Things just will not stop happening, huh?

First, some links to older posts:

• The recap I did back in mid-June -- after the first round of protest from #EndOTWRacism and whistleblowing details about the internal mishandling of CSAM-related attacks, before the OTW Board elections kicked into gear
• Be more democratic, be more autocratic, OTW -- a post I probably should've linked in the last one, it was the center of a ton of early meaningful discussion
• An Account of the Current OTW/AO3 Allegations -- a nice straightforward timeline. Originally posted mid-June, updated a couple times through early July
• Azarias did get a formal apology from the Board + Legal for the ways she's been mistreated and defamed throughout this saga, so, that's one bright spot!

New things that have gone down since:

1) Board election season kicked off; here's a timeline, plus collected candidate bios and Q&A responses.

• Originally this was 7 candidates running for 4 seats (3 full terms + 1 partial)
• One candidate dropped out before the Q&A stage actually started
• EOTWR gave their own assessment of the candidates' platforms; it was weirdly, uncomfortably dismissive toward the 3 candidates with Asian names, compared to the 3 with (unspecified ethnicities, but) Anglo names
• At this point we didn't know the races/ethnicities of the latter group; we just know the judgment went harder on the group who were explicitly, undoubtedly not white. So yeah, that was disappointing

2) AO3 was hit by a DDOS attack that kept the site inaccessible for most of Monday, July 10.

• All indication is, the culprit was a Russian group that's been going after a wide range of sites, from "a local Swedish airline" to "Reddit"
• If you haven't heard about the others going down, it's because most of them use industry-standard third-party DDOS protection services (e.g. Cloudflare), and AO3 just...did not?
• It's honestly hard to explain how wild this is
• A website that's been up for 10+ years, one of the most popular entertainment sites on the entire planet, and they didn't have safety measures this basic? My dinky little webcomic site gets less than 10K visitors a month, and it still has this
• Anyway, AO3 gets an emergency install of Cloudflare
• Reportedly because a fan at Cloudflare personally reached out to AO3's tech guy, and fast-tracked him through the application

This is kind of a perfect microcosm of typical operations at the OTW, for the record.

There are so many people who love AO3, who have relevant skills/expertise/services, and who would volunteer that expertise at the drop of a hat. When the org has the motivation, major changes like this can get accomplished lighting fast!

And when there's an active, critical, site-threatening emergency? The motivation is there!

All the rest of the time? ...We'll form a committee to consider the process for deciding how to select the committee that will recommend changes that other committees could maybe one day make. They'll report back in 6 months, to let the Board know that they're still considering processes.


3) The OTW shut down their Dreamwidth mirror of news posts, after making a general "are readers still invested in this mirror?" update, getting over 50 individual respondents, then claiming this meant people weren't "sufficiently interested."

• This was not long after DW founder Denise made her first few scathing assessments of the OTW's internal workings, so it's hard not to suspect a little petty retaliation
• It was also not long before the DDOS attack, which really highlighted the failings of the proposed "just follow the official site's RSS feed!" alternative -- when the site is down, the RSS feed is down

Sidenote: a couple months earlier, OTW officials were also planning a shutdown of AO3's account on Weibo, the main mirror/update platform in mainland China (where AO3 itself is officially blocked (for being too gay)). This plan was worked out without asking anyone, either the readers of the platform or the Chinese-speaking volunteers who were maintaining it.

Last I knew, the Weibo cancellation had itself been canceled, because of the public outcry once the affected volunteers actually heard about it. (Good!)

And, listen, there's a layer of "OTW staff ignoring the concerns of users outside the US" in the Weibo mirror that doesn't apply with the DW mirror.

But it's hard not to wonder if the lesson someone took from the Weibo situation was "if we want to shut something down, first we have to ask if people care. And if they do, we have to come up with an excuse for how it doesn't count."


4) Tag wrangler Dhobi ki Kutti, who's been actively pointing out the OTW's issues, especially around racism (not affiliated with EOTWR, just in general), gets an official wrist-slap for making other volunteers feel "unsafe, stressed, and uncomfortable".

With an admonishment that seems to boil down to "we're not saying you can't talk about things happening at the OTW... just maybe don't quote those things, summarize those things, give examples of those things, link to anyone else talking about those things, or make any conversation at all in a channel where someone who doesn't want to respond to it might be forced to scroll past it."

So, everyone who just got through advocating for "the way you're treating Azarias is BS, she deserves a retraction and an apology" takes a deep breath, and pivots to "the way you're treating Kutti is BS, she deserves a retraction and an apology."

(Look, I haven't backread every message in every channel of OTW Chat Platform...but everything I've seen from Kutti has been perfectly reasonable. She deserves a retraction and an apology.)


5) Election season gets wild.

• Another candidate drops out
• This time because, once her full name was revealed and voters were able to research it, the general public realized she's a US Republican political candidate IRL
• Of the current Board members, accusations of specific racist and harassing acts from one of them (Alex Tischer, any pronouns) reach a critical mass
• Their term is already ending, but people would like them gone now, instead of waiting for the October changeover
• In response, Alex appears to pull a classic "you can't fire me, I quit!"
• In fact, three of the existing Board members resign
• Two, including Alex, were already outgoing -- the election was to fill their seats already -- they're just peacing out a couple months early. One had a partial term left
• This means we're down to 5 candidates, and up to 5 seats (3 full terms + 2 partial)

And, listen, this is still not as dramatic as the year when the entire Board resigned!

(Here's the FFA wiki's recap of the OTW 2015 Elections, if you want to backread how that went down.)

Voting members of the OTW, your vote still matters -- the top 3 candidates will get the full terms, the other 2 will get partial terms.

And no matter how it shakes out, we're getting a Board where 5 of the 7 members are fresh faces with solid platforms. I'm not expecting them to kick the whole org into shape from the ground up...but I can't imagine them making us more dysfunctional than we already are. And I can imagine them making at least a few meaningful things better.