This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/DeepFake369 on 2025-01-21 20:14:15+00:00.
CW: Transphobia, transphobic slurs, other potentially offensive slurs. All slurs in question are either spoiler-marked or behind links; click at your own risk.
(I can’t believe I’m writing a post that isn’t Yu-Gi-Oh related, but I’ve fallen far too deep down this rabbit hole to leave this be. Furthermore, I’m just a lurker on Sufficient Velocity, have limited knowledge of its inner workings, and was not on-site when this event occurred; if anything I say here is incorrect, please let me know and I’ll fix it as soon as possible.)
I finally decided to give Worm (a popular dark superhero web serial from the early 2010s, known for its length, incredibly bleak worldbuilding, and many shades of gray) a shot a few months ago and fell in love with it. Soon afterward, I found my way to Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity, two of the major hubs for Worm fanfiction. While I have yet to post anything on either site (mostly due to laziness), one particular subforum on Sufficient Velocity caught my attention after I discovered it on accident through the r/WormFanfic subreddit: the Staff Communication subforum, which falls under the umbrella of Forum Governance. This subforum is known for handling two things: user requests for potential new features for the site, and commentary on tribunal appeals, which I’ll explain later.
Upon noticing one gigantic thread containing over 400 pages worth of responses regarding tribunal appeals (and a few smaller threads for later years before every published appeal got a separate thread), I decided to peek at it to see if it had anything interesting to read. Five years’ worth of potential material made it even more likely I’d find something engaging within.
Considering we’re here, let’s just say I found something rather interesting.
(One more thing: unless I see a user's gender, either in their profile or otherwise, I’m referring to each user mentioned here as “they”, because I’d rather not get someone’s gender objectively wrong, especially on this post covering this topic. However, I'm only human: if I miss something here or get something wrong, please let me know and I'll fix it as soon as possible.)
What is Sufficient Velocity?
In short, Sufficient Velocity is a well-known webforum that was created as an alternative to Spacebattles due to user dissatisfaction with how Spacebattles was run. In particular, when Sufficient Velocity was founded, Spacebattles was suffering from two major issues. One, the moderating staff were embroiled in a scandal for forcibly removing the long-standing and well-loved moderator Athene from her position, then trying to cover it up as her stepping away from the forum voluntarily. Furthermore, Spacebattles had been founded before the turn of the century and the site owner was refusing to upgrade its servers; the site’s age was starting to show, and users started wondering how long it would take before the site collapsed. As a result, Sufficient Velocity was born, designed to work around both issues (although Spacebattles persists to this day).
As such, it should be no surprise that Sufficient Velocity mirrors Spacebattles in many ways. The exact forums they use are a bit different, but their contents are the same. There’s a creative writing forum (each with a heavy emphasis on Worm fanfiction), news and politics forums, discussion and debate forums, role-playing forums, and all the rest. Sufficient Velocity’s rule enforcement is generally seen as a bit stricter than Spacebattles’ is, and the average user of Sufficient Velocity tends to lean a bit further left than the average user of Spacebattles (although that may have changed after the creation of The Sietch, a far-right leaning splinter forum that I’m not linking for obvious reasons), but the demographics aren’t too far removed from each other, and many people have accounts on both with no issues.
For the first five years of its life, Sufficient Velocity handled itself just fine. There were controversies and scandals here and there, but these were usually snuffed out rather quickly and didn’t contribute too much to the average user’s enjoyment of the site. Calling it a well-oiled machine was perhaps a bit disingenuous, but it definitely ran and didn’t look like it would need service anytime soon.
However, right at the end of 2019, a nasty scandal would take the site by storm, one that hopefully Sufficient Velocity never has to undergo again.
Trials and Tribulations
One of the more interesting features of Sufficient Velocity’s management (although this is also the case on Spacebattles as far as I know) is how it handles rule violations. Suppose a post reported to or otherwise seen by a moderator is determined to be violating Sufficient Velocity’s rules. In that case, it’ll be flagged by a banner denoting which rule it violated, and often the infracting moderator will post as such in the pertinent thread. However, no one is perfect; some rules are hard and fast, but many have subjective interpretations. Thus, users can appeal infractions they believe to be based on an incorrect or overly harsh interpretation of either the rule or the infracted post.
The appeals process works as follows:
- The user states their case following publicly available guidelines. They may do this themselves or obtain the services of an advocate.
- An arbitrator (this is a separate role from a moderator) looks at both the post that received the infraction and the user’s argument to determine whether to uphold, reduce, or overturn the initial penalty levied. (They can also increase the penalty. However, this is usually only done in extreme circumstances and/or as a response to the user’s conduct during their appeal process.)
- If the user (or sometimes, the other moderators) disagree with this decision, they can attempt to appeal to the Council, a group of volunteer staff members who are elected yearly.
- If the Council declines to hear this appeal, the process ends and the appeal remains unpublished. If they accept, the user (or moderators, depending on who’s appealing) have another opportunity to state their case. (As of more recently, except in particularly egregious cases the Council will always hear an appeal.)
- Each Council member gets to state their opinion on how the infraction should be handled. After each participating council member has stated their case or a predetermined number of days, whichever is shorter, the verdict is determined.
- The verdict is delivered. Usually, the majority opinion rules, with ties always going in favor of the user. If no clear majority exists, a reasonable middle ground is usually determined instead. Note how I said these things usually occur, because this will be important later.
Unlike on Spacebattles, most appeals that make it past Step 4 are available for the public to view; you don’t even need an account. There are a few types of infractions that inherently cause exceptions to this process, but they aren’t really relevant to the post, so I won’t be discussing them in detail here.
With the necessary context out of the way, let’s get to a time this procedure wasn’t followed, and all the unpleasantness that resulted.
It’s What My Character Would Do
Our story starts in the Creative Writing section. More specifically, the story WannaBee, a fairly popular Worm and Hazbin Hotel crossover written by RavensDagger, notable for having started when Hazbin Hotel was nothing more than a pilot episode. For a few chapters, it trucked on with minimal issues and no mods in sight. However, Chapter Six featured this exchange, which would be the spark that started the fire.
Khepri nodded. "Yes. By the way, who is Angel Dust. Beyond a pornstar spider person thing."
Vaggie rolled her eyes. "Just some wanna be dipshit whose head is too big for his own good. But some degenerates like seeing him get fucked online, so he struck it big. Traps are in right now."
"Traps?"
"Vaggie," Charlie warned. "We're trying to help Khepri, not corrupt her even more."
Khepri raised two hands in surrender. "I was just curious. He's setting up a pole in his room as we speak. Also, he brought a pig with him. A literal pig. I am not sure what the hotel's rules say about that."
Of note, “trap” is explicitly labeled a slur that’s forbidden to use to refer to someone on Sufficient Velocity. The standards for using such a slur in-story are a bit more relaxed (after all, between the Empire Eighty-Eight and Skidmark Worm has plenty of derogatory terms and swearing to go around), but that’s not how things went. Several users expressed concern that the slur was included without a warning and requested a disclaimer. Others argued that the term fit the setting and characters, and wasn’t nearly as offensive in-story as those users were making it out to be. This included the author, who replied to one of the users requesting a disclaimer with this:
We say fuck a...
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