Hello SHL Community, I know the last 24 hours have been hectic, but I hope you’re all well,

The last little while has been a stressful and frustrating time for myself and the rest of Head Office, but it’s also been an amazing learning experience to improve how we handle things going forward. I don’t want to beat around the bush too much so I want to come out and say right off that bat that I’m sorry. The Ragnar situation, while I believe was handled with good intentions from the parts of everyone in Head Office, was also handled in a way that was really messy and not reflective of the diligence we typically show in a majority of punishments and announcements. I personally rushed the discussion along yesterday because I believed we had all the facts needed to make a decision, and also worried that we were dragging our feet on making a call, when I should have known that if we had been a bit more methodical and organized we would have reached a conclusion that was much more favourable for everyone. I’ve personally apologized to him last night but I’d like to publicly apologize to @Ragnar about the way this was handled. He and I had a really good conversation last night that I wish I had taken the steps to have with him sooner rather than later.

I’d first like to be completely transparent about the process to give you guys sort of a look on where things went right, where they went wrong, and what could have been improved. I’ll start by saying that again our intentions were good, and I stand by our decision to at least discuss the issue at hand. There’s a thought going around that we suspended Ragnar for reacting to posts on Discord, which at face value is obviously an incredibly heavy handed sentence for something so small. Head Office agreed (and still do agree) that the issue stemmed from a case where one user was purposefully doing something another user found bothersome, after being asked numerous times to stop. Regardless of the outcome of the HO decision and appeals process, this is something I still believe is wrong.

Now what could we have done to handle it better, and what did we do wrong? In terms of handling it better, we’ve taken a stance in Head Office that it's really hard to gauge a lot of instances regarding trolling and harassment, so recently we started doing verbal warnings, for cases that were too weak to outright suspend for, but we didn’t wanna just ignore and tell the user reporting the issue to not be upset. We don’t have a right to tell people what bothers them and what doesn’t, and while that doesn’t mean we’re going to consider everything harassment from now on (we still vet the initial report for validity), I do think it allows us some agency to be more proactive in helping people feel like Head Office is on their side. That said, we have dragged our feet for far too long on formalizing what that warning process looks like, what it should say to communicate effectively to the user being warned, and just ensuring that when a verbal warning is given, it’s clear and understandable what it means. In the Ragnar situation, we didn’t give an effective warning. We told him to stop, but we never addressed follow up consequences, we didn’t make it clear that his message was a verbal warning, and that’s something we truly want to take steps to rectify and improve. We’ll be working on formalizing the warning process as an official rulebook entry, and should we use it in the future, we will ensure that the warnings we give are never confusing or vague.

Finally, where we were flat out wrong, something I want to take full responsibility for. Like I mentioned above we could’ve handled the warning process better but we so far were still mostly on track with how we wanted the process to go. Where we went wrong was losing sight of the initial issue at hand that was presented to us, and sort of reaching an “evidence” overload, where we had a lot of screenshots of a lot of things that, in hindsight, really amounted to nothing. After Head Office warned Ragnar, we had come across some other comments he had made in private DMs to other users and in the Anchorage Armada Discord, and while these comments were still poking fun at the situation, we had no evidence that Ragnar continued to bother Kachur after we had told him to stop. He had congratulated him on being drafted, which was a bit snide, but Ragnar complied with our warning. We made the wrong decision to suspend him afterwards because we perceived comments made in private as implying that the harassment issue was ongoing, but that was a misjudgment on our part. Had I not rushed the discussion process for the sake of efficiency, we almost certainly would have taken more time to consider these factors, and made a call that would have more properly reflected the situation we’ve been presented with. Again I wanna stress that our intentions were good, and the initial behaviour is still something I would consider not okay, but we let our discussion become muddied with too many factors and influences that ultimately lead us to make a decision that I’m not proud of, especially because I know how amazing everyone in Head Office is. I know we’re capable of handling things much better than this.



So I just wanna recap and address how things are going to look going forward. The warning system we have in place already is going to get a formal rulebook entry and become a much more clearly defined process, we’re going to handle all conduct infractions internally so as not to split discussion between our 2 separate Head Offices, and we’re going to be more thorough and concise in both our discussion and evidence gathering. @Luketd and I spoke in a call last night for about an hour and threw a lot of ideas towards making things go a lot smoother (making sure to throw out evidence not relevant to the discussion, compiling everything we know in one pinned post during discussion and recapping it one more time before making final calls), and I’ve also heard a lot of great ideas from @Keygan @Capt_Blitzkrieg and @teztify that will be receiving discussion in HO so we can work to improve this site, and ourselves as leadership, as much as we can.

Lastly, in addition to apologizing and taking responsibility once more, I want to thank you all for your patience. We currently have a group in Head Office that is very fresh and still learning, hell I’m the longest serving member and I’ve only been in there for 4 seasons. We’re not perfect, we’re going to make mistakes, but I can speak for everyone when I say we’re determined to not be defined by those mistakes, and to take steps to ensure we are always striving to be better. I have been an SMJHL GM in both Kelowna and Detroit and seen a lot of criticized decisions made by HO groups where instead of addressing the mistakes and issues, they ducked their heads and waited for the storm to pass. That’s not the kind of group I want to run, and that’s not the kind of commissioner I want to be.

Thank you all so much for reading, thank you for your criticism, and thank you for sticking with us even with things get rough like this.

On behalf of the SHL Head Office,
nour