User blog:RRabbit42/Timeline of the vandalism

For those who wonder why it is necessary to go through such unusual measures as removing the rights of all former leaders of this wiki, or are just curious as to what happened, here is a summary of what has happened over the past year.

September 2010 Wikia announces a change in the skin's appearance and functionality for the wiki, saying it is mandatory that everyone change within a month.

Many people objected. The admins here begin discussing moving. They want to take everything with them, so they start posting "we're moving" messages.

Wikia tells them they can "fork" when they leave, which means they can continue on from that point on a new site, but the existing content has to stay. The licensing all content is covered by allows for this. Things start getting hostile, so a few people are blocked and some user rights are removed.

November 2010 - Summer 2011 After locating a new site to host their wiki, the former admins begin vandalizing this wiki, to poison the well so that no one can use it. The vandalism includes:
 * Statements of "Death to Wikia", "Wikia is evil", "Wikia must be punished", etc.
 * Personal attacks on Wikia staff members and volunteers.
 * Sexual slurs, profanity and other troll/hate comments.
 * Falsely telling people they are blocked to force them to go to the new site.
 * Actually blocking people to force them to go to the new site.
 * Hypocracy by saying "come to our new site which doesn't have vandalism" (or as much) when they themselves are the ones doing the vandalism.
 * Hypocracy by blocking people for vandalism on the new wiki while engaging in vandalism here.
 * Taunting the admins who had not left yet and Wikia staff, saying they can't be stopped.
 * Abuse of administrator privileges by promoting accounts to admin status so those accounts could be used for vandalism.
 * Creating accounts that are similar to those used by Wikia staff and volunteers, so edits will appear to be coming from an official Wikia source.
 * Forging messages with the name of a Wikia staff member or volunteer.
 * Using bots for vandalism, including using several at one time for simultaneous vandalism.
 * Offering bribes of admin rights to people so they will come to the new wiki.
 * Lying to one of the admins who had not left, tricking him into granting admin rights, and then using those new admin accounts for vandalism.
 * Vandalism also occurs on other sites because Wikia hosts those wikis and they hate Wikia.

Over 100 accounts and IP addresses are used for the vandalism, including several existing accounts of the former admins.

While this is going on, the company they had chosen to host the new wiki has a major server crash. It takes several weeks to recover but some of the wikis that moved there lost all their data and didn't recover. Search begins for yet another site to be the host.

Summer - Fall 2011 Vandalism has tapered off as the second new site gets underway, but still happens occasionally here. There are also a few more attempts to recruit people to come to the new wiki. One of the former admins, the same one who had been tricked into granting admin rights and is now a part of the new site, stops by here to make some updates and to complain about the content of one page.

Summary Their attitude can be summed up as "Wikia is evil and that justifies our attacks on it".

This is the mentality of extremists and fanatacists. They don't care who else is hurt so long as Wikia is. The fact that they use the same tactics that they do not permit on their own wiki proves that their belief of "our place is better" is a lie.

This is why we need to remove the rights of those who left. We can remove the admin and rollback rights ourselves, but the bureaucrat and bot rights will have to be removed by Wikia. Until that happens, all of the accounts need to be blocked.