Here's my personal recollection of his ban. It actually occurred before I was admin, but a number of appeals happened while I was admin. I don't think I'm breaking any confidentiality with this, as the events are ~2 years old and almost all the people involved either left staff or quit mcpublic altogether.
For those who don't know, Team Avolition were a big grief group, primarily known for minecraft griefing circa 2009-2011. Nerd and Avo had some semi-famous altercations, including AlLnAtuRalX and Firestar rowing on mumble, and various bouts of griefing. Avo would livestream their griefing via their website, and everyone would follow them to the server. In my early days as moderator, I dealt with a number of griefing raids. In those days we didn't have NoCheat, so catching hackers was no more sophisticated than following them vanished (no flying legit either, of course). I probably saw a dozen raids total, but they stopped maybe ~September 2011. Avo have now moved into better things - Warchamp7 did a successful AMA in /r/games the other day.
Carver was banned in ~December 2011 for appearing in an avo video. He did not grief, however he was friends with a couple of avo members and they allowed him on their private teamspeak. At this time avo were making public statements saying "the war" with nerd was over - they hadn't griefed mcpublic in a few months and had stopped playing minecraft as much (iirc). You can see his appeal here. Pilot, then a Head Admin, offers carver an unban if he stops associating with avo. Carver takes his offer and a week later is unbanned. This decision was contentious as never before had there been a situation where someone was simultaneously a respected community member and former staffer (in many circles) but also a "grief group member" by some definitions.
In January 2012, Carver was banned for "Trolling" by Skuld.
Things began stirring up. Every day there was a mumble channel where people would bitch about Pilot's handling of carver's ban. A sizable minority of mods disobeyed the Heads' instructions to ban carver on sight. I think I never banned him when I found him on mumble or IRC. Still, I defended Pilot: I knew from personal experience that Pilot always asked many peoples opinions on the ban. He would frequently ask me if I thought he was doing the right thing, and with every appeal he consulted the other head admins.
However, one thing I think many former admins experience with the benefit of hindsight is a realisation of how crazy things become when you're a small group of friends who are also colleagues. There's two simultaneously pressures: 1. to show support and trust in your friends and their decision-making abilities 2. To show a united front to players, usually by following the path of least resistance (i.e. don't fight uphill battles within staff - maintain the status quo). In Pilot's case, I got sucked up into the idea that avo were still a threat, that an unban would be a "victory" for avo,
The head admin team at this point was: Ludeman, Pilot, AlcoJew, Skuld, forty_two. The last 3 are what I consider "old guard", in that they either worked under or knew Nat day-to-day, before our founder mostly-retired. The old guard were also pretty inactive, and their opinions of avo were very much influenced by the amount of griefing and trolling they lived through. Lude and Pilot were modded around the same time as me, and had seen griefing raids but this was towards the tail-end of avo's involvement with MCPublic. One thing I've commented previously is how the head admin democratic system falls apart when people are inactive. With only one or two head admins active, the server's policy is less affected by "what won the vote?" and more by "who wrote the question?"
I don't actually know the backstory, but his appeal from March is here. In it, he appeals only his mumble ban, pointing out that he's never trolled on mumble. Skuld sets a precedent here which I personally resent:
The mumble server is provided for the use of rule abiding players of the Minecraft community, as a member of a trolling grief group, you do not qualify.
To my knowledge, in every previous case, a ban from in-game did not necessitate a mumble ban. Some grief group members were always pre-emptively banned, but they [i]always[/i] used MCPublic services for trolling/griefing, whereas carver's usage had almost never fallen into that category.
Having already said that while Carver is involved with avo he will remained banned, the head admins did not want to U-turn on such a sensitive issue.
Skuld left in March. Pilot left in April, after Amaranthus almost pulled a coup over Toncom's permaban. Ludeman was left as the only active head admin, essentially promoting the active members of the tech team (myself, deaygo, c45y, jcll) to head admin decision-making privileges.
When Carver appealed again in May, Ludeman was concious to avoid having too much influence, and instead canvassed the admin circle for opinions. The difficulty with this approach is, again, that it's a private conversation with a friend where you're essentially asked "what should we do about carver?". For a fair number of the admins, they didn't really care about the issue at all and only knew carver by reputation from the other admins.
For his august appeal, Lude put a thread in Admin Chat called "What should we do about Carver?". I believe c45y and someone else came out supporting an unban, half-remembered paraphrase: "yeah why not? it's been a while". As the thread got older, I was worried that his ban would be decided on these opinions alone, so I replied to thread with some demonic advocacy:
If I were the only person to decide, i wouldn't let him back, if only for his drama resulting in Rainshadow's server - his little getaway with his online pals - being fucked up beyond repair.
- His original ban was legit. For one, it was common practice to ban grief group members at the time. I still want this to happen. The internet isn't world politics, there's no reason we can't exert extraterritorial jurisdiction, There's no practical reason why we shouldn't.
- also reject the notion that as he's devoid of responsibility for stuff avo & co do because he doesn't do any griefing himself. If you're handling money for a drug ring you're as responsible as your colleagues who sell it. I don't give a shit how nice or how little the team griefs. They still inspire legions of stupidity. We've had fanboys on the chaos server saying "AVO GRIEFED THIS SERVER GOOD", making swastikas, all that fun stuff. He's actively enabling their community via forum moderation at the least. Honestly I haven't got much clue what he gets up to.
- He handled his ban in the worst possible way, mocking it, rallying morons to his cause, and by some accounts causing the serious attacks against the server. Did he not also make money off it, via the "free carver" t-shirts?
- Remind yourselves of some of the forum threads on the avo forums about this. He's had hundreds of people rally to his cause, and by his own account he has no control over them (this was his excuse for Rain's server being griefed, in spite of the result of his antics being utterly predictable). Even if he promises not to promote an unban as a "victory" for the "'free carver' campaign", there's no saying we won't be on the end of more shit from avo.
- He left me some messages on IRC in early may
May 04 15:47:16 Showboat Honestly...I don't even want the servers. I just want the mumble
May 04 15:47:33 Showboat I'm even LESS a danger in the mumble. It's simply TALKING to people
May 04 15:47:58 Showboat I'm a moderator on MCNSA, so I spend a lot of my minecraft time over there
May 04 15:49:42 Showboat gotta go, class over.
May 04 15:49:52 Showboat I'll talk to you later. Try to help me out, though, will ya?
May 04 15:49:56 Showboat <3
May 04 15:49:58 Showboat Peace dude
My understanding with the Toncom was that wanting to come on the mumble isn't sufficient reason for an unban; Pilot said something like "we're not a social network; the mumble is there to facilitate our players", and Toncom's success in his appeal was in part due to his willingness to actually play minecraft and not just troll on mumble.
Conclusion: In the end this is our boat, we can run it how we like. If we don't want him back, lets not unban him.
As a quick rebuttal to myself:
- Carver was never a member of avo
- While carver definitely started off bad with stirring the pot, he got better and left the issue well alone for a long while prior to this post. His fanbase lagged behind him.
- He didn't do any rallying/mocking except at the very beginning, and he was never responsible for DDoSes AFAIK. I have no idea if the "free carver" stuff made money for him or someone else.
- History has shown avo really had stopped by this point and weren't coming back.
- I disagree with the "banned from server -> banned from mumble" logic.
It's been a long time. I can understand you being cautious, but carver is a great guy. In my opinion, it couldn't hurt to give him a straight unban from everything and put the whole issue behind us. If he does something banworthy then deal with it when it occurs