Should c/Conspiracies jointly petition admin for new moderation as opposed to it remaining an unmoderated Wild West?
Please answer YES or NO in separate main comments below, with any reasoning as desired.
This poll methodology is recognized to be unscientific but is better than nothing. Thank you for your responses.
Add: There is now a megathread. I would still appreciate contributors taking the time to add a YES or NO here to gauge interest on this specific question (thank you early adopters).
u/Paleo isn't admitting any prejudice. As usual, he writes for those with reading comprehension skills. "This 'vote'" page was about a desire for a mod, not about the identity of the mod. There were maybe five candidates who proposed they could be mod, on several different pages, and it's clear the admins and Paleo based their decision on those several pages, where the vocal among the community expressed their views (and those who opted not to express their views had fair warning). The decision appears to have been made after a week or two of my and others' raising the point, but they didn't implement it for months, presumably to gauge people's reaction to u/Thisisnotanexit indicating direction.
Paleo is not a Swamp Ranger to my knowledge; he was well established here long before the Rangers were publicly announced (by Scott Lively, late 2020). Now I've said repeatedly that, when Neo1 (who doesn't want my pings) expressed a desire for a return to moderated activity, I affirmed him and pointed out here and on Meta that it seemed incongruous to have no active mod. I didn't press any agenda, I proposed a couple community questions like this one, as did others. There was sufficient consensus that moderation was preferable but insufficient consensus on who or how many it should be; so admin stepped in by having TINAE state a direction and waited to see that direction validated by the community. You could've stepped in anytime, maybe you did, and could've done anything I did, in your own idiom; it happened the way it did because of group dynamics.
(This being Conspiracies, I don't mind at all being told I conspired with others as if secretly to get things to happen. But it's not like anyone at any point had any better idea that the community was behind. They picked a good mod, she'd certainly be willing to yield some or all decisions to someone who could be a better mod, if one arose from the field.)
Paleo, to my knowledge, is a mod of 20+ communities that is trusted by admin to assist with and/or process sitewide concerns. His account has never identified as an admin account. It's been publicly stated that there are five part owners and that it's not important who; if you've been following the admin accounts, they indicate clearly their relative roles on behalf of those owners, and their closeness with ownership. TINAE stated publicly, 2 months ago, that admin had chosen her tentatively as mod, and Paleo has every right to be a channel for admin comms, including making his usual wise ban recommendations.
Now, please feel free to lay into me for speaking up on behalf of other anons that I know only by reputation. I am happy to explain things I know about, even in so much detail as to repel people. I will continue to believe that transparency is the best antidote to charges of conspiracy.
Prove it.
Prove exactly how many people it took to qualify sufficient consensus. Looks like it was just your cult.
That means she was pre selected without community approval. Prove where her direction was validated by the community. From the looks of it both those who don't like her and those who do had issue with the way she modded. She even admitted screwing up, and being too harsh. She backtracked on certain rules, and kept altering them. Her original direction sucked and she had to change it cuz everyone threw a fit. She failed. She was a hard ass long enough to ban JG5, RealWildRanter and others that Paleo told her to. Immediately after she changed course and those who were banned wouldn't have been with the direction she went. She was the plant that you and Paleo can control. She's only a figurehead and you and Paleo are running the show behind the scenes.
Tell us your real name if you want to be transparent.
The proof is that admin acted on this result as being the consensus of those willing to speak. You certainly didn't vote on this question, even though you still could (there's no deadine for voting). You certainly didn't propose or build any other consensus.
That one is in response to my statement of presumption. I could just say I am a sufficient witness for the statement that I presumed something, regardless of whether my presumption is true. However, what you probably intend is to know how u/Thisisnotanexit was selected. I can only appeal to her public statements and what answers she may be willing to give to direct questions. Here are the details of how it happened:
2025-10-31 Neo1 asks the community for roundtable subjects, noting the lack of Axolotl as mod, and I propose a subject and note the lack of mods for the past 8 months.
2025-11-02 Prompted by Neo's encouragement, I naturally ask Meta for advice, and point out that he and I could volunteer as caretaker mod names until a mod is more straightforwardly elected. TINAE, Graph, and JG5 [Add: and Malta] are also proposed as candidates.
2025-11-03 TINAE makes her own community question on the subject. I took the trouble to verify that the comment I link there from 2025-11-04 is her first mention of contacting admin.
2025-11-05 TINAE compiles a megathread of open threads and emphasizes her desire to stand as mod. On 2025-11-06 she indicates therein she received a generic admin response about investigating what to do with the forum. She continues to update about admin responses about generic questions.
2025-11-08 JG5 posts one of many Nazi threads. On 2025-11-09 TINAE states for the first time that admin has tentatively approved her as mod.
So I was right to remember 1-2 weeks, it was actually 10 days of thorough discussion.
Nope. The links show only a small subset of the community's discussion. How could we have gotten community approval to do anything if not by a consensus-seeking post (e.g. a vote)?
She indicated how she would interpret rules, remove death threats, ban the persistent ephebophile, shut down disrespect and attacks, etc. There were individual pushbacks, of course, but there was never any post soliciting community consensus that she should not be mod as admin hinted. When a small group of active people have a consistent consensus and the larger group declines to form consensus, their silence and inaction is taken in all societal paradigms as limited consent. If they cared they would have broken their silence and formed a different group opinion. As I pointed out separately, as soon as she laid down a strict interpretation of "disrespect" a consensus of about 17 contributors arose rapidly, against which I was in the minority; but I reported that too. Those 17 were willing to oppose her rapidly en masse on a matter of interpretation, but not willing to oppose her standing as mod at any time. That's how consensus is objectively gauged.
That's actually the leadership mark of successful adjustment to community requests. Imagine if she had stuck to her original direction in spite of community requests! How much more you would have complained!
I recall the regulars here telling her to ban those, not Paleo, but I'm not going to get the links for you.
No, her change was about not treating every disrespectful usage as a violation of the respect rule, and that change wouldn't have helped save any of the banned accounts, which the logs show were all banned for "constant disruption" (trolling). If you'd like the specific objective differences between the two those are clear in the logs.
This is Conspiracies so it wouldn't matter to you that I deny it (which I do). I rely instead on what I've already said being sufficient. I've said I met her here 5 years ago and we have similarity of thought in Christianity, with some different focuses. I suspect Paleo is a Christian but I don't recall him saying so. Now, since we proclaim Jesus will take over the world you can put that on a takeover conspiracy, but then you'd have to say Jesus was the bad guy, which BTW has never succeeded. If Jesus shouldn't take over the world, he's waiting to hear your reason; perhaps you could take it over better than he could and he patiently waits for you to try (so that you can give up on yourself and trust him to do it better than you). I said I'd be happy to answer specific questions about private messaging, which is very slight. But there's nothing behind the scenes, because everything Jesus said was to be made public, and we add nothing to it.
(Just for gedankenexperiment, how could one respond to a charge like this conclusively? If one found private messages or real-life connection, that would be a smoking gun; but in the absence of any, there is no end to the search and the accusation. Denial wouldn't help, sarcastic affirmation wouldn't help; I could produce all DMs and that wouldn't necessarily be trusted; a theory could always be proposed that I control everything secretly because such is unfalsifiable. It seems that the only way to be conclusive is to appeal to the accuser for terms of peace, namely what would constitute successful proof. If a person is continuously accusatory, one could ignore him; if a person is defamatory, one could, I suppose, fight back, but I limit that option to the most extreme cases of defamation, and have used it once here in 5 years. So my primary path is to seek to sincerely answer your questions until they reach a point of either satisfying you or embarrassing you.)
That's a beautiful illogic from the person who can't even tell us his prior account (fake) names. I've said from the start that I volunteer for Scott Lively and am accountable to the SwampRangers.org entity, which is more than most anons. If you need a first name and last name, put Jesus Christ, because I identify as his body and it's all on his tab. There may soon be a time I deanonymize here, as I've said, but it's not likely to be on a dare from a handshake.
Are you Scott Lively?
No, but he and I are the body of Jesus Christ, like any Christians are. That should be name enough for your purposes.
Is there something you'd like to discuss with me directly?
What date were you approached with anything to do with moderating c/Conspiracies, who said it, and what was said?
Post pics of your DMs so we can see what was said and when. Paleos been talking to you about how to mod the forum behind the scenes. Even messaged me about getting you to ban me on his behalf.
As far as u/Nep1 goes, post links to where you guys claim he wanted a site moderator and make a mega thread of all the posts on here and other forums in regards to it so we can get a timeline going on.
I believe your cult conspired to gain control of the c/Conspiracies forum because it's a more active forum. Your co-cultist u/Slechta5614 mentioned something about getting all the main forums on the site to work together towards a goal. Sounds like you guys are trying to establish your cult's dominance and take over the bigger forums of the site.
If you decline to be transparent with the timeline of when and how you were selected to be mod here, it'll be safe for everyone to assume you and your cult did conspire to take over the forum. SwampRangers little vote to get community input was an obvious attempt to swarm and target the forum to create a false image of community consensus.
I'm banned in that forum, or didn't you know? How convenient, and no you don't have it correct: https://communities.win/c/TrueConspiracies/p/1ASFm4cTGD/swamp-searches-for-unmodded-comm/c
https://communities.win/c/Conspiracies/p/1ARws4aYDe/psa-regarding-moderation/c/4eZDW0vwGNW
I threw my hat in the ring when u/Neo1 started mocking the forum once again and then decided to broadcast the need for mods, u/SwampRangers took that to mean real interest and started a post in Meta.
You're welcome to try to find the first Neo post, I'm not going there again.
I asked admin to not be rash in adding a mod. They came back and asked if I'd be willing and I said yeah, it would be an honor actually, it's my favorite place on the internet. I love this place and I love my frens.