The reason for the quit.

As you may have noticed, a large number of staff and regular users have recently quit PO with little explanation. We feel that every user on PO has a right to know why we have quit, and what has gone on. As users we have done our utmost to contribute to the community, and improve it whenever we can. The owners of PO clearly could not care less about their contributors (unless they are a developer!). Nor do they trust or respect them.

First of all I would like to bring to your attention the Moderation Guidelines. Now you may not think this affects you, the user, but it does. The way the rules are enforced directly affect you. The Moderation Guidelines were written by the owners, and they expect the Moderators and Administrators to follow the guidelines at all times. So, what about the owners themselves?

    Originally Posted by Darkness
    Just to make it clear once again, the owners came up with moderating guidelines to keep the moderators and administrators in right track. But some of the staff protested that Owners should follow it if we do! To put it simply, No. The guidelines were made under our decision to be followed by our staff, not the owners them self. We know better on how to control ourselves.

In essence, the owners can do what they want. How they expect everyone to respect them when they do not respect the rest of the community by not following their own rules is beyond me. Furthermore "We know better on how to control ourselves."; This is so untrue its almost commical. On two separate occaisions owners have banned users (both users were ex moderators who had spoken out against the owners) for being kicked from a private channel. If the moderators did the same then they would lose their power instantly. This does not indicate control, this points to a dinstinct lack of control and more of a personal attack. It is stated in the moderation guidelines you must not let personal feelings get in the way of moderation. Alas, the owners are above the rules they created.

Now, onto the issue of private channels. What you think is a "private" channel is not "private" at all. First of all, you are not allowed to control who is there, even if you created the channel. If the owners want to be there, tough luck. Kick them at your own peril. Secondly, there is a command that enables Admins and Owners to literally spy on private channels. By taking a look through the PO Scripts (which are publically available) you will find a command /watch. This enables the user to see the chat of ANY channel they wish. Not so private anymore. Oh and there are also the server logs, which the owners can and will use against you, taking what you say in a private channel and quoting it out of context.

Furthermore, it seems the owners cannot step back and let the people they appoint to look after tiers and the like do their job. Almost every single one of the OU tier leaders decisions were questioned, often in a very condescending matter without proper research taking place first. Whenever a decision involving the Dream World tiers took place (see: Wifi Clause in DW UU, removing DW UU, Clear Skies), if an owner did not agree with the decision, they would make baseless accusations against the tier leaders, often trying to reverse the decision. If someone disagrees with the owner, they would have their power removed mid discussion (see this log:http://pastebin.com/KkR9zQsW).

As a side note, we would like to highlight the owners hypocrasy. Recently, an owner made it clear that insulting another user, whatever the severeity of insult, should result in a ban. Two well known members of staff took this on board, and then posted in a Ban Requests topic (private staff forum) logs of a vast number of other staff insulting other members. Both of these posts were met with trolling infractions, resulting in one member being banned from the forums. These users were following the owners rules. Following this, in the run up to March 9th the very same owner helped to organise a troll on the entire server, which I am sure many of you are aware of. How can someone expect their staff to respect them and follow the rules they put in place when these actions are commonplace? All complaints about this incident were either met with accusational one-line answers or just outright ignored, eventually resulting in the respective thread being locked.