DarkGidora said:
I thought SV was because a certain popular mod was announced as having resigned from staff--except they commented on the thread announcing their resignation that no, they never did that, management fired them, it turned into a forum sh*tstorm, and a bunch of SBers jumped ship?
Albeit the two origins aren't mutually exclusive, but the ex-mod I'm thinking of still has an active account here. The permabanned member starting their own SB knockoff has happened in the past.
This is indeed the case. The two origins are kind of mixed together. Lord Squishy made SV before the event with the popular member whom I shall not name because I believe they said that they didn't like to be dragged into the whole thing again each time it's retold. While SV existed beforehand, it was the events with the popular member that really gave it a kick.
At the time, SB was falling apart, the server was almost literally exploding, blackouts were a common thing, and there was the general impression that the staff were either incapable of helping or simply not doing it. At the time, that popular member was also staff, but had spent literally years working extremely hard to keep the forum together and as a result was generally well liked. Because they were an active moderator of the forum, there were also people who didn't much like them. These people kicked up a big fuss, and the admins at the time listened to them and forcibly retired the popular member. Now this in and of itself would not be too bad, it'd be bitter yes, but not the massive blow it would become.
Except that several more factors magnified it.
The popular member had recently come out as trans, and their reputation as a member of staff was, as far as I know, unblemished, so it looked like very much like as soon as that person came out as trans, they lost their position as staff. (I have enough faith in the old staff to think that this is rather untrue, but that's what it looked like at the time, and you can bet it didn't make things better.
The popular member wasn't actually given a choice to retire, and the staff posted a goodbye thread for them as if it was settled, all so quickly that they didn't even get a chance to respond. They logged off one day as staff, and the next day, they came online to see that it was announced that they had ''decided to retire''. Without actually being asked, mind you.
The admins didn't react well to the user backlash. In fact, I would say they reacted really, really badly. For a long time, they refused to admit any fault, and even then didn't seem to grasp why people were so upset. A literal quote on SV was ''this has happened before, it will die like all the others.'' (Hint, it didn't.)
Remember, the servers were dying at this point, the forum was down more than it was up, threads were limited to like 20 pages so the entire site didn't explode. It looked very much like the staff were picking on one of the few good things that the forum had left for little to no reason.
And lastly - and this one leads into most of the others - the staff were very disconnected from the userbase at this point. They hardly ever interacted, and were pretty much unknown anywhere except a few topics. This resulted in them having some pretty weird ideas and failing to properly be able to read the mood of the forum. They did not realise just how furious a lot of us were.
All of these things came together to create a mass exodus, which funnelled naturally to SV as it was already existing at this point, but rather small. As these problems were addressed one by one on SB, a lot of people came back, but by then, SV was already quite strongly established.
As for the differences between the two, as someone who posts on both, forum culture is actually really different, as well as having somewhat different focuses. SB is a general forum for the most part, but SV bills itself specifically as a creative forum with a focus on content. Its main claims to fame are its fanfic section and its quest section which I believe is actually now bigger than SB's own quest section.
It also uses an extremely different form of forum government, wherein the userbase is supposed to have some power and influence in the form of a council of elected users who actually have official power. This is ideally to prevent another situation where the staff gradually grow more and more disconnected from the rest of the forum.
EDIT: Very important, the staff that SB has now are NOT the same staff we had back then. I am not trying to reflect anything on the current administration, but more speaking from the perspective of someone who was actually at ground zero when it happened, and too an active interest in everything that happened.
