I need to preface this post by making clear that it is not regarding the circumstances of Jakker’s removal from the Moderator team and NationStates site, which as per that thread we cannot provide further information of. As such please do not post in this thread on that matter.
In late April 2020 I was contacted by a couple of players regarding the nation Ursidae; as later became public, this was a nation operated by the player Karputsk while spying on The Black Hawks. As part of this discussion, concerns were raised that Jakker (then a Forum Moderator, and a senior member of The Black Hawks) had been able to discern that Ursidae was Karputsk by use of his Mod powers.
This concern seemed sufficient for me to raise it privately amongst the Admins and Senior Game Mods of the time (note: I was a regular Game Mod at this point). This was investigated by the Admins, who determined that Jakker had used his Forum Moderator powers to look up the IP of this post by the nation ‘Lmaoofl’ (a known puppet of Karputsk) at April 27th 2020 17:43 UTC; this lookup displayed the other nations that had posted from the IP, which included Ursidae. Jakker would therefore have known from this that Ursidae was likely operated by Karputsk.
This was then followed up internally by the Admins and Senior Game Mods. Jakker was contacted for an explanation of what had happened; he said that he had looked up the IP of the post out of personal curiosity, and he had done this after The Black Hawks’ leadership had already determined that Ursidae was operated by Karputsk. He said that he did not tell anyone about this information, and apologised for looking up the IP of the post.
We did not previously have logging of forumside IP lookups aside from server logs (which require an admin to lookup, and are not stored indefinitely). Within a couple of weeks, the Admin team had implemented a much improved logging system to ensure indefinite recording of forumside IP lookups by Moderators and accountability.
Why is this being disclosed now? Personally speaking, I would have preferred for this to have been disclosed at the time, as transparency on this kind of situation is valuable for ensuring trust in the integrity of the Moderator team. This is particularly the case for Moderators involved in the invader/defender aspect of gameplay, where it is vital to know that staff do not use Moderator powers for in-game benefit.
While the intent was to follow this up further at the time, other events overtook this, and with the most important matters dealt with (it being made clear to Jakker that his action was not appropriate, and should not be repeated, and the logging implemented) further follow-up just didn’t happen. It’s been in the back of my mind to follow up, and I asked recently to do so, and was given the go-ahead. Bringing it up so long after the event might have felt like throwing a colleague under the bus, but with Jakker’s removal, that is no longer a concern.
What I want to be clear on is that we cannot provide any definitive comment on whether Jakker’s explanation is an accurate reflection of events. I also have to make clear that this is not meant, in any way, to cast aspersions on The Black Hawks, or suggest that they acted in any way inappropriately.
I want to keep this thread open for reasonable questions.
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