going to change that. The rest of this falls mainly on the entire admin team who, in my opinion, should take what this situation has given and work to fix their policies and information visibility so this has very little chances of ever happening again.
Originally posted by Sonikku
here's my recommendation:
a warning system akin to the classic invisionfree one; shows a gauge that shows a users warning level and is only visible to them and staff; a reason and associated post (if eligible) is linked. if the user is banned for it, the ban reason shows there as well.
now people don't have to resort to buying their own data when their historical record on the site should already be visible to them.

again: posting as a shitbaby that rarely posts and rarely cares so i'll probably forget i posted here as i do

This kind of system already exists in pretty much the exact way you've described, though I'm not positive if regular users can see their own warning history. I assume they can, otherwise it's a little pointless. The only reason someone would want to see their UD thread would be to see if staff were saying bad things about a user, which is something that we moved away from as a staff team because we recognize that the way people spoke about trouble users back in 2012 and earlier is not really conducive to a good site environment.

User Discussion threads are nowhere near as exciting as one might hope. They exist for procedural purposes, and that's about it.

Originally posted by Ryaa
First off, why exactly was this brought into relevance? Or well, what was the goal. This entire post invites a hell of a lot of speculation since it's so vague and doesn't provide much info that can actually lead users to trust you as an admin. I would imagine that staff would know by now after Impetus that posts like this only drives users/other staff to form their own random, one-sided and problematic versions of what happened. If you aren't going to give information that can make users feel like they are at ease and don't have to worry about potentially having their own personal information leaked all over this site, then it is pointless to admit this publicly.

It was brought up because Ladida himself contacted idol a couple of days ago and mentioned that this had happened. idol presented it to the rest of the admins without any names attached, and nameless outed herself. This thread was posted because we weren't going to try and hide this from everyone or sweep it under the rug.

Edit: Removed a couple lines that may have resulted in a misunderstanding.
Just popping in to explain some things that went unanswered:

Quote
why did you do it?


I opted to keep this out because I figured it'd just be me making excuses, but for those who wanted to know, I'll just spoiler it:
financially, it was the pits for me that year. I ended up bleeding money to a lot of costs that weren't always spur of the moment, but things (like an abrupt moving) that were somewhat beyond my control. But nowadays I'm a fair bit better than I was then. I don't live comfortably, but I live fine enough.


Again, I'm only stating it to satisfy the curious. I still recognize that there's no true justification for such an act of bad faith.

Quote
why exactly was this brought into relevance?


FPzero already answered this in the post before mine, but yes, it was mentioned to idol that it happened, and she polled for admin input. I thought it would be much more efficient to just fess up and explain what happened, so I asked idol if that was fine and I did it there. Between this and staying silent, I figured this would just bring forth the inevitable now, so the others don't have to worry about it in the future - hence why I drafted up an apology to begin with. I didn't mean to cause a headache for nearly everyone involved, and I feel absolutely atrocious for doing so.

Originally posted by Ryaa
anyone in the staff team to this day could be leaking personal information (for free) just the same and are being let loose due to not coming forward like you did.


If nothing else, this should serve as a wake-up call and precedent to anyone that's out here doing so (at least, I wish it could). You're absolutely correct that any staff could do this, especially for free, for no other reward than the jollies of them and whomever they leak it to. The only way to prevent leakage at the moment is good faith and trust in the staff that they'll do the right thing. Proper deterrence and security measures must be made and enforced to prevent such a thing from happening, and I can only hope this amount of public embarrassment that I'm putting myself through serves as even only a part of the example. If a leaker can't follow this, and they continue to send away info, then they will slip up eventually, or hopefully confess themselves (albeit maybe not in this manner, in hindsight I feel like it was a little too much, but I wouldn't do it any differently).

Whatever happens to me will happen to me, but I still stand that I will accept it no matter the outcome - and if it means I must leave, which a fair number of people seem to want, then them's the breaks. That said, all I can promise in the future (besides it never happening again) is that short of me leaving the team, I will continue to put forth my best effort for the site, to push it forward towards positive change. Regardless of what you think of me, so long as I'm in a position of power, I can be part of making SMWC the best experience it can be for everyone involved, even the ones who lost their faith in me. I can ask for a second chance, but whether or not I deserve it is up to everyone as a whole.

Again, I'm sorry for causing a headache for everyone involved with this incident, especially the staff team as a whole whose current standing with the community was smashed repeatedly by a dumb decision I made 16 months ago in the heat of the moment. Whether it be the userbase who distrusts me or the staff whose affected by this, I apologize to everyone who I affected, even in the tiniest ways. I probably don't deserve forgiveness, but I can only hope I get even a little bit of it. Thank you for the kind words, and even for the mean words, everything is helpful.
I forgive you, Nameless.
HackPortsASM"Uploader"

I'll just say it. I forgive you- if you do as you should and resign from the staff team. It's a simple way to make yourself seem believable.

Nobody should get away with it though it'd be a bit silly to completely lock you out of the community. You still got banging music to produce and review, being helpful to the community that way while having no access to this sensitive data should be a fair trade off.

If you (or your colleagues) don't, well, way to manipulate us into sweeping it under the rug then.
Don't worry nameless I still love you

On a serious note, obviously this whole situation sucks and I understand why one would be upset at nameless for this, but I guess I'm just more lenient with things like this. I forgive ya nameless.
I'm not a frequent user here, but I want to share my thoughts on this situation.

Any misconduct and conflict-of-interest that involves a breach in private data confidentiality is an unacceptably reckless abuse of power. Even though this particular incident had minor consequences, the potential for major consequences need to be focused on. As such, I think that the punishment should be based off the potential harm rather than the actual harm. If an engineer knowingly builds a bridge with faulty materials but no one is hurt, that engineer will be punished as if the bridge collapsed and causes injury. The same concept should be applied here.

I believe that your administrative powers should be stripped indefinitely. Your role is to make decisions in the best interests of the SMW community. Your selfishness and recklessness to sell personal info online violates this trust, and violates the sole reason for being an admin in the first place. It doesn't help that the tone of your apology attempts to downplay the magnitude of this; i.e., "even though no one was harmed."

Thank you for reading.
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