Taking it too far and the ramifications

Dear community,

It saddens me that today the group of people that have been associated with the group now known as "1/11" has taken things too far. What happened 3 months ago were necessary and all within our right to do. If we see staff members are no longer fit to keep their positions within this community, we can make the decision to terminate that staff member.

They started a group proclaiming the downfall of SGM, this was the first indicator that they wanted to see this community fail and had no good interest at heart for what we have going on here. We banned the players that had leaked staff information during this event with the intent to further harm our community. Their end goal was for this community to end permanently.

Well we survived their tiny fit of angst and they have returned to the community that they wanted to see fail just to be negative ranging from passive aggressive to outright toxic. This negativity does nothing good for our community. I really don't even know why they have returned, perhaps other communities aren't as tolerant to their antics as we are? We have been known to be very lenient towards this type of behavior.

A couple of days ago, a member of that group came on to make an appeal. Even though the forum appeal section was repurposed for shoutbox appeals and that individual was specifically instructed by an admin that he can't post an appeal on the forums, he decided to do so anyway while knowing creating alts on the forum is against the forum rules. Even then, I still had the decency to allow him to appeal further down the road by allowing him to appeal directly with email sent to our website e-mail. I told him in a private message what e-mail he can use to appeal. Coincidentally, this email was then signed up to a large amounts of spam mailing lists. Today my phone kept going off since the website e-mail is forwarded to my personal one and in turn forced me to have to shut off the notifications. This causes multiple issues, first of all, I use the phone for personal and work related matters. Second, the website email is used for multiple important notifications relating to the operations of the community. If there is suspicion of an attack on any network, if any server infrastructure health falls below a threshold, or any other operations related matter with urgency, I get notified to that e-mail directly on my phone so I can tend to it ASAP. Having to turn off these notifications, we could have downtime of any part of our infrastructure for a long period of time before I am made aware of such an event. This could cause outages of the website, game servers or teamspeak.

So this group has further proven they have no good intentions left for this community. They don't really play on our game servers anymore, they pop on the website to be "edgy" and negative towards anything we do or say. While I might not have a big public presence, you do need to understand that I do a lot behind the scenes to keep this place running. On a daily constant basis, I am interacting and dealing with the back end so this place can keep afloat. I have been in constant negotiations with data centers across the world to improve our TTT server infrastructure and setting everything up to run smoothly for the community. All these changes have been for the most part painless to the community while taking up a lot of my personal time and effort due to my high standards and dedication.

Truly, this is a low blow to the community as a whole. And I am deeply disappointed by this group for what they have done. This is very demotivating to me and others who invest a lot of time to make this a better place. We tried to be lenient even in these extreme cases but moving forward, we have no choice but to be far less forgiving.