I'm writing this 5 1/2 days after a false accusation was posted about the Snakey Monster servers, claiming that I used them to hack into clients and steal game codes. Two people accused me of the hacking, with one slither.io discord moderator lending credibility to the accusations, and another moderator directly backing them up. Shortly after the moderators allowed me to respond the next day, they deleted my main response, and let me know I could not post my response. 5 days later, the moderators have not changed their position of falsely accusing me of a crime (hacking into clients is, to the best of my knowledge, a crime), or of not letting me respond.
Since I am not allowed to post about the situation on the slither.io discord, I am forced to post it here.
See also the general response to these accusation.
The moderators are allowed to agree with a false accusation within 2 minutes of it being posted, with zero evidence... yet after 5+ days the moderators have been spinning their wheels incapable of agreeing on a response.
They have spent over 3,000 times as much time debating how to handle the situation, unable to come up with anything, than it took to agree with the original false accusation.
A proper moderation team would at the very least first immediately remove the false accusation, and only then debate the merits.
[BEST] Mafia - The person who originally "muted" me without warning for 48 hours, which prevented me from responding to the accusations Eiriker - The person who made the initial accusation Aylina - The partner of the person who made the initial accusation [LK] SHARKNADO - The moderator who with zero evidence posted that people should not use my servers, within 2 minutes of the original accusation [WORM] NumerOus - The moderator who lent credibility to the accusation [SN] IO Soldier - The moderator who apparently deleted my post in response to the allegations Semliot - The owner of the slither.io discord, who approved of these behaviors in general
Overnight, I realized something had to happen... and was thinking it might be best to shut down the Snakey Monster project.
I woke up the next morning to this:
Without warning, and after I said I wasn't going to post more for the night, the moderators decided not to allow me to post for 48 hours. They called me the "aggressor", despite the post that started this talking about how things would get "VERY nasty". And no punishment was given to the other parties in the discussion.
As I post this over 5 days later, despite being told otherwise, the moderators have neither deleted that post, retracted it, nor posted anything to the contrary.
Within 2 minutes of the accusation, and with no evidence at all and without hearing my side of the story, the staff/moderators had decided to treat me as "guilty until proven innocent".
Someone was asking for details, and after the accuser was being vague in describing what happened, a moderator added this:
What is interesting here is that the accuser never mentioned what exploit I used... so he was not merely giving details, but joining the accuser by giving out more information that the accuser wanted shared but had not posted yet. Further, NumerOus somehow knew not just that the exploit could result in code execution, but that it could be used to obtain tag codes, which I believe was only known by the accusers at that time.
After the accuser suggested that anyone using my servers should considered their tag/team codes compromised, this same moderator posted "assisting" information (e.g. information that someone would want to see if they felt their codes were compromised, which they were not).
Despite that, I had to wait until the 48-hour mute ended before I was able to post (and since that was done at night, I had to wait until the morning to respond).
I finally get a chance to respond publicly. There were other false statements, so I started responding to the easier ones, and was then going to respond to the primary accusation.
At 12:16PM, I posted that in about half an hour I would respond to the primary accusation. At some point after that, I finally had my chance to post my response to the allegations. posted my response at roughly 12:55PM, and by 12:59PM it was without warning or explanation deleted by moderators (I have heard that it was [SN] IO Soldier).
If I had not seen the post get deleted (it disappears if you are in the channel, as I was), I may never have known it was deleted.
I would love to post my response here, but they deleted it before I had a chance to save a copy of it.
That said, by not taking any actions in the 4+ days since I notified him, he has implicity condoned the action of the moderators (which I detailed to him after he said that it sounded unprofessional).
I could not be shocked that Aylina shared this confidential information with Numerous. However, Numerous shared this confidential information with all the moderators.
In general, if someone says damaging information about someone, it is defamation. And if you falsely accuse someone of a crime, that is normally defamation per se... which means that the victim doesn't have to prove that the comments were harmful or damaging.
If I were to sue Aylina, Numerous, Eiriker, Semliot and/or others, I would have the burden of proving that their statement was indeed false. But, the burden of proof is "preponderance of evidence" (e.g. greater than 50% chance it is true). Testifying in front of a jury, and providing all versions of the source code that were backed up into the cloud for the past year would almost certainly meet that burden.
Semliot and the moderators, however, took a different stance: they apparently watch and misunderstand a lot of crime shows: they wanted me to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that I did not commit the crime. But that is a playground rule! The law is the opposite of that: if you are accused of murder, and the jury thinks there is a 99% chance that you are innocent (not quite 100% because of a reasonable doubt), the judge doesn't throw you in prison and say "Well, there is a reasonable doubt that you are innocent."