As most of you already know, we - or rather, I - have removed certain posts that included screenshots or content from Quake Champions Closed Beta.

This is not exactly an apology since I'm still unsure if what I did was wrong.

I just wanted to clear some things.


1) Active admins
When prompted in the admin forum, the response from 'active' admins was rather lackluster. Not many showed up, we wanted to prepare for QC, maybe bring in some new blood, welcome new users and potential admins among the ranks. For a long time now, you could count admins on the fingers of one hand - even that might be a stretch. Keeping spammers at bay, editing posts, resizing images, helping out with formatting, doing all the background work went unnoticed (as it should be). Things became tricky when a sensitive issue was discussed. No one really voiced their opinions regarding different subjects and when someone eventually did, it just so happened that their views were vastly different, often resulting in excruciatingly long diatribes that ended up with insults, no real consensus, bitterness between the team that was already minuscule. the NDA discussion was no different.

2) QC / ShootMania debacle
Around the time when ShootMania news started popping up, roychez contributing advertisement links and shoving the failed title down people's throat I was a regular user and I recall being pretty fucking annoying, angry and entitled - the Shootmania posts were so clogged with up with negative comments, Demiurge had to make a separate thread just for the negative comments, racking up a total of 455 posts in a matter of days. No one really knew what was going on behind the scenes beside the admins. This time round I was on the 'receiving end'. With one major disadvantage - I asked admins how are they feeling about NDA posts and responses were lukewarm.


3) Negative comments and my involvement in protecting users content
Now I'm not gonna bullshit you into how good of a person I am or pander - I started noticing that some posts went 'missing' after QC major news threads. One of the admins even notified me about missing content. It's not the first time I went out of my way and reversed an admin decision (which might cost me of the title at this point), but whenever there was an issue I sent a message to people that were affected, tried to explain what's going on and in most cases brought their posts back. Obviously I was caught red handed and a big, rather ugly discussion went on the admin channel on Discord.

I refused to sell people's comments, contributions, opinions that weren't "in line" with some admin's ideas. The people's who's comments got deleted might not be your favorite posters. They might not be important or vital for the existence of ESR. But they've been posting for years, ESR is like a retarded kid to me. Sure you hide it from the public and you're sometimes ashamed of it but deep inside you care for all the lunatics, spastics, downright terrible shitposters. You faggots have been part of my life for nearly a decade now, I won't let anyone keep you down, let your voices remain unheard in the depths of the deleted posts. I refuse to remove opinions and trash comments because this is what the site is built on, it's the site that we love.

I never deleted posts and insults directed at me nor silenced users for being harsh.

When everyone jumped ship I was a one man army keeping ESR afloat and heading to a better direction - The nature of my job offered me enough time and I was much more motivated to spam the board with Weekly Quake happenings, articles, interviews. I received up to 50 instant messages a day asking me to write a news articles for cups, formatting issues, requests to remove posts, just overall tidying up the boards etc

I am unaware how many people I got on my side throughout these years by being impartial or even helping out people that I used to argue with.


4) The final word on NDA
My intention was not to silence opinions, but as shown in the screenshot that's floating around from the admin section, remove posts that I kinda felt weren't really helping anyone - id managed to remove Twitch streams and I figured I'd be doing the right thing by deleting in game screenshots. I even voiced my concerns about 'grey area' NDA - there's a third wave of beta keys being dished out in the upcoming days and plenty of ESR users already played it and want to discuss it.

I knew this can't go on forever, I knew that I'm basically mopping the floor and doing someone I don't even know a favor.

I think that if <certain admins> didn't have the guts to touch the site in years, hasn't participated in any discussion, hasn't voice his opinion or contributed to the discussion, posting screenshots from the closed forum is a low move.

It is undeserved and I feel betrayed. A person who is not actively involved in moderation, who doesn't know half the story and goes around accusing me and even stripping me of my admin status after all I've done for this community seems just unfair.


Even though I was and still am the most vocal admin fighting for the users, bringing back their posts, notifying them when/why their post was deleted I get shat on by someone who never really cared about moderating the forums at all.

If you had something to say or felt that what I'm doing is wrong, you should have done it by either messaging me or bringing it up with the admins. We have a discord where we discuss sensitive matter, there's a closed admin forum and you can reach me anywhere - you just wanted to make me look bad without asking how I came to the conclusion of removing certain posts.


And that's pretty much all I have to say about it.

I know it seems easy to judge and I probably fucked up but trust me when I say I didn't know how to handle this properly.

Cheers.