Note: I originally wrote the vast majority of this shortly after the incident, and sat on it for a while waiting to see what else might happen and to get advice from various people. As such, some mentions of dates and times will be off as it's been a few weeks since I wrote it.

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This is not something I ever intended on writing. If you told me amonth ago that I'd be writing this, I'd probably say you were out of your mind. However, over the past few weeks, I've had the wonderful experience of seeing the true faces of the Weasyl administration and learn first hand that they're not any better than any of the other art sites out there. They are just as childish and unprofessional as the others, maybe even moreso.

Before I get too far into things, I'm sure there will be some who say I'm only doing this because I'm "bitter". Perhaps even "butthurt", which is the phrase that some of the "directors" of Weasyl have chosen to use. Read the whole thing and form whatever opinions you want. I don't care. I'm going to loosely base this post on a_pigeon's "FA Retrospectacle" format and start with my experience with Weasyl, then explain how the staff seems to work behind the scenes, then a conclusion.

My first interaction with Weasyl really began before it was really A Thing, when I was toying with the idea of starting my own site. Ben was interested and I shared some of my ideas. Some of those later ended up in Weasyl promotional items or the site itself. I'm not saying the ideas were 'stolen' and I could care less if they were. They were better off with Weasyl than with my poor attempt at my own thing.

I would later make it clear that I wanted to help out with Weasyl, but at the time, they had finished rounding up their original staff and there wasn't really a place for me. Ben was handling the things I was interested in (Marketing/Promotion) anyways, so I shrugged it off and went on my way.
As time went on I'd promote Weasyl using various furry-related social media accounts that I have access to whenever possible. I donated during the donation drive and I invited friends during the beta period. I put a lot of faith in the site and really wanted to see it succeed.

By early this year it was becoming clear that the site was not living up to the hype. The PR had died off and there didn't seem to be much going on. I began suggesting features and ideas to Fiz through the Vivisector IRC channel. While a few ideas were well received many of them (mainly creative/promotional ideas) were ignored or dismissed. Other people involved with the site liked my ideas too and offered to help try to get me onto Weasyl staff.

During this process some of the Weasyl staff became overly paranoid and I was subject to what other Weasyl staff called "an unusual amount of scrutiny". This was originally attributed to someone's idea that I was trying to "take down FA". My reply was something along the lines of "If I wanted to take down FA I could find a lot better ways to do it than to dedicate my time and effort to Weasyl." and that seemed to ease their concerns for now.

After several months of waiting (which was a time period long enough for me to leave one job, sit around for a few months, and interview and get hired for a new one) I was invited into Weasyl's developer IRC on September 26th. I was immediately asked what I wanted to do, to which I answered "promotions/marketing and business matters". The response was "i don't know if we need someone for marketing and business stuff right now" and was told to "chill in here for a bit". I think they thought I could code and when I said that's not what I wanted to do, they didn't know what to do next.

For the next several weeks I certainly chilled for a bit while things went nowhere. I offered suggestions and occasionally chatted. Days went past where literally nothing happened.
A couple times, I was suprised by what came up in the developer chat. At one point, discussion about what features should be included in "Premium" accounts came up, along with discussion about what that should be called. While there isn't anything inherently wrong with this, the fact that more than a year into the site's life, one of the key features promised still hasn't been hammered out by the people in charge (i.e. the "Directors"), and it's left up to the development staff to figure out is quite concerning.

At another point it was communicated that one of the developers had privately acquired some servers and that they were allowing Weasyl to use them. The first thing this reminded me of was the Jheryn/Arcturus drama early on in FurAffinity's history.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing that came up was one of the directors and one of the developers discussing their various attempts to poke and prod at FurAffinity through the use of bots and scrapers. One attempt had used "enough nodes to double the number of guest connections on the site" as a means to scrape unspecified data, and another was a bot account that simply followed people, following upwards of 4000 people before someone caught on. For a site that was worried that I was going to try to "take down FA" by helping out, they sure don't seem to care that some of their staff is, you know, actively poking and prodding at FA. I believe the plan is to release whatever "data" they found via channels not directly tied to Weasyl, but it appears to be some major project for them, from what I've seen and heard.

For the next few days I would interact with the developers a few more times until the evening of November 6th, when I was suddenly kickbanned from the channel without reason or an explanation. I asked someone what happened and I was told some of the staff "got tired" of me (I hadn't even said anything at all that day). A little while later I asked Fiz through the Vivisector IRC why I had been kicked. She first said she didn't know. I somewhat jokingly commented that Weasyl seemed to be run by "shadowy individuals" and then remarked that the management structure was a mess, seeing as I was arbitrarily kicked by one person without input from others.

This was apparently Too Much and I was called 'butthurt', because apparently thinking that a website that wouldn't shut up about how they'd do everything real professional-like might say "hey you know we don't really have anything for you to do right now so could you come back later?" is just too much to ask.

I would then be accused of trying to damage Weasyl through posts on Lulz.net, one of which I did make, well before I was in IRC and before the person in question was even on staff. The rest are a bunch of wild, baseless assumptions that reminds me of when FurAffinity thought everyone who said negative things was Pi. I was also accused of "digging up dirt", which is probably just an attempt at justifying booting me because they knew that I'd make a post like this if they did. Congrats, guys, you were both wrong and right at the same time.

The People

Fiz:
Fiz is one of the directors and one of the original members of staff. She has a bit of a past as an internet troll and being involved with drama. Fiz insists she's not in charge of Weasyl but seems to be the closest thing they have to someone trying to organize and lead things in the period since Ben left. I never really had a problem with Fiz until the other day.

Kihari:
Kihari is one of the owners of Weasyl, LLC (the other is Benchilla) and doesn't seem to interact with the site much. He appeared a few times in the developer channel and made some code commits but otherwise didn't seem to be very involved.

Casmer/Castazel:
Casmer is supposedly the "social media guy" and has been on staff since sometime in September, but hasn't really done anything visible. How a "social media guy" can do things that no one ever sees is a mystery to me. Casmer was arbitrarily appointed to a Director position by Kihari "a long time ago" but only materialized recently. He is known to hang with former Weasyl admins Benchilla and Prawst.

Inaki:
Inaki is a sysadmin-turned-Director since after donating servers and hosting to Weasyl. Inaki privately owns and operates said servers, which is an interesting conflict of interest. Inaki also was the one subjecting FurAffinity to data scrapers which doubled the amount of guests on the site.

The Other Developers:
For the most part, the developers seem to be a good bunch who work on the site regularly and are actively trying to improve it.

The Rest:
I had no interaction with the rest of the staff. I was not in a common staff channel, and I don't even know if one exists.

Conclusion

Weasyl is not the site it purported to be, and the current leadership is ineffective at bringing the original vision into reality. They do not show that they have the skills required and it doesn't appear that anyone's quite sure of what to do next. When confronted with unusual situations they break down entirely and resort to childish name calling. At one point it was implied that since the site wasn't active, they didn't care if anything was going on, as if to suggest that since no one is using the site, important matters can be put off indefinately.
One of the concerning things is there seems to be a real belief that Weasyl's time will come when something happens to FA. Not a "it would be neat if..." thing, but the true expectation that FA will just cease to exist one day or something will happen that will compel users to leave en masse.

The management structure of Weasyl is badly broken. This is a result of Ben's poor planning when building the site. The "Directors" really have no one to report to (other than themselves, which never works anywhere) and are thus left unaccountable for their actions. Things just seem to happen and they all kind of shrug and go along with it. There is no leadership and the owner(s) don't seem to care about the site.

With arbitrariy appointments of people like Casmer and buy-ins from people like Inaki, it's obvious that there are no real guidelines for who can be a "director" other than being liked by someone who decides to bring you aboard. The Staff Code of Conduct says that only Administrators can be appointed to Directors via a vote, but that is clearly not being followed.

It is my opinion that the only way to fix Weasyl is to gut the existing staff structure and reorganize into something where there's true leadership. The Staff Code of Conduct is a bureaucratic mess and needs to be thrown out. I'm not sure if any of the existing Directors are fit for the whole "Leadership" thing, and I don't think the owners would be effective trying to find someone who is. Finding someone who would buy the site from them is probably a good first step, but now that the servers are controlled by a director, who knows how well a sale would go.

And that's my side of the story. If you still think I'm "butthurt" in expecting a site that I was working with with for months to be professional enough to not shitcan me without providing any reason whatsoever, fine.

http://paste.pound-python.org/show/HCtlLahSdvRndY1Nrk9j/
At this link you will find a nearly complete archive of every conversation I ever had in Weasyl's chat. I say nearly because I never got around to setting up logging on irssi and there were times my home PC wasn't on (which is where these logs are from) They are edited in so much as I've only included the relevant conversations and removed anything from others that doesn't need to be there.

Perhaps some good will come out of this post and Weasyl will figure out how to correct itself before it's too late. Maybe, some day, some one will read this and realize how not to run a website. All I can say is that if FA/Dragoneer was doing this, we'd all be in the same place as we are now. There was always complaints that FA ignored people's offers to help, and now Weasyl has jumped on that bandwagon too.