So, the community has been asking for it. Here you go. There are probably a million caveats to this, and this thread is open so that various people (mods and others) can post and be included in the discussion.
----------------------BEGIN STORY------------------------
Events leading to and consisting of Travis being banned, circa National Championship Game (NCG).
1. Fluff was perturbed by Hachiko's style and perceived nonsense spamming of various threads, and unilaterally banned Hachiko for saying "oh Fluff." This was done without discussion, which was uncommon.
2. Travis posted about this issue in the subscriber forum (Anything Thread) and Fluff did not respond, so nothing was done about the situation.
3. Travis started the Jihad thread and as his jihad he subsequently spammed Hachiko dynasty posts to be annoying (not intentionally malicious and Travis is not a hacker).
4. Travis’s Hachiko copy/paste posts somehow fucked up the board and crashed everything.
5. Because Fluff was the only person who had access to the admin tech stuff and wasn't available (watching the NC game) the site stayed down all night.
6. Fluff eventually found out that the server was getting DoS’d and that it was Travis’s anime copypasta “attack” at fault.
7. Fluff had to investigate some log files and eventually did live support chat for an hour or more to resolve the issue.
8. Fluff banned Travis and wrote an announcement about the event that included airing of some of Travis’s posts from the mod area.
9. Instead of venting in the wasteland Travis sent an open email to Fluff and all the mods and explained his side of the issue. Travis asked the mods to consider his side and decide what should be done about him, Fluff, and the whole issue. This e-mail reached almost 100 responses without Fluff ever contributing.
Resolution: Mods argued a bit but basically agreed to no punishment for anyone. Both did something stupid -- just drop it and move on. Fluff never responded other than to Travis’s personal apology email to say he'd be taking some time off.
[Approximately one month passes until our second cluster of incidents, detailed below.]
1. For the month after the initial blow up, the staff really avoided saying anything to Fluff at all during this time in hopes that he'd cool off and transfer part of the ownership so that we didn't have his "thumb on the button” anymore.
2. There was some arguing back and forth between Pavel/Travis in the public areas about the ownership issue.
3. A month went by after initial Travis ban, and Fluff started posting on Utopia but never addressed any of the concerns Travis had raised.
4. Travis bumped the thread in the mod area and asked if we could clarify ownership issue before money was spent on new software or Fluff put a lot more work in. Travis also asked if Fluff had cooled down enough to talk about it.
5. There was some more back and forth between mods about chippy attitudes in general lately, but this was largely separate from the ownership issue.
6. Fluff's response to Travis was that he didn’t want to discuss the issue, but that Travis was the cause of all the chippiness and declared that he owned 2/3rds of Utopia (the domain and the database) and he wasn’t willing to negotiate on that point.
7. There was some general agreement with Fluff by Pavel/TM that Travis had caused the chippiness with the BTT stuff and general asshole tone.
8. Travis disagreed about the schtick thing since everyone kind of has one, and then called Fluff a pussy for slinking around and trying to do more unilateral decisions without answering the questions about ownership.
9. Kella made fun of everyone for being sensitive and mocked the idea that Travis was some sort of forum villain and attempted to demonstrate the point that mods don't really matter by posting a screen shot of Utopia carrying on in merry fashion while we all bickered. (This was in response to a few assertions that mods and Travis in particular drove a majority of the discussions and lorded over forum discourse at large).
10. Southpaw weighed in with his thoughts about Pavel/Fluff's issues and asked lurking mods to weigh in as well.
11. OU told Travis that he was a shitty negotiator and Travis disagreed because there were no negotiations to be made as Fluff had all the power/cards. OU then called it more of a hostage negotiation and Travis agreed.
12. Fluff said he was tired of it all and that he was sending the money to Irishman (which he did), declaring he was "out."
13. Travis said that was a pretty asshole move to punish everyone because he was pissed at him.
14. All the mods asked Fluff to reconsider, offered to buy him out, sent multiple emails, etc and Fluff never responded.
15. Fluff posted the announcement that he was closing Utopia.
16. We posted the moving thread.
17. Mods started deleting threads with personal information in them (deaths in family, marriage talk, some reported post threads that served more as basic moderator discussions, etc). Irish decided to say fuck it and just deleted the whole reported post forum. This seems drastic but there was a general feeling that Fluff was becoming increasingly hostile and vindictive, if for no other reason than his occasional post was very combative and relations between him and many mods had gone south.
18. Fluff saw this and umodded everyone, noting that he had maintained backups of everything that was "deleted," and issued vague threats about sharing what the mods "really thought about users.”
Resolution: We moved to this place.
-----------------END STORY--------------------
----------------------BEGIN STORY------------------------
Events leading to and consisting of Travis being banned, circa National Championship Game (NCG).
1. Fluff was perturbed by Hachiko's style and perceived nonsense spamming of various threads, and unilaterally banned Hachiko for saying "oh Fluff." This was done without discussion, which was uncommon.
2. Travis posted about this issue in the subscriber forum (Anything Thread) and Fluff did not respond, so nothing was done about the situation.
3. Travis started the Jihad thread and as his jihad he subsequently spammed Hachiko dynasty posts to be annoying (not intentionally malicious and Travis is not a hacker).
4. Travis’s Hachiko copy/paste posts somehow fucked up the board and crashed everything.
5. Because Fluff was the only person who had access to the admin tech stuff and wasn't available (watching the NC game) the site stayed down all night.
6. Fluff eventually found out that the server was getting DoS’d and that it was Travis’s anime copypasta “attack” at fault.
7. Fluff had to investigate some log files and eventually did live support chat for an hour or more to resolve the issue.
8. Fluff banned Travis and wrote an announcement about the event that included airing of some of Travis’s posts from the mod area.
9. Instead of venting in the wasteland Travis sent an open email to Fluff and all the mods and explained his side of the issue. Travis asked the mods to consider his side and decide what should be done about him, Fluff, and the whole issue. This e-mail reached almost 100 responses without Fluff ever contributing.
Resolution: Mods argued a bit but basically agreed to no punishment for anyone. Both did something stupid -- just drop it and move on. Fluff never responded other than to Travis’s personal apology email to say he'd be taking some time off.
[Approximately one month passes until our second cluster of incidents, detailed below.]
1. For the month after the initial blow up, the staff really avoided saying anything to Fluff at all during this time in hopes that he'd cool off and transfer part of the ownership so that we didn't have his "thumb on the button” anymore.
2. There was some arguing back and forth between Pavel/Travis in the public areas about the ownership issue.
3. A month went by after initial Travis ban, and Fluff started posting on Utopia but never addressed any of the concerns Travis had raised.
4. Travis bumped the thread in the mod area and asked if we could clarify ownership issue before money was spent on new software or Fluff put a lot more work in. Travis also asked if Fluff had cooled down enough to talk about it.
5. There was some more back and forth between mods about chippy attitudes in general lately, but this was largely separate from the ownership issue.
6. Fluff's response to Travis was that he didn’t want to discuss the issue, but that Travis was the cause of all the chippiness and declared that he owned 2/3rds of Utopia (the domain and the database) and he wasn’t willing to negotiate on that point.
7. There was some general agreement with Fluff by Pavel/TM that Travis had caused the chippiness with the BTT stuff and general asshole tone.
8. Travis disagreed about the schtick thing since everyone kind of has one, and then called Fluff a pussy for slinking around and trying to do more unilateral decisions without answering the questions about ownership.
9. Kella made fun of everyone for being sensitive and mocked the idea that Travis was some sort of forum villain and attempted to demonstrate the point that mods don't really matter by posting a screen shot of Utopia carrying on in merry fashion while we all bickered. (This was in response to a few assertions that mods and Travis in particular drove a majority of the discussions and lorded over forum discourse at large).
10. Southpaw weighed in with his thoughts about Pavel/Fluff's issues and asked lurking mods to weigh in as well.
11. OU told Travis that he was a shitty negotiator and Travis disagreed because there were no negotiations to be made as Fluff had all the power/cards. OU then called it more of a hostage negotiation and Travis agreed.
12. Fluff said he was tired of it all and that he was sending the money to Irishman (which he did), declaring he was "out."
13. Travis said that was a pretty asshole move to punish everyone because he was pissed at him.
14. All the mods asked Fluff to reconsider, offered to buy him out, sent multiple emails, etc and Fluff never responded.
15. Fluff posted the announcement that he was closing Utopia.
16. We posted the moving thread.
17. Mods started deleting threads with personal information in them (deaths in family, marriage talk, some reported post threads that served more as basic moderator discussions, etc). Irish decided to say fuck it and just deleted the whole reported post forum. This seems drastic but there was a general feeling that Fluff was becoming increasingly hostile and vindictive, if for no other reason than his occasional post was very combative and relations between him and many mods had gone south.
18. Fluff saw this and umodded everyone, noting that he had maintained backups of everything that was "deleted," and issued vague threats about sharing what the mods "really thought about users.”
Resolution: We moved to this place.
-----------------END STORY--------------------