Early this morning u/DrunkAlunya and I woke up seeing that u/Alexitine (the top mod in this community) had added u/FamousPlan101, one of the National Bolsheviks (or Nazbols - what are nazbols?) from the ACP as a moderator. Immediately after that, the mod list was reordered and some of us most active mods in the community (like u/DrunkAlunya and u/HeinrichTheWolf_17) were removed as well.
As soon as we realized that this subreddit got infiltrated by those fascists, some of us mods got in touch with each other and decided on how to proceed. We then contacted Reddit’s support and eventually, we were able to remove u/FamousPlan101 and reinstate as mods the same old team that was here.
It is our belief that u/Alexitine’s account was hacked because (as you can see in the screenshot) the account had been inactive for some time and, out of nowhere, one day we received a warning from Reddit saying that the account tried to add someone to the moderation team. That warning got buried in the modmail but, looking at the modlog, we can see that after that warning, u/Alexitine’s account became active again in an effort to gain the ‘active’ status. And this morning, when the account finally returned active, the whole shitshow happened.
Whoever is using u/Alexitine’s account tried explaining away the whole situation by sending the message you can see in the screenshot in the mod group chat. Mind you, that was the first and only message we had received from u/Alexitine in months. And after that, nothing else.
We have mentioned all of this to Reddit’s team of course. However, their reply (so far) was that they believe u/Alexitine’s account was NOT hacked…
Because of Reddit’s reply, at the moment we are unable to fully remove u/Alexitine as top moderator sadly. But rest assured that we the other mods we are continuing to HEAVILY monitor the situation and keep an eye out for more practical resolutions.
In the meantime, I would like to thank all the users that kept telling those fascists to fuck off from this community 🫡
If you have more questions about this morning’s situation feel free to write in this post
Also I want to add something on FamousPlan101 first removal of two most active mods who are trans themselves is too on the nose, because FamousPlan101 is an openly known transphobe of ACP, if he was smart enough he’d wait a while before removing everyone but the fact that he went for the few trans mods on the sub proves how problematic him and Alexitine.
This whole debacle is what finally pushed me to get on lemmygrad. If the sub situation is fixed then yay, if not then I’m on a better platform now either way.
Same here. While it was a shit show to see, I’m happy I learned about Lemmygrad through it all. Still learning how to use the site and stuff, but it’s been great so far.
Welcome! Lots of fun here.
Welcome! Lots of learning and camaraderie to be found here. And don’t be intimidated by the sometimes contentious discussions. :) We try to make the struggle about ideas rather than the individual: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10105758
Counterrevolution quashed! Still, that’s awful that it happened in the first place, I hope the mod team is taking steps to tighten their security in the future… though I’m not terribly optimistic. Not because I think you guys are incompetent, but because I know how bad Reddit is as a platform when it comes to subreddit security.
I hope the mod team is taking steps to tighten their security in the future
We’ve been in continuous contact since this morning and we are doing a complete rework/check of everything to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
And like you correctly said, Reddit is still a shit platform so there we don’t have the same type of support we might have here. But - in a tragically liberal way - we will try our best to work within the system and prepare contingency plans. Having more users join us here for example would already be a great start
But - in a tragically liberal way - we
good ol hyphen as an em dash, no AI here, just the way god intended
The long-inactive account suddenly coming back to do a mod coup is something that I noticed when I shut down /r/snackexchange in the mod protests. Spez said something about returning power to the communities and not being able to close a subreddit as a protest, so I made it the Democratic People’s Republic of r/Snackexchange and had the community vote for every moderator and rule each day. I had universal support from the userbase who understood the joke. Then some old account which had only posted there once a decade before reactivated from a dormancy period. In each day’s voting thread they proposed the exact old rules which had been erased when I changed the stylesheet. They started getting really weird and clingy in PMs, electing themselves as a mod and then using that as pretext to have the admins give them the top mod slot and purge everyone else. Their one big issue that they were excited to change was creating a 3rd party user verification website where they alone would have copies of photo IDs before someone could post.
After the community attacked them, they went silent again. The only lasting impact was to remove all of the mods who joined in the protest. I’m 90% certain it was an admin coup.
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Screenshots here
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Bruh,reddit admin are so close but so far…
Even though, some might not see that sub are safe until Alex are willing to address the situation and step down.
They’re not wrong to consider that the sub is compromised
We have mentioned all of this to Reddit’s team of course. However, their reply (so far) was that they believe u/Alexitine’s account was NOT hacked…
Because of Reddit’s reply, at the moment we are unable to fully remove u/Alexitine as top moderator sadly.I believe this is Stormfront’s doing. They got a warning from the glowies, and tried to topple down the subreddit using patsucc fundies.
Purge the Reactionaries
Happy to see you guys are handling those fucks. Hacked or not, that alexitine account is compromised.
Have you contacted the podcast trio about this? Is the subreddit officially affiliated with them? If so maybe it would be wise to coordinate with them and maybe make a backup plan of migrating the community to a new subreddit.
They’re not at all associated
