Hey everyone,
The last couple weeks have been a little crazy. My house lost electricity for 3 days in below-freezing weather because of the Texas power generation disaster, which resulted in my water main pipe freezing and bursting. So I have not had running water for over a week now, and also all the stores are completely sold out of bottled water because everyone else is having the same problem.
So in dealing with all of this craziness, I was offline for over a week. This also by chance happened to unfortunately coincide with a cultural attack on saidit, where we have had dozens and dozens of accounts created with the sole intent of destroying the quality of the front page by stirring up lots of emotional nonsense, including arguing against themselves using alts to cause more drama in comments sections, and posting a lot of garbage and upvoting themselves to the front page using dummy accounts. I've gotten good at dealing with these attacks over the years, because they can be very difficult and the people involved are very dedicated, spending literally hours a day on this over a period of weeks or months. Sometimes forming close relationships with admins through PMs with the purpose of influencing them or extracting information from them, which also happened repeatedly with this latest attack. Some of the accounts they used in this recent attack were over 8 months old. This is a high level of persistence that indicates this person is probably being paid, or they are a sociopath, or both.
A few weeks ago, I appointed a content admin (TheAmeliaMay) who I put in to place to help us combat simple spam and ads, and they have been doing a great job of this, it has made my life a lot easier. In my absence though, they decided to step up to help stop this attack which was genuinely happening, but they also may have over-reached at times and also gotten in to public drawn-out arguments which put some people off. But for the record they did a decent job mitigating the attack which probably would've ruined the front page for over a week.
TheAmeliaMay is going to step back and resume their previous role of removing just only ads and spam now that I have returned, or they may quit altogether, they are still deciding. But whichever they decide, I am grateful for all the help they have offered so far.
Lastly, thank you to everyone who has helped by reporting rule-breaking comments and posts, this makes it much easier to spot and act on. Especially during attacks.
But anyway, long story short, I have power back now and life is returning to normal here after the Texas disaster, so I am now resuming my duties as head admin. Cheers.
