Important Decisions

[The Carrot]

Important Decisions

Dear community,

During the course of this server's life, we have been making essential and heavy decisions. Decisions that may have affected personal relationships,
decisions we did not want to make and decisions to break off members with history within the community.
These decisions were necessary because, once lines are crossed, we cannot stand by and watch as if nothing happened.
Today, unfortunately, is no different. Over the past couple of months, we have witnessed events that ended up with us making a decision that we did not think we would ever have to make. They are: the demotion of AMNOTBANANAAMA and the banning of two members: KibikiKibble and Grotesquity.

The purpose of this post is to be as transparent and straightforward with the community as possible.
Rules and agreements have been broken and no one, not even staff, will be exempt from the consequences.
Certain events have been a chain reaction. We will begin with the event that started the discussion. Click on screenshots to open them in a new window, this was done so they don't take up as much space in the post.


Brenda's letter leak, 10th of August
Around August 2020, some weeks after Brenda got promoted to Senior Admin, Brenda sent Migas a letter with some concerns and points of improvement. This was a private letter which she shared with Banana to give him the opportunity to express his opinion, before sending it to Migas.

Shortly after that time, it was known to us that Banana revealed some of the contents of this letter to other people of the community, distorting the matter of those points of improvements, which were only suggestions and nothing more at that point.

This caused unnecessary conflicts which are settled now. However, with this new information, we believe this was one of the factors that caused Banana to behave differently, alongside those who persuaded him. This belief relies on the fact that Kibiki's name was involved within the letter. This probably sparkled a detour from her and her group of friends from the server. She was soon after demoted because of inactivity. (But apparently available to start a new server).

Oplegoman's Senior Admin promotion, 27th of December
Following Oplegoman's promotion, we understood that AMNOTBANANAAMA was upset over this event and talked to him regarding this.
This happens, he was not the first nor will he be the last, objections are a given with this kind of event.
The Senior Admin team gave it thought for a while and, from our point of view, we made the right choice. No one can contest this as it is our right to decide.

AMNOTBANANAAMA was upset and had his objections over the topic. He was infuriated and frustrated with this. 
However, when we developed a proper response that was made with complete care on our part to explain why we took those steps, we were met with more frustrations.
We were met with inaccurate assumptions on his part of how things have played out behind the scenes, and how we are just doing damage control when that isn't the case. Other than him being a helpful individual, none of what he said is correct.
Simply put: He was not fit for the rank. We are not here to detail the reasons as to why he is not fit, as some are private, personal and borderline humiliating to display publicly on here.
However, we do have the following screenshots that we can share with you which has helped us led to this decision.


Including an unbiased party, 29th of December
We were frustrated. We thought this wasn't going anywhere. We wanted to help AMNOTBANANAAMA get over this hurdle of thinking he was unappreciated by ourselves,
when he was very much being appreciated regarding his contribution towards the server. Access rights, that no other admin has had in the entire history of SentinelCraft, were given to Banana to showcase this.
Banana had gained Migas' trust through his dedication. These special perks did not seem to register with AMNOTBANANAAMA, because of this we decided to let Fedgar in as our unbiased party.
Fedgar was fit for the role of communicating with transparency while remaining unbiased and seeing the other person's point of view. Going into the conversation, Fedgar reminded us of the following:

"He is obviously hurting and is obviously in need of our help.
We can make a difference in his life and I think that makes all the frustration and irritation worthwhile."

We were starting to get hope back, hope that we can resolve this. Perhaps in the future, we could count on AMNOTBANANAAMA as part of the SA team.
That is if he had gotten past this mental block, something we have seen happen before with a senior admin. We were not considering a demotion at this point in time.

Server Issues, 30th of December
The server issues of December 30th started around 9am GMT, the server crashed, failed to restart on its own and could not be restarted within the console.
This is a highly unusual event, it required extensive time to find out the issue was that we filled our server drive with data, more information can be found here;
http://sentinelcraft.net/forum/index.php?topic=10083.0. This only affected files where currently open upon the server at the time of the crash,
an important file is the server.properties file. Without this file, it becomes impossible to start the server.
We ensured that we correctly set the file to start in offline mode, to preserve all user data, but this was overridden by PaperMC on start.
For 2 minutes the server ran in online mode, this was swiftly fixed, but the damage was already done. By this point work on the server has been going on for the last 6 hours non-stop.
Maps and inventories had been lost. AMNOTBANAAMA stepped up to find a solution to potentially save the majority of the lost maps.
I was there to help with server restarting and assisting to the best of my ability. I assumed that all was resolved after the hard work of our team.

Unfortunately, Banana held a grudge over this situation, to our disappointment. We received this screenshot from another discord server:

It felt like we were pouring water into sand and felt that something was up.
More importantly, this mystery discord server was also a hidden setup that we were not aware of and had been going on for at least 3 months.

Server poaching, 6th of January
At this point in time we stopped all communication with AMNOTBANANAAMA, we did not want to sound the alarm of what was going on.
Our main objective was collecting proof and investigating further before taking any final decisions.
Based on the screenshots and information we received, AMNOTBANANAAMA, KibikiKibble & Grotesquity are the main Admins of a modded server that they are in the process of making.
 
They were attempting to lure in a few of our staff into their team and discussing private staff conversations with none staff members which goes against our guidelines.
Moreover, they were taking schematics of our server. And coincidentally, we share the same project as of last month.
This implied that we did not know what was being leaked, that the access AMNOTBANANAAMA had was being used for us but maybe also against us.
Most importantly, we discovered that this was not just AMNOTBANANAAMA fault. Based on the screenshots, it was evident that discussions and false assumptions were being made by KibikiKibble and Grotesquity.
These were unfounded and manipulative, and AMNOTBANANAAMA was the subject of this manipulation because they had no experience in configuring a server, and he does.



Furthermore, KibikiKibble and Grotesquity were possibly taking schematics from the server, whetheir it is their builds or ours we can't conclude.
Not to mention gaining loyalty by smearing our reputation among themselves and with whoever was in their server. These screenshots won't be included they're distastful "gossip" and some even attack community members, not even the staff.

Now, a modded server experience is not something we care of, people are free to play wherever they want whenever they want.
It is, however, worrisome when a server is run by Sentinel members who start poaching and picking staff that they want to influence into their ranks and build upon the foundation of Sentinelcraft.
This, as staff guidelines clearly state, is a bannable offence. Since Grotesquity and KibikiKibble are the instigators of this project they will be banned effective immediately.
AMNOTBANANAAMA is to be demoted to his normal rank as he still likes the community. He already has been contacted to be informed of why he is being demoted.
Moreover, measures were taken to remove his entire access from server files.

We know that this is heavy news, but decisions have to be made to protect the integrity of Sentinelcraft.
We had hoped for a more peaceful resolution, but it was apparent we had hit a dead-end and had to put an end to the hypocrisy.

-- Sentinelcraft Senior Staff.