You may be wondering why you're seeing this page, or why you were seeing an "Account Suspended" page on this site for several hours, instead of a fully-functional IP.Board-based website. Since I felt it best to keep everyone in the loop, I figure everyone deserves to know exactly what's going on behind the scenes, instead of letting corrupt staff members paint me as a "villain".
If you're just an innocent, everyday user that has never gotten themselves entangled or involved in this site drama, I deeply apologize that you've been affected in the crossfire. I myself know how painful it is to have a place you call home taken away from you like this; a site I had once joined and just became a minimod on had been hacked and defaced by a user that had been banned for reasons they didn't agree with. Granted, I did not "hack" this website. Hypnoponies.net is my website. Allow me to explain.
A common misconception that seems to have spread with the attempt I had made at reshaping the site staff is that I did not own the website, that I, for whatever reason, did not have the authority to change everything around the way I had. Let me explain how Hypnoponies.net came to life.
A few years back, the second forum had just finished its term. A group of staff members had become disgruntled at the way the leader of that forum had ran things, as said leader was unstable and could not do his job properly. So, one of the staff members had made everyone they could find admins and lead the defacement of the site. Afterwards, people were left wondering who was going to try running a site again. My naïve self figured "Oh, running a forum? That'll be simple; hire staff and don't piss them off." I established a board on another site, hired people that I could trust, and had things running there for a while.
But something about that site had concerned me. First off, the host loved to put ads everywhere. Second, they would not release SQL databases to people who ran forums, saying it was their property and so they chose not to give it out. Finally, irreversibly deleting the entire site was as simple as logging onto the ACP as the site owner, clicking "Delete Account", and confirming to the E-mail they had on file. This made me anxious, so as soon as I had a little bit of money to spare, I bought the hypnoponies.net domain, restarted the forum on IP.Board's Community Cloud service, and used a crude software tool someone had developed to pull whatever information was on the original board to the new one. From there, I eventually got enough money to buy a full-blown perpetual license, moved it to a cheaper webhost, and things continued on.
But, that being said, I own everything related to the site. I own the hosting, I own the domain, I own the software, and I did pretty much all of the configuration that brought it up and kept it up. I only started making the position of webadmin a shared position when I had left for basic training in 2016, as I felt it would be unfair to leave the site without someone who could bring it up if it went down. When I came back, I figured I'd continue to leave that a thing, as I felt, at the time, that it would be unfair if I took that shared spot back. Which reminds me of another question I'd like to answer.
Well... yes. But allow me to explain why I feel, in the grand scheme of things, that such is irrelevant.
Through all the actions I've taken,I've still paid for webhosting. The only times I've received help with it since early 2016 (at which point I was gone and literally physically could not be present to pay for it) is if I either practically begged to staff saying I couldn't make ends meet or if anyone donated, in which case, their donation didn't go to me; it went to Glide, and Glide would send that donation to me whenever she'd talk to me again, at which point she'd remember that she received donations and sent them my way. Furthermore, the site and everything still remained on my server, and I considered myself "on call", that is, if "shit hit the fan" (pardon my French) and the site went down for whatever reason, I'd come back to fix it. So I basically did everything I was tasked to do, keep everything running and paying for it, the only difference was I wasn't getting any credit.
Second, the first time I left was mostly because of issues I had with the site. I returned to fix those issues. I then left because I was made to feel guilty by staff for wanting to fix those issues. I then came back with a vengeance because I thought it over and I wasn't going to take what was being done to me sitting down.
So now you know that I own the site and I've been basically doing my task as a webadmin this entire time, just without the title and fame for a few months. Let's decipher this mess now, shall we?
When I came back to Hypnoponies and stayed, I did so with one thought in mind: to fix the issues that had caused me to leave in the first place, and make it better than anything Positivity could make on her own. I had become vengeful at Positivity for being a brat at negotiations, treating them like a "hostage situation" (as I'd like to call it) and generally being impatient and power-hungry. So I wanted to make Hypnoponies the best it could be. I wanted to set up a new section of the site that would neatly list hypnosis files (I still have the page mockups I scribbled out somewhere on a few pages in my computer desk drawers), I wanted to make a new terms of service, and I wanted to rearrange the staff, to take out anyone who was corrupt, was not proficient at their job, or otherwise. (Before you say "But how can you judge that?", think about it. I was pretty much head of the site. Being the judge of that is literally something I'm allowed to do. Do you question the President of the United States' authority to pick cabinet members?)
I had contacted a former member of the site, Oscore, to help determine fitness of new staff members. While he had his controversies, and a lot of people did not like him for how brash he was (which lead him to become disliked among staff and banned), he had a skill beyond anyone I've ever known to identify the character and behaviors of a person. Additionally, he had helped build our staff once before, and when he did, that staff team was the greatest staff team that had ever existed in the history of the site. So, I voiced my concerns to him and asked for his help, and he agreed with my concerns and reasoning.
So, he had organized a few people he and I had both known to be level-headed individuals, and I added Glide to the chat, figuring it would be a nice thing to work with the user I had willingly shared webadmin position to. The plan would have been simple; I was going to have all current and wanting staff members to fill out applications and basically go through the staff selection process again, and every person was going to be individually looked at throughout their history and decided by said council of level-minded people, Glide, and myself as to if they should or need to be on staff and, if they are, if they should have the position of a moderator or an admin. Glide was on-board with the ideas posed at the time. I had even tried to make sure she had known that Oscore wanted to work alongside us as an admin; he'd manage staff positions and moderation, Glide and I would manage site look and functionality. Essentially, we'd all run the things that we were the best at. Eventually, however, there was a deviation in our plan.
I had misunderstood what we were focusing on as far as Luna was concerned. I had believed our only concerns were involved with her integrity as a staff member, and was unaware that her competency as a staff member was also in question. (Reason being, while it may be easy to conclude that an active member of a community will also function as an excellent staff member of that community, that's not actually so. It takes a certain set of chops to moderate or administrate a website, and while you can contribute a lot to a site as a member of it, you can also not really contribute anything extra as a staff member that you wouldn't be able to as a regular member. Why give people power they're not really going to use? It's wasteful.) After talking with her, I wasn't exactly trustworthy of her, so, in order to avoid damage to property, I removed her from staff for the time being, pending investigation. A routine thing to do when investigating a staff member, however, being all caught up in explaining myself (albeit a bit badly at the time, I make mistakes) and talking out drama with all sorts of other people, Glide had misinterpreted this as me "overriding" her and so decided to lose all trust in not only me, but the plans that were made.
Over that day and the next day, I had found evidence proving that her integrity was sound, and all of the evidence I had found stating otherwise was either insignificant, merely not fully explained, or a straight-up lie (note to self: check to make sure webadmins for other sites are telling the truth about why they fired a member before blindly believing their story. It's a bit embarrassing to buy into a belief that a member was considered to be lying and causing trouble as a staff member on one site, then discover that member was actually fired because they prevented that site from causing a raid on another site!) However, Oscore explained to me that there was still concerns about her competency. So, I figured instead of adding her back immediately, only to take her out of staff again, I was going to press forward on staff applications and get that out ASAP. I started work on them and asked Glide for her E-mail so she could work on them with me. She, however, had other plans.
She had decided that what I was doing "violated the trust" of staff members who had welcomed me with open arms, and that she did not like any of what was going on. I had relied on Glide at the time for my own moral validation, and so I felt a bit bad pretty quickly. Being beaten down, I was lead to believe that because of my plans, I did not have my heart in the right place, and I left. After taking a bit of a walk to calm down and think over things, though, I started to realize that perhaps I wasn't necessarily wrong. I came back, only to wind up with my tulpae and Glide getting into an argument. Me, being unable to really handle it in the shaken emotional state that I was in, blocked Glide temporarily because I could not handle it. As a result, Glide cancelled any plans she had made to visit me or go to cons with me, then proceeded to go to staff and tell them about the plans that had been made, although with a few inaccuracies. Instead of saying only two, perhaps three staff members were really being looked at, she went to say that most of the staff was being replaced, and specifically, with hive members. She stated that Oscore was going to be the main admin. She basically told them about the "secret chat" where we were planning on "screwing the staff". And she tied this all down to me.
That being said, I lost trust in Glide. It's one thing to tell the truth, it's another to sensationalize it, throw your friend under the bus, and twist the truth to make it sound as sound as bad as possible without completely leaving the truth all at the same time. I gave up for a time on getting everything working, but by talking to Oscore and a few friends, I had realized I still had power, and I could still make the change that I had wanted to. I could get rid of the corruption and lies in staff, and it was through the site that I owned, even if I could not do it by means of the democratic process.
We had all gotten into a voice call and, in a few short, swift moves, I had removed Luna, Celestia, and Glide, the now three members that we had concerns with and I could not trust, and added Oscore as an admin to spearhead selection and management of further staff. Obviously, this decision came with a lot of concerns, mostly because of the sensationalization of it all on Discord staff's part. And a lot of things went down in the process; primarily, the slandering and echo chamber of hate towards mine and Oscore's name by a few people that felt they had known us, and Positivity, the member that had proved herself untrustworthy earlier on, then time and time again in negotiations and shady-looking appeals, used this distraction to let herself back on the site.
When the dust had settled, Oscore had come to the conclusion that we had deserved better. So, he had me remove her from staff and re-ban him. Oscore and Glide had talked and had settled their differences, and Oscore urged me to work with her to recover my reputation. So, I talked to Glide and gave him one last shot for my trust and friendship. She said she would work with staff to have me come back. However, this was met without success (although not necessarily through any fault of Glide's.) At most, I was told that I would need to be "humbled" and work as a mod, despite doing my webadmin stuff, until I "proved" myself better, at which case I could earn my way back up to webadmin status.
This hit a nerve. I have really, honestly never been really recognized for the work I have put into this site. Donations didn't even go directly to me, for God's sake. And now I'm being told I need to be more humbled? This is when I had decided that this staff does not deserve my work. This is why you're seeing this page now.
I have deleted all copies of the site, as well as my account on the backup site I had signed up with to pull daily backups of the site. I no longer want my work being used to help this staff, as I do not agree with them or the way they run things. If the staff wishes to run another site, they will need to do so fresh, without my work. I'd like them to learn what goes into keeping a site up and paying for it, if they wish to dole out complaints about how I demand a little bit of respect for my work. I will keep my license of IP.Board and have another community more deserving of it use it. I'm done touching anything with this staff's name on it. And now, I can sleep sound at night knowing the work I've put into this site will not help a corrupt staff that is willing to practice manipulation on their members and create an echo chamber of lies within their doors.
Goodbye, Hypnoponies.