Change to the Directorate & a Statement Regarding GFL's Previous Owner

Hello everyone,

Yesterday afternoon, it came to our attention that a private string of messages was leaked from GFL’s Council chat to an outside party. These messages were sent by me mentioning that I would be creating a thread to outline and document all of Roy and related parties’ actions towards GFL, that being this thread. Benroy, former Director of Teams and Moderation Team Leader, came forward and admitted that it was him, taking full responsibility for his actions and has apologised. With that, Council has collectively decided to remove him from all of his positions in GFL, as well as blacklist him from regaining staff positions in the future due to his breach of the GFL Staff Code of Conduct.

I had sent these messages in the heat of the moment and thus they were not the most carefully worded. Honestly, I was very upset that these issues kept popping up every month and that it has always been us that have to explain ourselves in situations that we did not bring about. These messages were an over-exaggeration, my intention was to simply clear the air and document exactly what happened with receipts. However, I understand what I said was uncalled for and highly inappropriate, and for that I am sorry. 

With that, this thread will still perform its intended purpose; that of documenting Roy and related parties’ actions towards GFL in detail. Please do not hesitate to comment on the thread or reach out to any of us if you have any questions about any part of this, we would be more than happy to clarify anything.

As of late (and ever since it happened), Council and myself have been receiving a lot of messages from people about what happened with Christian Deacon (Roy). Particularly, this has started happening a lot more as he has been pushing the "Ex-Owner/Founder of GFL, join me!" message quite a lot more to get people to join his initiatives. We've realized that people are not getting the full picture of what actually has happened when it's asked about, and while I can try to individually explain every detail of what happened, it is best that we have a public thread about everything that happened, so here goes.

This thread is divided into a few parts to address common questions and portions of the situation. We have pretty much nothing to hide, so just about everything we can share will be published without editing - any part of this that does have edits or missing information will be mentioned and clarified. Each section will be highlighted with a heading briefly describing the event in detail, as well as giving a date that it occurred on or around.
Salad and I wrote this post in coordination, with the assistance of Aurora after recalling as much as we collectively could, with as many examples and as much "proof" as we were able to add.

Also, we would like to make it clear that the only people who have been banned by us that relate to this situation are those that have done something to earn themselves a ban. We are not handing out bans solely for the fact people are moving to a new community. We don't do that. When you try to wreck shit on your way out, or come back only to stir up trouble, we will.

Why are you only sharing this now and not when it happened?

Apart from the reasoning above, we did not want to publish any of this before now for the following reasons:

• When this happened, Roy was still part owner of GFL. While we worked on separating him from the community, we remained silent as we did not need him retaliating. (More on this later).
• I ultimately made the decision not to publish it unless absolutely necessary because I did not want to be engaging in a fight between GFL and Roy, regardless of his feelings towards us (More on this later). I felt it would be better for everyone involved on both sides to move on and focus on more productive things rather than continue to be emotionally affected by what happened.

Note: Any mentions of Roy’s new community have been redacted from some of this post. We do not want anyone stirring up trouble for either community, so please don't do that.
 

With all of that said, we will begin with the early stages of Roy's transfer of ownership to Aurora.

Roy Transfers Ownership to Aurora - July 13, 2021
On July 13th, 2021, Roy decided to depart from GFL by his own choice, transferring the majority of ownership to Aurora at this time. There were issues regarding the Paypal account we used for GFL’s donations/finances, as well as other residual things such as ownership of the web domains, IP block, ASN, and Cloudflare, meaning that Roy still retained a large amount of access to key aspects of the community.

With this transfer of ownership, Aurora made the decision to dismantle our preexisting Anycast system (created and maintained solely by Roy for its lifetime, causing many issues during the time it was in use). This was done after consulting with Council previously about concerns with the network and was followed through on after ownership was transferred to Aurora.
 

Roy Returns to GFL as a Developer - September 8, 2021
On September 5th of 2021, Roy decided he wanted to become a Developer for GFL. On his application he notes that it would be a reduced amount of responsibility for him, and he still had a drive to help. His application was swiftly accepted on the 7th of September, and he joined the team. From that point on his contributions to GFL were limited and mostly included participating in a few helpful discussions within our GFL Teams Discord.
 

Roy Becomes a Technical Administrator for GFL - December 19, 2021
Aurora and Roy had been discussing the potential for Roy to return as a Tech Admin . This was due to his vast experience with the backend of GFL, as well as to help alleviate the load for Aurora. This position would be majority backend work, meaning he would still not need to deal with any of the front end drama and staff of GFL at large. He was promoted on December 19th, 2021.

Roy Announces the Formation of his New Community - December 2021 onward from the 19th
On December 17th 2021, Roy began to formally vocalize his opinions as he was not happy with the state of GFL. He created a thread highlighting his concerns and some suggestions on how to address them for the betterment of GFL. The thread was mostly well received, however, many of the suggestions were not acted on due to concerns shared by the community – especially with regards to changes in the staff structure. However, there have been many discussions since this post, attempting to address Council's issues, which we all can agree, there are some.  

On the 20th of December, Roy announced the start of his new community with the goal of being a simpler, more “relaxed” experience compared to GFL. We felt this to be completely fine and our relations with Roy and his community remained positive for quite some time after this.
 

Salad and Roy’s Discord DM Discussion - March 22, 2022
Salad reached out to Roy via Discord DMs to inquire about two GFL staff members (TheThirdReaper and Muse, both managed GFL Prop Hunt at the time). This was of course when Roy and Salad were still on good terms with each other. Both managers had shown interest in working with Roy in his new community, specifically on their Prop Hunt server. Roy proceeded to inform Salad that he was unsure of what their plans were as he had been “out of it” during their discussion the previous night. He then continued on, noting that he does not think that a good relationship between GFL and his community is possible. He finishes his initial message Stating that we can ban him and others from GFL if we felt that they were acting maliciously, and that he would not be hurt by it, nor would it affect his personal relationship with Salad and the others who could make that call, but would understand if the other side felt differently.

Salad explained that there were no plans to ban anyone unless things got out of hand, and that he was speaking with TheThirdReaper to get her side of things, and would be speaking to Muse afterwards. Roy went on to restate his thoughts from his previous message, adding that he felt he did not do well in GFL and wanted to make up for his personal shortcomings with his new community. He then confirmed that he was still proceeding with his community, regardless of GFL’s decisions. 

Salad concluded the conversation by reiterating his message saying that there is “no malice towards you unless things go south and things get worse from here on out. I still value our friendship a ton and wouldn't want either of us to do anything to damage that, but I along with several others like Infra hold GFL pretty close and we don't want to see any attacks on our community in terms of poaching staff and whatnot, which I don't think happened here, but I would hate to see that happen again, especially from your new community. I trust that you won't do anything insane, and I know that this new community is important to you.”

Screenshots of the conversation:

The Beginning of the Prop Hunt Incident Involving TheThirdReaper - March 28, 2022

On the 28th of March, TheThirdReaper, former GFL Prop Hunt Manager, left GFL to move to Roy’s new community. Her reasoning for the move was our lack of A2S_info caching (ping spoofing) and more specifically a lack of population on GFL’s Prop Hunt server. Due to Roy’s aggression towards us at the time, we gave her the choice of either remaining in GFL or having to leave if she wanted to be a part of both communities. We also did not believe that she could effectively manage both of the servers simultaneously, as one of the two would obviously get neglected. While we dislike having to give our staff such ultimatums, we were effectively forced to with Roy’s growing aggression towards us. (This was before Roy eventually threatened us.) After a few days, she decided that she would be joining the new community and leaving GFL, to which Infra thanked her and wished her well in her future endeavors.

We will circle back to this situation and develop it more later on in this post.
 

Screenshots of the conversations:

Roy is Banned from GFL for Threatening GFL’s Solvency - April 5, 2022
On April 5th, 2022, Roy proceeded to have a meltdown over the growing state of affairs between GFL. This alcohol and weed induced meltdown happened mainly on the GFL forums as well as in Roy's new community's Discord server. The frustration of GFL Management stemming from having members of our staff teams show up within his new community, as well as other issues had created a bit of tension between both sides, however Infra, Salad, and Aurora were still on good terms with Roy until this. At the start of the video linked below, Roy mentions something about a voice call, which we are confident is referring to a call within Roy's new community that Infra and Salad joined to speak with him in (with no malice intended, literally just to talk and say hey) a day or so earlier. We feel this is important to include because it seemed to be part of the frustration Roy was having, despite being friendly and normal during said voice chat.

We would like to touch a little bit more on the aforementioned public scene Roy caused as well. Roy spammed our chatbox (Which was previously on our homepage) as well as an old forum thread of his. This extended into his new community's Discord server as well, where he begins to ask to be banned from GFL, among other things.

Forums Spam:

Discord Stuff:

Following this, Aurora, Infra, and Roy all got into a private Discord call to discuss the situation. We will be linking a recording of the call below.

Below is a rough set of timestamps noting key parts of the video linked. These timestamps are also available on the YouTube video itself, so feel free to open it in a new window and click through. A few important things we would like to note are as follows:

• While Roy was incredibly high and drunk during this call, he has since admitted that he stands by what he said during this call.
• Infra’s microphone was not captured by the recording software, however he did not speak very much, and what he did say is noted and paraphrased below based on his memory of the call. All of his replies are responded to accurately by Roy, leaving little room for any errors in Infra’s recollection. 

00:30 - Roy reinforces that he wants to be banned. Infra said “Why” immediately following this.
00:55 - Roy states that he wants to be banned as well as says that he will transfer the PayPal account to Aurora if we fulfill his request, citing that his ban will kickstart his new community.
01:25 - Roy says that the things he did in GFL were “nothing” and that we can delete all of his stuff on our website as it “does not mean shit” to him.
02:13 - Roy says that he has no malicious intent and that he will be relieved to be banned.
03:13 - Roy repeats his sentiment on wanting to be banned and the motivation it will give him.
04:15 - Roy kicks it into high gear with his tirade, repeating “Ban me” multiple times. 
04:24 - Infra says “Christian” to which Roy replies “Yeah?”. Infra says “Christian…” again to which he replies “Shut the fuck up.” Infra then replies with something along the lines of “I am not going to ban you.” To which Roy continues repeating “Ban me” multiple times.
For the next little bit, Roy proceeds to be hypocritical on the way GFL is currently run compared to how he ran it.
06:10 - Roy mentions issues in regards to paying GFL’s taxes as well as his own expenses, to which Aurora replies that he can take the amount of money he needs to pay those taxes. He then continues on his “ban me” tirade.
06:50 - Roy declares that he and Infra are not friends anymore, and he has seen “chat logs” of Infra “talk-shitting” him, which we finally learned some of the details of in his apology document that we will touch on later. He follows up by loudly restating “BAN ME!” and that his new community will “BE TOP!”. After this he proceeds to discuss his new community and how it is superior to GFL, incorrectly noting the time it took us to release one of our servers, likely due to his sustained absence in GFL during that time.
09:54 - Roy restates that he has no malicious intent, and is not going to do anything to harm GFL beyond spamming our website.
12:35 - Infra says something along the lines of “Christian, can we just talk about this?” to which Roy replies “Go ahead.” Infra then says “We’re not banning you.” and Roy replies “Why not?” and proceeds to question why he is not getting banned.
13:16 - Infra replies something to the effect of “Even if you were new, I wouldn’t ban you.” Roy replies “I don’t care, ban me.” and Infra repeats his sentiment of not wanting to ban him, to which Roy replies asking why he won’t ban him.
13:52 - Infra says “Roy.” Roy says “Yeah?” Then Infra says that this is no reason to ban him, to which Roy replies “Ban me, I don’t care, It is.”
14:31 - Infra says “Roy, we aren’t going to ban you, I know you think we hate you, but we don’t want to do it” Roy replies that Infra is fake.
14:45 - Roy tells Aurora to give him the permissions he would need to ban himself.
14:56 - He reiterates that he will ban himself and that it’s “his” community. He then proceeds to say that he can “go into the database I can shut the PayPal off right now, just give me fucking permissions to ban myself! I will right fucking now.”
15:30 Aurora begins to try to level with Roy, however he is deep into his tirade and will not let her speak, proceeding to yell about how GFL isn’t even really his anymore.
16:07 Aurora tries to speak again, only to be met with Roy screaming “STOP!” numerous times, begs for permissions, and then quickly shifts his tone to address Aurora’s concerns.
16:23 Aurora offers to ban Roy, to which he replies “Just do it. In the database, I don’t give a shit.” to which Aurora finally replies “It is done.”
 

We would like to emphasize that this decision was only made to protect the safety of GFL, including it's finances. When presented with threats such as these, our hands became tied and we had very little choice not knowing what Roy was going to do with all of this unbridled anger he was holding, and the ability to do what he threatened us with. Without these threats, we would not have banned him.

After the confrontation, Aurora worked on moving most of GFL’s savings from Roy’s PayPal (We say “most” because Aurora delegated the funds required for Roy to pay GFL related taxes) to a separate business account to help ensure Roy will not be able to act on his threats at any point. Infra, Salad, and Aurora spent a few hours ensuring that our new PayPal account was functioning properly and that we adjusted our donation system to reflect those changes.

Note: All of this was done with the explicit consent of Roy

Over the course of the next month, a lot of effort was spent by Aurora, Infra, and Salad to remove any remaining access Roy had to GFL. Roy is now no longer involved with GFL in any capacity and is permanently banned.

Roy’s Initial Apology to Salad in Discord DMs and Follow Up Messages - June 7, 2022 and June 8, 2022
On June 7th, 2022, Roy messaged Salad with an apology for the things he has said to and about him. Roy acknowledges his shitty behavior and his entire attitude towards Salad and many of the others, however he admits that he does not regret what he said about/did towards Infra and GFL as a whole. Salad proceeded to question what Infra did to deserve this, to which Roy explains as he did during the voice call on April 5th. His message echoes most of what he said during that call. He acknowledges what he said and did during that call, and refers to himself as a “huge threat” to GFL. Knowing that his future responses may elicit a negative response, Salad regains the last bit of access that Roy still retained, that being the GFL YouTube account two factor authentication. After doing that, Salad proceeded to shut down Roy’s incorrect and evidently baseless claims, as well as shut down and rejected the apology completely.

Roy, clearly not expecting the reply he received, proceeded to revert back to his attitude he had during the voice call with Aurora and Infra, continuing the idea that we are trying to compete with his brand new community. Salad quickly shut down the idea that there is a “rivalry” between the two communities, stating that it’s just something Roy came up with to make him feel better about his past behavior towards GFL and its management. The rest of that day’s messages are just a loop of “We’re competing now” and Salad shutting it down.

Hi guys, Salad here. Decided to write this part entirely from my perspective instead of having it from a top down view like the rest of this. The night of the apology that we just touched on, Infra and I met with our CS:S BHop manager, as we saw that he had somehow gained an interest in helping out in Roy’s new community. We quickly informed him of Roy’s behavior during the past few months, and he had no idea the extent of what Roy had done.

He decided to distance himself from Roy’s new community, which I imagine is what caused Roy to return to my DMs. In these new messages, he mostly repeated his same arguments of competition and how GFL sucks yada yada yada. I decided it wasn’t worth feeding into his rants that night, and have not spoken to him since the first apology on the 7th of June.

Note: This was one of the key moments, along with TheThirdReaper incident that led us to fully understand that there was indeed poaching being attempted, and in some cases succeeding.

Screenshots of the conversations:

The Conclusion of the Prop Hunt Incident Involving TheThirdReaper - July 8, 2022

On the 8th of July, TheThirdReaper made an essential Steam Workshop collection private. This collection was being actively used on our GFL Prop Hunt server, and the move caused the server to break for several hours. When reached out to about the issue, Infra was completely ignored by TheThirdReaper for 48 hours, when she was then contacted again to no avail. 

Due to her purposefully ignoring attempts at contact when approached about the issue, she was permanently community banned for attempting to sabotage the server, a direct breach of the GFL Staff Code of Conduct - ironically, she responded to Infra mere seconds after the ban was placed.
 

TheThirdReaper choosing to respond to Infra only after the ban was placed, instead of the contact attempts made 48 hours prior, is further evidence that her intention was to not communicate with us. While we definitely should have replaced the Steam Workshop collection upon her departure, it was decided that there was no need as she had been a member of the community for several years and had quite a high level of trust, as well as the fact that we were still in the process of revamping the Prop Hunt staff team and server. Furthermore, Steam Workshop collections are a pain to manage with no form of separate access control, making it rather difficult to have shared collections that are secure in terms of access without being highly inconvenient for developers and managers.

Additionally, while this issue was being investigated, it was discovered by Salad that Toxic, another former Prop Hunt Server Manager, had been hosting the in-game loading screen on a host completely separate from any GFL operated host. You can read more on this issue here as it is not relevant to the main points of this thread.

Infra’s Response to Roy’s Apology Letter - July 18, 2022
On the 18th of July, after the events highlighted above, Roy drafted an apology letter directed at a few people in GFL. You may read it here.

There are a few points in this letter that I would like to address:

• He mentions that he felt GFL was viewing him as poaching which accelerated a lot of the tensions being faced at the time. I would like to clarify that this is not us simply “viewing” it as poaching, it is poaching. There have been several accounts of Roy personally contacting several members of our staff (As well as those who have gone from GFL to his new community) with the sole intention of convincing them to join his initiatives. I would also like to note that GFL does not often care about staff helping/contributing to other communities - personally, I believe doing so is a great way to meet more people with common interests and learn more about the things they’re interested in. However, there is a difference when people are heavily involved with those that have, on several accounts, attacked us at any given opportunity. 
• As mentioned earlier about Roy being shit-talked by myself, he clarifies in this letter that my “shit-talking” was from my grievances with our previous Anycast network. It is worth mentioning that I was far from the only person frustrated with this, and as Roy himself states in his letter, I always followed my grievances with a side of understanding. 
• While Roy has accounted for him being heavily intoxicated when doing the things he did, he has noted on several occasions while sober that he stands by everything he did and does not regret anything, invalidating just about everything he apologised for in this letter. In fact, he invalidates his apology quite heavily with this quote from his letter: “I don’t regret having my account banned because I did truly want that and I still stand by that to this day as the last part of the “burnt bridges” process.”

Salad’s Response to Roy’s Apology Letter - July 18, 2022
Infra already touched on the majority of what I think in his first point, however, I just want to reiterate that I still do not accept any of these apologies. The things that Roy did up until these apologies combined with what has transpired after both leave me with zero confidence that he was ever truly sincere.

Final Message to Roy from Infra and Salad
We know you’re going to read this, and we just want to make some things explicitly clear as we know you’ll be motivated to respond to this by contacting us, directly or indirectly:

• We do not care for a response from you on this. Please do not bother contacting any of us or trying to reply to this thread by evading your ban. 
• Please do not bother Aurora, Council, or ANY member of GFL to try to get a response through to us. 
• There is nothing you can say to change our minds about the things you did. At the end of the day, nothing will reverse the things you have done, please leave it at that and move on.