never forget: the great twitch.tv furdrama of 2013

Myself and others of the Twitch community are upset by the actions of your lead admin, Russell (Horror).

Horror is homosexual and affirms that he is a furry. While this is not inherently wrong or a problem, the fact that he tries to push his beliefs onto the Twitch community through blatant emotes from furry-pornography (NightLight), and constantly tweets about sensitive homosexual issues on what he uses as an official Twitch account, is a problem.

He approves furry-emotes, but denies other's emotes with no prior knowledge of what the emote is from. One example was in Cirno_TV's stream, in which he tried to remove a Touhou emote without knowing the legality of the Touhou franchise. Only through the help of Cirno's chat were they able to prove the openness of which Touhou allows the use of it's characters. This is something he could have easily found himself through a google search - instead he heads into his chat and tells him his emote will be removed. Is this how a professional twitch admin should act?

Another more recent example is with Cyghfer. While the metal slime emote he had was from Dragon Quest and is understandably removed, he also removed all of his other emotes with no reasoning - he doesn't know where they are from and obviously did no research into it.

Is this how emotes should be decided? "@HorrorTheCat: I'm adding a @manvsgame emote and no one can stop me" (https://twitter.com/HorrorTheCat/status/402659820739653632)

We, the Twitch community, have no idea why you would allow Horror to represent Twitch.tv. We want him removed.

I wish people could stop focusing on LOLFURRYDRAMA and just focus on the actual facts:
Horror is a shit mod who abuses his power; this has been an issue before (see EvilSnurDeeps) (yes this is a fact)
Cyghfer got all his emotes removed based on some takedown request from someone, for being "inappropriate" or for copyright issues. I can't comment on that because I don't know what the emotes in question were or how that relates to the rest of the issue. (Were they furry emotes too? Apparently one of them is shown here: https://imgur.com/k7Awa7V)
Duke_Bilgewater got banned for joking about the origin of the NightLight emote in response to this. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BZfHH2BCEAAstit.png
People got banned for just complaining about Horror in chats/streams
16 hours later, Twitch has yet to give any feedback on the duration of these bans. Only one admin has dared to discuss them at all. The ones that causes the most backlash (Werster and Duke) have been unbanned, dozens of others are still gone.
This was posted to their official Twitter feed around the beginning of all this https://imgur.com/qVIUxAb
Peaches_ got banned for having "Using my keyboard REMOVE HORROR" in his title (playing Typing Of the Dead, so literally removing horror). Another admin had forcibly changed it and warned him not to change it back. Someone later changed it to "horrible zombies". Peaches__ was then banned after going to bed.
http://www.twitch.tv/profile/werster is a 404, i.e. the account was completely removed (EDIT: correct URL is http://www.twitch.tv/werster/profile - notice the swapped words - which also redirects to TOS violation page.)
http://www.twitch.tv/werster/ reads "The community has closed this channel due to terms of service violations.", i.e. the channel itself was shut down; it's not (only) an IP ban. It's apparently back up now, loading in some browsers but not others, which is probably a cache issue. Edit: down again, in all browsers now.
Werster apparently actually made a living off his subscriber money, so to have his channel shut down is more than a minor annoyance. It's effectively equivalent to being fired from your job for complaining about something stupid a manager did.
Longer explanation at http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=LLUNmnUN (new URL)
The NightLight emote has now been removed
Werster's channel was back for a moment, and chat was displaying a message: "You must Facebook Connect to send messages to this channel. You can Facebook Connect in your twitch settings under the connections tab." i.e. requiring you to link your Twitch account with Facebook to be able to chat i.e. giving Twitch a fuckton of your personal information i.e. RIP Twitch.
/r/gaming mods are nazis and deleted every single comment in the other thread so I reposted this here.
FrankerFaceZ added peach emotes which may or may not be related to Peaches__' ban.
Cruxit was just banned (not surprising): https://imgur.com/zuEuis9 - notice subs mode despite not having subs (you can do this to your own channel but why)
Twitch admins are now going into every channel that supports the anti-Horror movement, turning subscriber-only mode on (in channels that don't have subscribers), and then nuking them. Dugongue has now been nuked and licensetobill is under attack. https://i.imgur.com/9cqRYST.png https://i.imgur.com/z3fOaAi.png https://i.imgur.com/bs7gtB6.png
Licensetobill's chat is now in perma-subs-only mode and admins are bitching at him because he got raided https://i.imgur.com/toiXFhc.png https://i.imgur.com/HX2cJLr.png Meanwhile Horror still doesn't believe in censorship https://i.imgur.com/uEmsIu7.png
I can't keep up with all this drama, so many screenshots to crop
https://twitter.com/TwichTVSupport/status/403062887008067584 Notice the name, this is NOT Twitch's real account.
ChalkedJanitor is banned: https://i.imgur.com/NHsB5Qf.jpg
I'm also hearing JesusFromTheBible, PoodleSkirt and SlayerOfBabies got banned.
Adam_AK is refusing to stream until this is fixed. https://i.imgur.com/AvrKcua.png
Someone is now banning anyone who posts links/info in http://www.twitch.tv/zodiacsmash
el_poncho_grande is now banned: https://2img.net/r/ihimizer/img22/1765/9rkw.png
zeldalove is now banned: https://imgur.com/u56Deii https://images.4chan.org/vg/src/1384986720930.png
Twitch is now down for maintenance, although stream pages and chats are still working if you don't refresh. https://i.imgur.com/4ijeqmK.png
"Site is undergoing maintenance. If you're already connected (logged in), you should be fine."
Maintenance #1 complete. We will run another short maintenance at approx 4p PST.
squidd__ was just banned by Kanthes, who refused to explain how exactly his title was a form of harassment. Screenshots here: https://imgur.com/a/cNeYm - notice the part where he asks the admin for an explanation and never gets it.
qwerty1605 is now nuked, screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/tptuX
Reddit keeps reverting my post to older versions when I try to edit.
https://i1.minus.com/i2aFIu2Ro7TQl.png updated image summary. I didn't make this.
RIP SnowyV2: https://i.imgur.com/7fGsshu.png https://i.imgur.com/UsXHtLJ.png
Better screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/v6NqGMg.jpg showing again asking to explain how the title is harassing anyone and getting no response
RIP cptpoopfist: https://i.imgur.com/3e4rNhe.png
RIP spahcrab_: https://i.imgur.com/qoplgUr.png
Werster's channel is loading again and he's speaking in chat, but it's still stuck in Facebook mode, and his sub button is gone. https://i.imgur.com/AuxoLkS.png
Even if I were willing to use Facebook I would never give Twitch access to so much personal info. Fuck that shit.
Now hearing timesthelegallimit got banned even though he complied with the demand to change his title.
RIP rilagin, though it took having REMOVE HORROR in the title and streaming porn for a while, lol.
Werster is getting shit reinstated, but his chat is currently still full of suckups and an admin who appears to still be banning anyone who complains https://i.imgur.com/QDc8ygw.png
RIP Xkeeper_, went down in a blaze of glory. https://imgur.com/a/5SISd
Abahbob was forced to shut down his stream, and everyone in chat was timed out for some reason: https://imgur.com/a/6UP4D
https://imgur.com/cEF8e1a This happened, but it looks like a troll, and not an actual deleted post. Time will tell. It's real. Every thread in /r/gaming about this is being nuked.
https://imgur.com/t5RiV3Y This is GOLD. They're now asking the Reddit admins to nuke this thread too and admitting it's censorship. https://2img.net/r/hpimg15/pics/489706Twitchcensorship1.jpg https://2img.net/r/hpimg15/pics/399013Butthatgeniuscallsitcencorship.jpg
RIP spahcrab_ https://i.imgur.com/HoDFUXO.png
C0urtney admits that, despite taking part in banning people for complaining about Horror, she has no fucking idea why people are complaining: https://i.imgur.com/SOBtsGA.png
71% agree that Horror was out of line: https://i.imgur.com/rOlRttA.png
Admin C0urtney is in Abahbob's chat replying to people in an extremely robotic fashion. Nobody's been able to confirm she's not a robot. https://imgur.com/usbZHzu She doesn't respond to anything said in stream, only in chat. She suggests we all go purchase support to complain: https://i.imgur.com/usbZHzu.png
Werster was NOT banned again, his computer just crashed. But he's no longer with us and would rather brownnose admins since his stream is his only income.
Thanks to everyone PMing me these shots, this has spread too far for me to keep track of on my own.
For those wondering, going to /tos_violation on a non-banned channel does NOT show the "channel closed" message. Try it on http://www.twitch.tv/cosmowright/tos_violation - you just get the stream page. So no, Werster is not unbanned.
This topic is being censored in /r/gaming. https://imgur.com/h7gs2us
Another nice image summary: https://i.imgur.com/6eUPa5o.png
https://i.imgur.com/4nH0q7e.jpg "Definitely don't want this all over Reddit. That would be hell."
36 hours later, Twitch has finally issued an apology. But there are still a lot of questions they haven't answered. They also aren't posting it on Twitch itself. (Because then more people might become aware of their fuckup!)
/r/gaming mods have yet to say anything as far as I'm aware.
Horror is still on staff. Only "removed from public facing moderation". Other admins who participated in the mass bannings have not even been mentioned.
Instead of, say, actually dealing with these issues, Twitch has been spending their time working on an anti-Adblock system. However, it's trivially bypassed.
Xkeeper is now unbanned. I don't know about anyone else but I'd assume they are too. Let me know. (I'd check, but just going to their channel pages doesn't tell you if they're IP banned, banned from chat, etc.) There are still a lot of unanswered questions in the apology thread.
Dugongue is still banned. I think he was one of the ones participating in actual harassment, but I don't remember exactly. (I regret not saving the images people were spreading that showed people saying transphobic things. I didn't bother to save them because they weren't showing what Twitch was doing, but it would have been good to keep a record of who was doing things actually worthy of a ban, too.)
I'm now told everyone except rilagin (who had been streaming porn) and Dugongue is unbanned.
I'm not even sure where the whole furry thing even comes from (NightLight came from porn? who cares) but it's really just distracting from the issue that Horror has no place being admin.
I'll keep editing this post as I learn more.
Also since everything in the other thread was deleted I'll link the screenshots I posted there too:
https://i.imgur.com/em6v1RR.png "More "damage control" on Twitter"
https://i.imgur.com/G31ATTe.png "oh my god"
https://i.imgur.com/7nwYl4u.png "and yes, Leo is his BF"
https://i.imgur.com/XVZH2zp.jpg Werster's channel loading in Chromium but not Firefox
unfortunately I can't recover anyone else's posts. But /u/Sharun can: https://i.imgur.com/s7YZbSE.png and I can't type.
<&Inuyasha> ".@TwitchTVSupport Would you mind explaining how long the suspensions you've been handing out today are for"
<&Inuyasha> this is apparently offensive enough to be worth a block
<@Treeki> I bet that if that thread was in r/gaming, the comments would be a total crapfest
<Inuyasha> can't exist in r/gaming
<Inuyasha> mods censoring it
Even other furries are pissed off at him:
<xxx> you know, it's not just the shit moderation that's annoying
<xxx> the fact that Horror brought his furry stuff into the site and caused drama
<xxx> that reflects poorly on all furries
<xxx> look at all the furry hate it generated
<xxx> he's not just a shit admin, he's a shit furry
<xxx> making the rest of us all look bad
<zz> that pissed me off quite a bit too
For those wondering what "furry" is: https://i.imgur.com/aOh46bT.png (slightly NSFW, but censored)
TL;DR https://i.imgur.com/6eUPa5o.png

sixty second rice wrote:can I get a summary

all I see is some drama with a literal gay furry
But what was it truly about

pvints viubladan wrote:

sixty second rice wrote:can I get a summary

all I see is some drama with a literal gay furry
But what was it truly about

it was about a shitty twitch mod who censored and banned someone for making a joke about an icon he forced on everybody that was of his fursona or his boyfriend's fursona and which originated in a porn comic and which quickly spiraled into a movement to get that shitty mod removed

shit hit the fan pretty quick and this fairly inconseqential drama eventually caused the entire twitch staff to  back the mod despite him being totally in the wrong according to literally ~90% of people, something which also resulted in them going full damage control to a point where they censored the fuck out of /r/gaming and twitch.tv so bad that the entire fucking world turned against them basically

they eventually had to apologize and gave up trying to damage control, but the dude still kept his power in some capacity (he cant interact with users anymore tho) and i dont think twitch has ever recovered

LKE wrote:gay thread