I don't know that I ever saw the last message I wrote on this forum being an outright challenge to a moderation panel I myself have done my best to diligently serve for as long as I have.  chances are that, if you're one of the lucky ones who actually gets to see this message in its unedited entirety you will also see my account has been banned later on, as a message has recently gone up stating that anyone found voicing their opinions, personal takes, or factual gathering  on this particular situation will, for all intents and purposes be punished rather heavy handedly.  if you do see it though, remember the following:
1.  You all have made up the forum with your conversations, it should not exist as a platform for only a select few to declare their own side of the story, only to have closed topics or ban people for daring to civilly suggest that all is not as it seems.  Take note of the word civilly, as I do not condone riots or uncivil protest be taken against any member of this site or, most importantly, the moderation panel.
2.  I'm stepping down for this reason and a few others, not least of which is a set of doublestandards I have seen within the moderation panel but which at present many if not all of them are choosing to ignore.
3.  I can with a clear conscience state that I sincerely have nothing to lose by posting what I'm posting at present as in my mind, I've already lost everything I'm going to lose given, A, the forum is no longer the place it once was, B, the time I've spent out here is time I cannot get back and, C, whoever decides to depreciate whatever material I've willingly submited will more than likely do so because they feel I have joined one side over another in an attempt to make myself more poppular, which is far from my goal.
When I signed up to be a moderator, I did so in an attempt to be helpful to the community as a whole, not to a select few.  Over the past three weeks, I can honestly say that this is, overall, what I feel the moderation panel has been gearing up for behind the scenes.  To the community, they have done their best to present themselves as well organized as possible, while acting within the mailing list as if this is a chess game in which the best moves are going to score decisive victories for the panel as a whole.
If, in your view, this post makes me a coward who simply opted to backstab the team I signed up for, you're entitled to that.  Before you jump to that conclusion though, I want you to take a few things into consideration, which I am going to carefully lay out for your attention and careful contemplation.
On Wednesday, June 22, 2016, I received an email concerning a situation in which at least one female gamer was being stalked on a game called Survive The Wild.  As I learned later, the origins of this situation date to a much earlier time and were brought to light by the user lori21.  In a post dated 03-09-2016 on the topic "A Warning to all who play survive the wild," Dark wrote, "Lori is a long standing and reliable member of this community who has been around for quite some time and generally is not inclined to make up such allegations against others on a whim, so I am inclined to believe her, particularly about the threats and cyber stalking."  Interestingly enough, in the email written on the 22nd of June, he wrote, "I do appologise if this sounds a little harsh, but frankly I'm getting rather pissed at people's instant assumption that anyone claiming to be victimized must be wrong just because "Walter is a good mod who gives out in game items." The reason I find this interesting is that this is in all reality a full on admission that favoritism did to some extent or another occur, whichever way you wish to spin it.  Whether you choose to believe he acted because he saw the one as a vulnerable female and the other as a cowardly male willing to prey on any vulnerable female, or you take a stab in the other direction and assume that the two are better friends than they let on, the fact still stands that the female, a reliable member of the forum is ok in making suggestions, while the male, a reliable member of STW and one who gained a following on the forum, was not.  One was allowed to defend herself privately with the assistance of at least one other voice; the other for all his public defense, was not.  This mentality was earlier emphasised in post 65 on the same topic, dated March 10th.  "Were this just normal bad behaviour on the forum or disturbing the peace I generally would give a warning first as people know, but when people (long time members in fact), are telling me they don't feel safe, then something needs to be done."

On the 23rd, a day after my limited knowledge of the situation came to my attention, Aprone sent an email in which he opens, "Hmmm, Dark it seems I may have been given information that you were not given.  Because we are working under the assumption that everything said here stays only within the circle of moderators, I'll fill in a few things that I think were kept from you."  he then goes on to detail how he has been conducting his own investigation, diligently talking to as many people as are important to the situation as possible for as long as he can.  After interviewing Lori and Turtlepower , he stumbles upon the possibility that there were holes in both of their stories.  Pushing a little further on turtlepower whom he suspected might be the weakest link, he managed to get her to confide to him that they wanted to sound as convincing as possible between the two of them and, if possible, get others to make up similar stories.  He goes into further detail about what he did after this revelation:
"In my talks with Lori, her story changed quite a few times, as she likely forgot what she had said earlier.  I did the whole cop-approach where I asked her the same sorts of things on separate days, taking notes so I could see what parts always stayed the same and which parts changed.  It sounds like I went into that already assuming Lori was lying, but that was not the case.  I just quickly noticed some inconsistencies with her very first conversation with me, and I wanted to find out which parts may have been exaggerated."
He continues, "I put in a good amount of effort trying to get hold of the facility Lori's dead friend had been housed in, but I had no luck.  If the friend ever really existed, she left no trace.  I sent emails to the dead friend, to see what would happen, and the address was not a valid email.  To make sure she hadn't accidentally told me the wrong one, I asked her to directly cut and paste it to me from an old email she had from her friend.  When I told her the email was not valid, she explained that since her friend had died, the email would not exist anymore.  That sort of bizarre reasoning shows up a Lot in Lori's stories, even back when she was one of my game testers.  She doesn't know enough to construct believable lies."
Note: It has since been proven that this friend, later refered to as Lucy, is very much alive and well.  If she is in fact working to coroberate Lori's story, then it stands to reason that either, A, she didn't know she was supposed to be dead because Lori never told her, B, she's just as ridiculous as Lori.  Whatever the case, this is the most blatant lie to date in the entirety of the story.

Later that day, I wrote in, stating that, A, because I myself was in the middle of a few different personal crises and, B, because I felt I had so little information concerning the situation, I honestly felt I had no leg to truly stand on and voice an opinion either way.  As a moderator, my instinctive reflex would be to ban him because there's a bunch of unnamed people screaming sex abuse, and as a father, I know I wouldn't want my daughters at any age possibly stumbling upon him and being subjected to such a thing.  One thing I did add as decisively and emphatically as I could, however, was the statement, "You're going to end up taking sides regardless which way you spin it.  The most you can do is atemtp not to err on the side of self interest, particularly in this case."
Further emails concerning this issue never came to my attention; indeed, by the end of that day I was receiving emails from Dark concerning possibly adding Redspot to the news section on ag net.  By the time July came around, STW was a consideration as well.
Given all of the above and the recent article made by Smoke J, whom I happen not to know, have never been interviewed by or even heard of until said article was brought to our attention, I began asking myself the following questions in an attempt to shed some light on this situation as a whole.
1.  If STW was, in fact, a platform in which even just one person was a possible sex abuse suspect, why even add it or think about adding it to the database along with any of Sam Tupi's other material, given the possible friendship that supposedly existed between Sam and Walter?
2.  if this issue was of great importance to begin with, why did we not apply more truth testing to both sides instead of just going with one over the other, particularly when another mod brought forward the possibility that the vilified individual might actually be the victim in this case?  Why did we play guilty until proven innocent?
3.  Is it seriously to be considered a huge coincidence that Lori's credibility hangs entirely on the sole factor that she has a registration date that predates Walter's?  Is it also a coincidence that Walter cannot address himself as maturely as Lori, thus realistically giving him less credibility in the public eye's perspective from the start?
4.  How can someone who has had previous experience in a tramatic situation sincerely be objective?
5.  Dark has previously voiced his need for help in various other areas on the mods' mailing list; why was this the exception, particularly knowing the seriousness of the situation in comparison with other things he has asked to be helped with?
The other side of the coin:
1.  Aprone stated that he knew he was being interviewed for an upcoming article; is it possible he knew ahead of time that this article was intended as a character assassination?
2.  If so, why?  What was to be gained from the ensuing disruption our forum was likely to face as the result, a forum he uses as a vehicle and advertising platform for his very own games?
3.  Could he have overestimated the people involved?  Was it possible that Walter did in fact manage to entice a naive person to participate in something she sincerely didn't want to over a computer program that could be closed at any given moment or on which he could have been, at the very least, blocked?
4.  Who else was interviewed for Smoke's article?  Is it possible that Aprone is the only one who was and that Smoke is simply exagerating on the amount of people he actually had giving him evidence?
5.  is the skype conversation between Smoke and Lori legit?  If so, it highlights some very interesting points that have not yet been considered by the moderation panel, such as the fact that Lori states she didn't talk to any other mods concerning this entire situation when at least one other moderator claims she did.  If the conversation is yet another exageration that never happened and which is used to hide behind for the sake of the article, then much of this falls apart, Aprone himself could have been lying about ever having received any information at all or even talking to the women in question concerning this situation.
Because the article referenced the mod team as a whole, I felt compeled from the very beginning to go read it.  Here was me, actually getting ready to go and defend each member to the letter, myself excluded, because I know I've been a fairly controversial individual particularly since I've banned people who have been accused of dealing with the cosmos database and producing games with it, and that article suggested, however lightly that I might be just a tad too vocal in suggesting that someone kindly take their piracy support elsewhere.  I put away what personal feelings I had concerning the article, which was, I can remember the author writing, the most important point when approaching the article or else we might just dismiss the article entirely and assume it was a personal issue with Dark or any other mods.
After reading it I quickly sent the list a message that stated I was willing to assist however I could.  I sat back and read emails coming in detailing both Aprone's and Dark's stances on the Walter-Lori story.  What caught my attention right away was how angry Aprone seemed about the already supercharged situation.  Equally stunning was his outright admission that he had willingly been interviewed by Smoke and allowed him to use said responses.
Armed with all of the above, I took to skype and sent Aprone the following message on the 18th of October.  "I imagine this is not the way you wanted to start off your morning, but honestly, this is just my imagination on overdrive at present.  Woooooooo what a mess!  And sadly, I'm still not sure I'm qualified to honestly deliver an educated statement on half of it.  The various decisions that have been handed down over the years, from the doubleposting rule to the retraction some two years later, to the cloning matter, to the steam issue, bla bla bla, we probably could have skated over all of that, but this Walter thing isn't going to go away, and I think it was you who originally said that back at the end of 2017 or there abouts.  Anyway, if you don't mind and when or if you're up to it, and if you feel I can somehow help with this overall, I need at the very least a refresher on all this dirty laundry, as it were.  Otherwise, and should you tell me to keep my nose clean of all of it, I think I'll just sit back and hope for the best."
I received the following in reply: "Thanks Salem.  Yeah it's a horrid mess that I really am not happy about.  I did indeed tell Dark that the Walter Lori thing wasn't going to go away, because periodically I get people asking me about, and I would get the impression the answer seekers were asking on behalf of a pissed off group waiting on the sidelines.  That whole thing angered a lot of people, and they never got the answers they were looking for."
Figuring this could simply be the partyline touted by the article I pushed further throughout the day, while reading the emails he was sending to the list as carefully, meticulously and methodically as I could.  In one skype message he wrote:
"In quick summary, Lori (whom dark was friends with), claimed that a guy named Walter was bullying and harassing her and a few friends online.  To the point where he would demand they act out sexual situations in voice chat, supposidly with the threat of violence if they refused.  Again this is a quick sort of summary.  A rational adult would understand that someone cannot force you to do such things, but Lori was never the sharpest tool in the shed so it's quite plausible."
This suggested to me that he was open to the idea that Lori at least, might have been naive enough to believe someone so far away could have had that much influence over her life with so little information, or that Lori had possibly given him, Walter, more information than she herself had let on.
He continues: "Dark encouraged her to post about the harassment on the forums, where he spoke all sorts of ill about Walter, and banned him."
I have since confirmed that bit about Dark readily writing ill of Walter from the very beginning with things like, and I quote, "Yes, of course Walter or someone else would deny this, however that is pa for the course, (people don't tend to admit to these sorts of abusive behaviours lightly, if they did we'd not need police). were Walter in the Uk I'm fairly sure criminal charges would be brought here." (Taken from post 14 on the warning to all who play survive the wild topic...)
Dark had, in essence, already made up his mind about Walter and wasn't going to allow him to defend himself, to the point that he believed it was a clear cut case in which charges would already had been filed against him, were he in the UK, leaving Lori as the victim and Walter as the Vilain, no questions asked.  The chief defenistrator had spoken.
Aprone continues: "As time has gone on, and I've tried speaking to Dark about all of this, the more I'm convinced that he did wrong.  Not a simple mistake of trusting someone, but rather he knew it was all garbage but wanted to support his friend Lori, or destroy that kid Walter.  I don't know which, and I dont know why."
Clearly, Aprone had already made up his mind about what Dark was out to do even if he wasn't at all certain on the motive.  He continues with messages like, "I just finished another long email to the group.  This mess is rather stressful." and, "and another reply sent out.  I feel like I'm beating my head against the wall.  It won't upset me to hear your honest opinion... am I being too knit-picky here?  Has he already answered my questions well enough for me to move on?"
At roughly 3:30 PM on that same day I checked my emails and noticed something interesting... Dark had posted an email he clearly wanted to keep within a small circle of people, myself included probably because I was deemed trustworthy.  The email read as follows:
Hi.

I am getting really bothered by Aprone's behaviour on list, and frankly this is feeling like an extreme witch hunt, especially with his threats to publically smear me if I attempt to retire.

I have run this forum for ten years, I've always made decisions based on what I felt was the best course of action. Generally it has worked out, obviously times change.

I have tried to consult on decisions when I can, but to be brutally honest, people were not always around to consult witth so I made decisions according to what information I had at the time.

I am not sure what Aprone wants here why he has such a mammoth grudge against me (I don't think I offended him in any way previously.

Either way, I would appreciate being able to stay part of this community and continue to contribute where and what I can rather than being the central figure in a witch burning party.

Dark."
At this point, it became clear that there was two sides to pick and choose from; my task became that much more difficult because I've always wanted to remain neutral and as unbiased and objective as possible.  I had to put more pressure on Aprone, but didn't want to let on that I might suspect he was possibly conspiring with Smoke J for a myriad of reasons.  I kept watching his messages as I formulated my questions as carefully as I could and tried to extract as much truth from his answers as possible.  Things like, "I'd love to know where everyone stands at least, even if it's against me." made it clear that he at least, saw himself as the lone soldier in a battle where the rest of the moderation panel had already decided he was opting for a castigation to be handed to Dark, so unreasonable it didn't even merrit a response to him at all.
As the day continued, Aprone filed in an email which contained about 15 pointed questions he wanted Dark to truthfully answer.  After his having sent it, Dark did in fact, provide answers to the questions, to which Aprone replied no more than half an hour later.  He privately sends me the message, "posted.  arg it was hard to hit send on that one."
Our conversation ended there for the day, as he was pulled away and I had to get to sleep, but my mind did not relax one bit and I am afraid to say I didn't get any good sleep that night.  Given his directness with Dark and the whole of the moderation panel I decided to put pointed questions to him as well as soon as possible; his responses are as follows:
No worries Salem, and sorry it took me so long to reply.  I was at work.
I'm still reading, but I'll type out answers here as I come to various questions.  First off, I am not part of any smear campaign against Dark.  I was indeed sent questions on Skype by Smoke J, a few days before he released his article.  I was not in coohoots with him in any way, and that was the first moment I had ever spoken with him about anything relating to Dark or the Walter/Lori situation.  When he contacted me, he started of by asking if I'd be willing to answer some questions about past moderation decisions, and if he had permission to use my reponses in something he was writing.  I agreed, but asked to have my  name left out.  He had clearly done a lot of homework before coming to me, which actually impressed me a lot!  He pretty much asked me a long series of questions about the Walter/Lori case, to verify answers he had already seemed to have gotten beforehand.  He didn't have everything filled in, but many questions were in the form of "I've heard blank, is this how it happened?"  So he came prepared.  He had also likely been working on his article for quite some time before he ever came to me, seeing as how he only contacted me a few days before it went public.  I think I was part of a final fact-checking stage.
As a side note, among the mods I have revealed information about the Walter/Lori case that would have been extremely valuable to Smoke J and his article.  Those things did not show up in said article because I was not actively feeding Smoke, but rather answering questions.  It was how I wanted to handle that situation, so I wouldn't feel like I was betraying anyone.
I in no way set out to overthrow Dark, get him to step down, or to ruin his reputation.  Everything that has made it seem like those were my goals, came about only here in the moderator circle, without any pre-made plans or plots.  It is just reactions to his dodging, dodging, dodging, and answers.  lol!"
When asking him to clarify that last bit, he continued, "I was also asked why I waited so long to deal with this now, but I thought I had made it clear in past messages that I tried to deal with this when it happened, but Dark brushed it all aside.  I brought it up more casually, a few times between then and now, and as always he just brushes it away.  Now that it's so very public again, I don't want that same pattern to continue, and I got a bit more heated than usual when it looked like history was once again going to repeat itself.
You mentioned a quest to find the facts, and for me at least now I can say that journey is over.  When Dark finally went through and gave clear straight answers to my list of questions, it's the first time in 2 years that he didn't blow me off with some very generic messages.  I finally had proof of things I was 90% sure about, but wanted to hear from his own mouth (er fingertips) before I would treat them as truth and push forward."
Before finishing up with him I said, "If there's any way I can be of further assistance, please do let me know.  I can try and contact the other mods separately, perhaps, ask pointed questions, I dunno.  What I do know is that we can't go back to business as usual if we're to preserve the forum and its community as a whole.  It's funny, I could have sworn up and down that we had a discussion like, 4 or 5 years ago in which we said between the two of us that something of this nature was bound to happen in such a small community that always seems to be split amongst itself, JAWS vs NVDA, Twitter vs FB, Winamp vs foobar, your mic vs my mic, your keyboard vs my keyboard, don't use goldwave-use reaper, screw your sapi voice mine's better, your audio library sucks, bla bla bla bla bla negativity and general unrest instead of people helping each other out collectively."
His reply?  "haha, you're probably right.  It sounds like a conversation we would have had." 
Obviously, words are words; you hear them when you hear them and have to feel them out little by little as well as attempting to put as much credibility to them as you can or destroy it if necessary.  But what gave substance to the possibility that he was telling the truth and turned it into probability for me was his asking me to read an email he was intending to send to the mods list as a whole, excluding himself and Dark, in which he sincerely wanted to congratulate the team for working as it should.  It was his belief that the situation would be resolved with all the truth finally on the table and everyone making conclusions based on reasonable inquiry and answer gathering, to the point that he had taken it upon himself to not only put his trust in us as a whole team, but had already seen the outcome being a good one, a light at the end of the tunnel, as it were.
IN an attempt to keep this already long post as short as possible, I'd like to give you all the following details as quickly as possible as he outlined them:
1.  All the information was at long last, more or less available for the moderation panel to look at and critique wherever necessary.
2.  It was his hope that we would listen to both sides carefully and poke at both sides to try and find inconsistencies wherever possible.
3.  It was his hope that we would actually primarily side with Dark because Dark was the one being accused of such monumental matters.
4.  it was ultimately his belief that after talking to Dark, to him, and amongst ourselves we would reach a resolution that did not contain Dark's influence, as the situation could have been avoided altogether with greater reasoning and without having dragged Walter through the mud which is what ended up happening, even after the fact that he, Aprone, had made it clear that he had talked to everyone important to the situation secretly and separately with out any side being aware, had presented his findings and Dark had over all dismissed them.
the above email was never sent, as everything happened entirely out of character with what he believed might and should take place.  Dark was able to influence his own punishment, and to add an interesting twist to things, became the driving force behind Aaron becoming new chief mod.  This might have been the end of the story, had it not been for the fact that, out of seemingly good intentions, long standing forum member Jade decided to toss his hat into the fray and advertise himself as a possible candidate for moderator.  Aprone is pushed aside as simply being a troublemaker and Jade is accepted with little resistance, despite the fact that it has previously been pointed out by myself and other mods that one should not feel free to invite themselves to the panel based on contribution and their own self worth or any other self assessment.  Truth is, I actually believe in many respects that Jade may possibly be the right step forward, as of all the mods on the panel, he has been the only other person who has, like myself, stated that at least in this case, truth may be entirely exclusive.
To bring this topic full circle, I'd like to point out a few things that have continued being prevalent patterns throughout the entirety of this discussion.
1.  Dark has not wanted himself quoted publicly for the most part, which is probably the main reason he has not bothered to post in the original topic which has fueled all of this recent discussion.  By comparison, Aprone assures me that I don't need to ask him for permission to use anything within our skype window.
2.  Dark desires to have this situation discussed secretly and with as few people weighing in on it as possible.  Aprone wishes to remain as transparent as possible and allowing people to criticise him as unreasonable wherever necessary, provided that such criticism is warranted, comprehensive and coherent and well thought out.
3.  Both Dark and Aprone have dismissed any skype logs as being almost entirely insignificant to really getting any truth out of this situation unless it can be proven that they are not fabricated.  Beyond that, Aprone stated on June 23rd of 2016 that he at least, did not believe either side was consistent enough to take seriously enough to merrit the kind of action Dark had already taken.  Dark, did not reverse his stance on this matter and it was swept under the rug, until now.  Even with the possible evidence Aprone, a person who was entrusted to help with the moderation panel, presented within that email, suggesting that at the very least Lori's story was not holding up and that at least one other person had confessed to fabricating some of it for her sake, everything was swept under the rug.
Whatever happens now, I only know that I cannot go along with things as they currently are, and so it is that I'm taking my final stand and challenging the norm I myself have helped to uphold.  The idea that a person can be silenced because they have an opposing view that hurts the highest member of the moderation panel is arrogance of the highest order and should reserve no place on this forum.  It was stated of me that I might be a hatemonger because I heavily participated with my views on Christian apologetics on a rather controversial topic and I was asked to come forth and clarify.  It was voiced by once member figment that Sebbi might have personal biases in handing out his moderation warnings.  It was voiced that Aprone might not be a person capable of the moderation duty because of stuff he posts off the forum.  Whatever the case, someone else was either asked to step in or the person in question was asked to clarify and accept consequences as they were, if indeed consequences should have been dished out.  At no point have anyone of us suggested closing a topic because we chanced upon something we entirely disagreed with; to this day the topic in which Nightshade was accused of taking too heavy a stance against MusicalProfessor is still open for discussion.  I don't see why this should be any different, save that in this case, one moderator has tried to cross-examine to the best of his abilities, while another has clearly wanted the rest of us out of the way.
I wish I could thank many of you by name who have been instrumental to my posting life out here, but honestly, given that I don't know if half of this is going to stay intact and that I don't want half of this to be seen as some self -pity party at any rate.  I'll leave things as is and let you make of it, whatever you will.  The night is quickly coming, and I must be going with it.  Carry on, and happy gaming!