As Bureaucrat I have to come clean and say that while the plan to try to make the demotion seem innocuous to avoid confrontation was agreed upon by Promme and the rest of the wiki mod team, that it was my idea in the first place. I am truly and honestly sorry for deceiving all of you. This was the wrong decision to make. This was an extreme violation of trust in my community and I want to try to make things right with you all. The Strawpoll and Community Vote post I made are now invalidated and have been deleted. Here's the story.
The whole reason I came into this situation to begin with started with a DM from Promme, co-owner of GV Cafe. He messaged me asking if I still had authority on the wikia, because he wanted to look into getting Zistal demoted for misuse of power in the server. I have some experience in conflict-resolution, so the first question I asked about his behavior was "have you talked to him about it," to which his response was "I've had some discussions with him, that typically don't end well."
Promme introduced an "affiliates" system to the server a while back, where administrators of the wikia had some say in moderation over in the Cafe, the only two administrators in the server at the time being Zistal and Azure Feathers. In Promme's words, "Zistal had only ever used this position to complain about decisions the mod team makes or attempt to manipulate the moderation team into thinking they're "too harsh"". He's also used his pseudo-moderator position to defend people like Colonel Crossfire and Jack, two people who constantly started arguments or fought with moderators with no intention of changing their behavior. Zistal would not attempt to stop these people, and in some cases further instigated or expressed admiration for them and their behavior.
Promme did not think this was proper moderation, and neither did I. So he brought me, KaiAfterKai (also known as Ai Kurai, or Wikiboss James), and Azure Feathers together to discuss what to do with him. Azure Feathers further testified about the removal of the Discord integration on the front page that happened in November, one month after I initially promoted him to Bureaucrat.
Given everything, I thought the best course of action would be to do this demotion under his nose so he couldn't use his rights to hold the wiki hostage, given that he has a habit of acting on his own without the consultation of anyone else. I tried sending countless emails to Fandom support, which culminated in "we have no power to ban or demote this person based off of actions that happen off the platform," and they told me the only way they would even consider demoting him would be through a poll. We still didn't want to provoke him, so we framed the poll as an innocuous temporary demotion. And... here we are.
Once again, I apologize profusely for all the damage I've caused. I plan to be honest with all of you from now on, starting with this.
