Day 2 of a request to the @moderators on SE23.life in the form of an open - and honestly stated - appeal to them.
It is more than a day since my post appealing to @Moderators on SE23.life to reach out to all of the "disaffected", "detached" and non-participating members to return to the fold in SE23.life.
At this time no statement of rejection or acknowledgement of the appeal has been forthcoming in any form either direct or indirect in response.
To the @Moderators I say, it cannot be beyond your collective or individual reasoning to realise that your actions and silence give all the appearance to the community of you withdrawing into a circle of wagons or a laager camp. Refusing to acknowledge that anything serious is happening and refusing to say anything, creates significant problems for the community about how you plan to deal with the problem that is Chris Beach’s ongoing presence on the forum, This has dire consequence for the wellbeing and existence of the forum in that the community is turning to and may reach a conclusion that their voice is not being heard and is possibly being silenced.
Here is a small sample of comments from people who were not necessarily hostile to the forum.
Homecroft said,
“Many people past and present have put a lot of time and energy into creating the wealth of information and discussion that the forum now is. To see all that content go to waste because of the selfish and obsessive actions of one person (albeit the owner) would be a travesty.
Unfortunately, all the attention seems to be on protecting his "good name" whilst making sure everyone believes the blame lays with the other party. This is far from the case, as many have said. Neither an isolated, nor a harmless incident.”
And
“I'm sure most are more than happy to give the mods the time and respect they deserve. No one wants anything to happen over night, just a little actual acknowledgement that something went badly wrong, and that they know it needs addressing. So far it has all been a little, "oopsie daisy that was an unfortunate hiccup."
I hope sincerely that the right solution can be found to keep the much loved forum running, and no more nasty little hiccups.”
Satchers wrote,
“I’d really love there to be a forum for se23 that didn’t have these problems.
Rachael said,
“Running around the internet kicking the sand over your digital footsteps is not exactly the actions of a person who made one sleep-deprived mistake, is it?”
And
“what has become abundantly clear to me is that SE23 Life will never be a safe space as far as I am concerned. If, as suggested there, Chris gave up control and sold it on to a new admin, do we suppose he would just leave it alone? Or would his focus switch to destroying SE23 Life in its turn? For those of you with access to Nicola’s twitter account, she has laid out in forensic detail ways in which he used sock puppets and regulatory bodies to attack and force the hand of the SE23 com admin. And that was two years ago. All the time he was attacking the SE23 com admin for underhand tactics, he was doing the same and worse. There is no reason to suppose this pattern of behaviour would change no matter how far he was removed from the running and/or ownership of SE23 Life.
While it’s easy to say this is just about a local forum and why worry, the fact is that his manipulative behaviour hurts people. Real people, real pain.”
I attach an extract from an item in the DM from last year. It has been published by me on STF during Chris Beach’s foray onto that forum when he made a crass attempt to inflict the “principles” of his SE23.life style stewardship on Stuart and the Admin of STF. His freakish demands that both individuals should obey his unreasoned ultimatums were rejected and his increasingly garrulous voice and presence was ejected from the forum. I asked for the post to be removed after his ejection.
It describes a pattern of behaviours that I invite you to examine. And ask yourself if you can see comparisons with Chris Beach’s behaviours. I would offer you this – many respected voices in our community have now begun to see how duplicitous Chris could be.
And as has been said before, it can be sensed that huge disappointments are doubly palpable for those who put the same amount of effort as Chris Beach into the creation and roll-out of SE23.life.
It may be the case that whatever disorder or dysfunction may be at the root of Chris Beach’s behaviours, the arising actions cannot be offset against the consequences of real harm caused to real people in our community.
And in such volumes too.
To extend your silence will be a mistake. People might go further and begin to question why the moderator team did not query Chris beach’s repeated attacks on his selected targets in the community. Why did they not prevail in any intervention that should have been more effective in stopping them?
The request that you reach out to and begin an open discussion on what you feel you can do next is made once more.
There are plenty of channels you can trust amongst them former moderators, The Forest Hill Society and the owner of the adjacent STF forum.
The clock is ticking.
